We were kindled invited to the web2day, an annual festival dedicated to the digital world gathering over a thousand attendees in Nantes, France on May 16th & 17th.

Organizers gave us the opportunity to talk about “the future of mobile design”. We asked a pool of experts (that share the ambition to build both effective and innovative interfaces) to join us at the table in order to give a global overview on the topic.

We started by a short history of mobile design, from devices to interfaces, illustrated by practical apps use cases, to set up the global context. Then, we covered the following topics:

Trending topics

Skeuomorphism and flat design are currently the two major trends and a short-sighted analysis would tend to oppose the two currents. After a presentation on their impact on interface design, panelists agreed upon the complementarity of the two movements, as the final objective remains to propose the most convenient interface.

Guidelines compliance

You’ve all heard of the user interface guidelines defined by vendors in their respective SDKs. Guidelines first aimed at simplifying the end user experience by ensuring a global consistency among apps. Nevertheless, as apps are getting popular, users became familiar with mobile interactions, especially the younger folks, and started seeking for novelty. This phenomenon, combined with the developers’ willingness to push more complex and differenting products, turned out to propel new interface paradigms and gimmicks created by the app makers community. For instance, gestures like Twitter’s pull-to-refresh or Facebook’s sidebar menu, now both very popular, were pushed by the community, not OS guidelines.

As the discussion went on, the metaphor of mobile design as a language (with a common grammar and neologisms) appeared to be a shared view within the panel.

The future of mobile design

Internet of things, augmented devices… Will the mobile interface that we know today disappear in the near future? For our panelists, these innovations will definitely bring new opportunities. The mobile interface will be global: on, but also around, the device itself. One scenario could be that the smartphone will become a connection hub linked to our various devices. Nevertheless, panelists all agreed that mobile interfaces would remain for a while.

The video of the session is available online, we’d like to thank Geoffrey Dorne, Jérémie Francone and Olivier Desmoulin for accepting our invitation as well as the web2day team for the organization. See you next year!