We reached the end of a large project we've been working on for Orange today, collectively exhaled and collapsed over keyboards. It's been a quite demanding piece of work - aggressive timescales, last-minute bugs, all the usual stuff - but good fun too, and we've learned a lot in the process. It's stretched us, and stretching (physically or otherwise) is A Good Thing in my book.

In the meantime I've posted little other than links and the occasional rant to this weblog, which has annoyed me - I've got about half a dozen half-formed posts in the "drafts" folder of NetNewsWire, some of which I'll try and knock off over the coming days, in between the housekeeping tasks which have accumulated and before we kick off our next project for the BBC...

One of the things which I've thought about a lot recently are the needs of the less advantaged, and what an appalling job mobile does to address them. As lots of people realise, mobile phones are quite intimidating devices, even for people who want to know about them; never mind the large chunk of the population who just want to use the darn things. The elderly and the disabled are two groups who (from what I've seen) have been left behind - and yet communication is at least as important for them as for the rest of society, perhaps more so.

So it was nice to see Mobi-Click announce the release of dead simple handsets designed with some of these audiences in mind, even if their product seems weirdly non-specific (how many pensioners need a phone with a baby alarm?).

Without having evaluated their product, I can't really comment on whether it's any good - but the thinking behind it is solid. With an increasing elderly population, devices (and therefore user interfaces) which don't rely on cramming text in tiny fonts onto a small screen, which have large, clear buttons, which perform a simple set of features well, and which remain simple to use, are going to become increasingly important.

It's not just the elderly, either. We can expect handset ownership to move down the age range over the coming years, as a culture which encourages paranoia around child safety increasingly looks to technical solutions for a quick fix (or at least to appease a sense of fear), and as mobile phones become an increasing cornerstone of, and private space within, the lives of children. Young children will have requirements for user interfaces, just as the elderly do.

So (in an attempt to bring a ramble to a coherent point): we've seen phones move from being functional devices to lifestyle accessories, with diverse form factors but broadly similar interfaces. How about user interfaces which reject the one-size-fits-all approach and target significant niches: the very young, the very old, the blind, the deaf, and so on?

Oh, and anyone going to EtCon next week: I hate you.