Great article published by Mauricio I. Perez, MCAD from Microsoft Corporation review from the old to the new mobile ui and puts out some good guidelines on designing your future mobile app ui.

heres some bits:

The UI of Windows Mobile based devices continue to evolve in a convergent fashion. The addition of keyboards to both the Pocket PC and the Smartphone provide similar and friendlier user experiences in two devices that were intended originally to be used in a different way, as we explained before, the Pocket PC with two hands, and the Smartphone with one hand. As we will see in the next section, the Pocket PC has now one of the features that were unique to the Smartphone: the Soft keys. This convergence of user experiences should not be ignored by designers. One of the goals of the software industry, especially software targeted to vertical markets, is to build applications with an extended life cycle. Designers must think in the future, and at this point, the rule of thumb to keep in mind by all designers and developers is to think of their designs with the two platforms in mind. In a word: design software for both the Pocket PC and the Smartphone.

Link to the original article

I personaly found that designing a mobile application using Flash 8 is excellent. it gives you the ability to mimick the phone UI and see how it operates using softkeys. it does require some knowlege of Actionscript if you want it to work and be interactive but its very usefull to see where you reach deadends and where you should improve navigation and add more feedback to the user. be advised that it mostly support symbian powered phones but you can install flash on windows mobile os also and see your flash app mock in action before moving to serious development. the ability to see your application in a mobile windowed mode is priceless if you ask me.

These are the guidelines from the article for designing a mobile ui. some are pretty handy. some are Dhuu.

• Follow the 80/20 rule — You cannot please 100% of the users of your application, so stick with a design that will benefit 80% of them.
• 5 minutes of activity — Think of tasks that can be accomplished in bursts of activity of 5 minutes. This is normally the way mobile users work with their mobile devices, as opposed to the desktop, where users spend several hours working on a single task.
• Avoid Options — UI navigation should be as simple as possible in Windows Mobile. The use of dialogs and text input should be limited as possible. If we think of the Options menu in a desktop application, we will realize that many of those options do not make sense in a Windows Mobile application. It is better to spend some time figuring out what default options will suit the majority of the users. Don’t try to make everything an option.
• Leverage desktop affinity where applicable — Users know the desktop, so it is good to have the same experience, but don’t make the mistake of trying to implement a desktop UI in a mobile device. The user interaction with a mobile device is different than with a PC.
• Leverage synchronization — to keep the application always on and always updated. One of the biggest advantages of mobile devices nowadays is their capability to keep the user updated.
• Minimize stylus and thumb movement — It is important to keep in mind that entering information in a mobile device, due to its reduced size, is normally a complex task. It is definitely not as easy as it is in the desktop. Stylus and thumb movement, and also data input, should be minimized as much as possible. This is a very important general rule that should not be disregarded.
• Emphasize data content over graphic elements — In a mobile device, the screen size is reduced. It is better to give priority to the presentation of information than to the surrounding graphics. Most applications don’t have status bars, because the users are most concerned about the data.
• Make the UI predictable — Users should focus on their task instead of having to stop and figure out how to perform such task.

   

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