In order to put the IPFS protocol into the mobile phone, the official launched a design guide

Written by: Donnager

Because the peer-to-peer file storage and distribution network based on IPFS is significantly different from traditional Internet infrastructure, and IPFS was originally used more in desktop devices and has not yet been widely popularized in mobile devices, Protocol Labs, the developer of the Interstellar File Protocol (IPFS), released the "IPFS Mobile Design Guide" to provide application-level design guidance for the "mobileization" of IPFS.

After all, mobile devices and desktop computers have different positions in computing power, network access stability, storage capacity, and battery life. The "IPFS Mobile Design Guide" takes these characteristics of mobile terminals into consideration, proposes several basic design principles, and provides specific suggestions for applications that need to embed the IPFS protocol in mobile apps in the future.

This is somewhat similar to the Human-Computer Interface Interaction Guidelines written by Apple for its application developers for different platforms, which provides developers or application designers with a complete set of unified design principles. Any application designed based on this set of guidelines can guarantee the most basic user experience that conforms to the characteristics of the corresponding platform.

iOS Human-Computer Interface Interaction Guidelines

As for how Protocol Labs came up with this design guide, they mentioned that they had conducted basic research, including investigating peer-to-peer (P2P) applications on mobile devices and conducting corresponding user interviews. In addition, they have published a summary of the research results in a previous article.

They believe that several aspects that require extra attention when integrating IPFS into mobile phones include:

• The mobile browser experience is less complete than the desktop one

• Mobile devices need to pay attention to battery life

• The amount and speed of mobile signals and data transmission

• Privacy, Identity

The above objective challenges have become an important basis for this design guide. However, they said that this guide is not comprehensive yet and the research field is still in its infancy, but first of all, it can identify common user needs, patterns, and challenges of such applications, and can be transformed into early suggestions and best practices.

A single page description of the IPFS Mobile Design Guide

Specifically, the main principles proposed in this "IPFS Mobile Design Guide" are:

• Adhere to the nature of the device: Apps or services designed for mobile devices need to consider device-specific issues, such as battery life or mobile signal.

• Explain, but not too much: Avoid long or overly technical explanations of your UI, but provide brief descriptions of how the technology works.

• Concern for privacy: Users need to have a certain level of privacy and security to ensure that their data and files are safe.

• Put users in control of their data: Respect user needs through data availability, discoverability, and persistence.

• Provide a seamless experience: Users don’t necessarily need to know how they are connected to the network, but do need to be assured that data has been sent and received.