Mobile Monday: Mobile User Experience
This week’s London Mobile Monday concentrated on ‘Mobile User Experience’.
Michael Quazza of SurfKitchen explained that while devices, networks and contents have reached maturity, the user experience is causing users to give up using mobile data services. For example, in research for a Tier 1 network operator, results showed that 43% of users would use more services if they were easier to use. Surfkitchen (obviously) had the solution which was shown to be quick, have visible pricing and good device coverage. It would have been nice to know the marketing and technical challenges SurfKitchen encountered. For example, the challenges of writing for multiple devices and the handling of things outside SuftKitchen’s control - phone Internet setup being one aspect.
Samuel Sweet from Ikivo described how SVG-T is in over 95 million phones and 100 different handsets. He went on to explain it’s suitability for presenting rich media. Unfortunately, little was said that today’s (95 million) phones contains SVG-T 1.1. This is basically a rendering engine. Version 1.2 is the version required for interactivity and improved user experience. This newer version also has very few (if any) tools for creating content.
Rachael Jones from Instrata gave a presentation on User Centred Design. Basically, things like user research, video observation, interviews and studies. It’s my belief that too many applications are shipped without thinking about User Centred Design. I didn’t realise the importance of this until I took part in user studies of my applications (but not by Instrata). For example, error messages I thought were obvious, confused users and had to be dumbed down considerably. All of us in the mobile industry are probably guilty of this.
Nick Hancock gave a demo of Juvino, a way of circumventing high network operator changes by connecting calls an alternative way. It was interesting to note that Juvino can still make a profit after cutting call rates by up to 50% AND still swallow the 35% payment to network operators for payment by premium SMS. Again, it would have been nice to know the technical and marketing challenges - these kind of things are what the audience are looking for.
This Mobile Monday just scratched the surface of Mobile User Experience. This actually includes everything from advertising when the the user chooses a device, right up to when they replace it and data has to be transferred to the new phone. Along the way, there are many challenges - for example, the greatest application or data serice is useless if the phone hasn’t been pre-provisioned for data access.
More detailed coverage of Mobile User Experience can be found at the MEX Conference where I will once again be the official ‘real-time’ reporter on the MEX blog. Please contact me if you would like to meet up.