Recent Blog Posts

Last week, companies such as Symbian, PalmSource, and SonyEricsson became advisors to the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) group. For their efforts (and cash), they get to help mobile operators drive their businesses to irrelevancy.

OMTP is an organization created by and for the mobile carriers. The group's mission is to "create an open ecosystem for advanced mobile platforms", but they keep the focus on the operators. Small wonder this is a group based in Europe, where the operators have historically lower influence than those in Japan and some in the US.

Notably absent in OMTP is companies like Digital Airways and Trigenix (who may be represented via Qualcomm). These companies have existing platforms to do much of what OMTP is working towards, including giving the carrier or other content provider a lot of influence over the phone's user interface.

Regardless of whether OMTP or the independent companies prevail, let's think about some key implications of this.

1. Operators, not device manufacturers, become responsible for the user interface, especially the standby screen.
2. Operators don't really want a consistent user experience. They actually want differentiated and branded user experiences. Thus we can reasonably expect a "New York Yankees" or a "Hello Kitty" standby screen, with ringers, background images, news, applications, and links to content. They want to sell the space, allowing users to select what suits them best. This week.
3. Devices become differentiated solely on cost, industrial design, features, and speed. Just like the computer industry. This benefits some low-cost leaders like LG and Samsung, but probably hurts Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, and SonyEricsson. After all, the carrier provides the user interface.
4. New device features, like speech recognition, will not be well supported and will therefore be irrelevant. Innovation will likely suffer.
5. Different user interfaces have different metaphors: scrolling softkeys, Options/Back, two softkeys, etc. Either operators will have to limit what content providers can do, or they will have to support multiple metaphors.
6. Items deep in the phone's menu will be ignored. The content provider doesn't know anything about them. The device manufacturer doesn't care. Thus operators will have to define those separately. One for each UI metaphor they allow.
7. Applications, particularly the Java environment and the web browser, will not have a consistent experience with the rest of the device. Expect this to fall through the cracks on the first round of branded user interfaces, and the technology to catch up with these needs.

I'm concerned that we're going to dive into this mess without really understanding the consequences.

The universe of devices, even so-called "smart" devices, is endless. It has facets that nobody has yet conceived, and other facets that somebody has conceived but has not yet brought to market. Yet companies, organizations, and bloggers desperately want to limit that universe significantly to promote the ability to have a "consistent user experience" across devices.

As a simple example, consider user input. Right now, most phones have either a keypad with a scroll control, or a stylus input. There might be a limited-functionality speech input. The industry has created user interfaces that assume one of these input types. Dozens of companies have gone through a lot of effort to make typing on these devices easier by making better keypads or by adding a variety of predictive typing software. But this set of input mechanisms is much smaller than it will be even in the next year or two.

There's nothing particularly magic about these two types of input mechanisms. They both have histories that have little to do with the way devices are used today. Smart people are inventing alternatives. Samsung, among others, is working with accelerometers for spatial gestures as a input mechanism. It is currently possible to drive an entire user interface on a phone - including web and some Java - with speech. Fingerprint scanners are cheap. Interface gloves are possible. While none of these currently provides a satisfactory user experience, some probably will in the future.

Now, if I could write an application that ran natively on Palm, Symbian, and PocketPC without recoding, I'd do it. Java is an entirely imperfect answer, but it moves us partway there. But I would never expect this application to run on a scroll-and-keypad device without some redesign. And I certainly wouldn't expect it to work for a speech user interface.

It's possible to achieve a "consistent user experience" across multiple devices, but only if you sacrifice innovation and user experience, or if you very loosely define "consistent". I'm hoping for the latter. Let's not limit what we could do to create an artificial consistency.

Samsung recently announced the SCH-S310, a "3-dimensional Movement Recognition" mobile phone. It uses accelerometers to detect the relative motion of the device as an alternative user interface. While I have great hopes for gestural technologies, this isn't it.

Samsung is using this technology to replace the keypad. You can write the number "3" in the air, or mark an "x" to say no to a dialog box. Shaking the device twice will end your call.

This implementation introduces some probably fatal flaws.

1. Devices frequently move when the user is not using them, on rattling trains or bumpy roads or downward stairs. This introduces the need for a "keyguard" - I guess "motion guard" function, perhaps a "listen to me now" button.
2. Visual feedback becomes problematic because the device is moving with respect to the user's eyes. Thus either very large visual feedback, or some sort of audio or tactile feedback is necessary. Why is feedback so necessary? Well, can you imagine handwriting recognition without being able to see what your gesture actually typed? Apparently Samsung recognized this, and the device actually says "no" when you mark an "x" in the air.
3. A sequence of actions - such as entering a phone number or name - will have to have pauses between each gesture. While this will partially alleviate the visual feedback problem, it will be quite jerky for use. This raises concerns about carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive stress injuries.
4. Regardless of the capability of the technology, at least some users will use large gestures. This has the potential of interfering with other people nearby.
5. Standard application environments such as the browser, J2ME, and BREW fundamentally assume scroll-and-select (or possibly stylus) with some flavor of keyboard. Pretty much any application or web site will have to be redesigned to work well with gestural interaction.

There are good uses for the "movement recognition" aspects of this phone. Controlling MP3 playback (start, stop, skip) will be very useful - note the natural audio feedback. Gaming is an obvious play. But the primary value for standard phone functions is to show how you have the latest technology.

User experience comprises several different parts of a product's overall experience, including advertising, sales, activation, actual use, support, billing, and disposal. Each of these parts has a few key factors that affect user experience. My focus is on where technology touches the customer: packaging, communications, technology, business process, and product design (with its myriad components).

I advocate taking a customer-centric approach to overall product development, starting with user research - not technology. Many times the latest technology is not the best for the user, especially in the mobile space where users are at the mercy of a wide variety of factors including device and network status.

In this blog, I intend to comment on products, technologies, and businesses that are new or exemplars of particularly poor or good user experience.