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There is a carrier behavior that I don't understand. They are given the opportunity to invest less than $5 per customer at time of phone purchase, and get an additional $1-$5 per customer per month in usage in the very area they are trying to promote. They don't take it. They delay, detract, and perform testing.

My favorite example of this is a very easy-to-use keyboard from Digit Wireless. Carriers have known it is easier to use than standard 12-key keypads for a couple years now. But you won't find the keypads on many phones. (Telus Mobility of Canada is a notable exception.)

My numbers above are approximate, and would obviously depend on the exact situation. But why wouldn't a carrier let customers self-select for whether data services are important and give them a phone that will make data services more enjoyable to use?

The buttons on my PalmOne Treo phone are small - I can definitely type, but it is uncomfortable and I make errors. It is worse for those who don't have small hands or who have long fingernails. But I have no problem typing on a Fastap phone, and I've learned that I am more likely to do things on my phone if it is easier to type. This, of course, is a no-brainer. The carriers are leaving money on the table.

This behavior is right in line with the non-adoption of location-based services. By federal mandate, US carriers had to implement the capability for location-based services for 911 purposes. They had to make changes to their handsets and to their towers; they had to create an internal database to store the information and they had to develop the processes to handle all the above. So one would think that they would be anxious to spend the very small amount of money necessary to start capitalizing on all the previous large investments.

Alas, the myriad applications made possible by location services are not possible. Application providers are forced to develop creative alternatives, few of which are good substitutes. Again, the carriers are leaving money on the table.

We can all agree that mobile adoption is higher in Japan and Europe than it is in the US. We can further agree that data services (iMode web in Japan; SMS applications in Europe) enjoy much higher usage and revenues than the US. Is it because the US is backwards? Hardly.

The problem with US wireless services is a combination of culture, carrier strategy, and marketing message. This is evidenced by the fact that Japanese and European companies, upon entering the American marketplace, have not fared as well as they do at home. (Virgin Mobile may be an exception)

Examples:

• historical costs. A landline call, or an internet connection, is quite expensive in Europe and Japan. Not so in the US.
• carrier price structure. With calling party pays, people are not afraid to give out their mobile number. Further, initial costs for mobile internet services were ridiculous.
• email and internet penetration. US users got used to ubiquitous and free internet communications. If I can write a long email for free, why pay for 160 characters? Internet penetration, especially at home, is much higher in the US than Europe and Japan.
• coverage. Even Cingular, with its national footprint, only has digital coverage (and hence advanced services) in major areas. Japan and Europe, with their denser populations, have better coverage.
• personalization and privacy. A mobile phone belongs to a single person. In Japan, it may be the only thing a teen or young adult has that belongs only to them. Thus adoption grows.
• standardization of technologies.
• product positioning. "It's the Internet in the palm of your hand!" was the mantra of the carriers for WAP. Guess what? It isn't. It's a highly useful information, communications, and entertainment platform in the palm of your hand. But US consumers knew it wasn't going to be the same experience as their computers.

This topic is really old, but it still irritates me and the report is still available for sale so I'll post about it here.

In December 2000, Nielsen Norman Group posted the results of a usability study of WAP usage in the UK. As one of two people working intensively on WAP services usability and design for Sprint PCS, I purchased the report. And was upset.

The study looked at WAP services available in the UK, based on 2 or 3 different phones on I think 2 carriers. The UK was selected because mobile services were better there than the US, thus WAP services were better there than the US. They concluded that all WAP was bad. They did this without investigating WAP in the US.

If you read the report, you will find several serious flaws that, combined, make the report not terribly useful.

One of my favorite examples was the conclusion that the devices (Nokia and Ericsson) were all very well designed, and then complaining about dropped calls and timeouts completely erasing the browser history, so the user had to start over. Of course, this had quite a lot to do with device design, as I recall from trying to get Nokia to change that behavior in their browsers for us.

They also complained about paying for time in which they were simply looking at the screen. Again, a device design issue. In the US, the browser started where it left off (so a dropped call didn't interrupt the browser session), and the connection dropped after x seconds (varied by carrier) so that the user didn't pay for time when not connected. This Phone.com (now Openwave) implementation made for a much better user exprience.

Further, NN complained about connection times of 30 seconds when Sprint had instituted a quick-connect technology that connected in 8 seconds.

When I contacted NN regarding the report, my comments were ignored. After resending my query, I was informed that Jakob Nielsen had indeed received my comments. No change was made anywhere, in the report or on the website.

By the way, what was the major problem with WAP in the US? Marketing. First, the pricing was wrong - you want me to pay how much to get information I can get for free? Second, the message was wrong - no, it is not the Internet in the palm of my hand. Everybody can clearly see that a full color PC screen will render a different user experience than a black and white, no-graphics, 2 inch (5cm) screen. Thus the advertising is lying, thus the product is not useful to me.

I'm not claiming that the US is ahead of Europe. I'm merely claiming that we are doing different things and that our markets are different, so we should not be evaluated the same way.

Device convergence: It's a phone! It's a camera! It's a television! It's a game console! It's a computer! Each of these devices have developed their own conventions, input methods, and user interfaces, and we are now forcing all these features into a small device with very few buttons. Usability will suffer — it has to, at least until the physical form of the device can change based on the user's current intention. The challenge is first to avoid bundling in features that a particular market segment will not want, and second to design intelligently. Usability tests of add-on features consistently show that the application could have been designed a lot better. Add-on applications (such as a blogging application that accesses the camera) can be much easier to use because the hardware is now merely part of an application rather than an independent function.

Downloadable user interfaces: Companies like Digital Airways, Trigenix, and Action Engine allow the user to download a new user interface for their phone. This will be particularly profitable to content providers, who can now define the entire home screen of the phone, including web content, applications, and ringers. While this is set to transform the wireless experience, there are immediate problems: who will design the device's support functions like call logs? What happens when the phone face content provider uses a different user interface paradigm than the rest of the device (like the browser)? How will user guides and customer support technicians tell users what to do to fix a problem? Why will device manufacturers bother to make it easy to use support functions if they don't own the user interface? Why will content providers make it easy to use support functions? These and many other challenges need to be addressed.

Voice: Most devices continue to be optimized for voice, and VoIP should be more available this year. Will this mean that applications are finally designed with voice input in mind? If done properly, voice input will radically enhance the user experience.

There are others, of course. 2005 could prove to be very interesting from the perspective of user experience — or it could be "yet more improved technologies." It's up to us to decide which.

The wireless industry has been talking about the importance of user experience for over 5 years now, but what have we done about it? Technologies are more sophisticated, networks and devices are faster, and we have more fancy graphics. Some devices have become more friendly to non-voice-driven applications. But companies are still developing web sites and applications that have at best surface usability: the pig may have a pretty face, but it is still a pig.

The solution: engage in user-centered design from the very conceptualization of your product, embracing mobility rather than mimicking desktop applications. Build applications that work with the user's context, not against it.

Mobilize vs. miniaturize: Mobility does not mean fewer features plus more ring tones. Companies should divorce themselves from the desktop experience and embrace all differentiating factors of mobility: user attention, device diversity, network capabilities and coverage, push messaging, other users, location, and environment. SMS is a good example of a technology and platform that embraced mobility rather than emulating the desktop, and it has been very profitable.

User context: A desktop application designer can expect the user to be sitting in front of a computer, focusing on the computer. A mobile application designer can expect the communications device to be in the user's possession but not foremost in the user's attention. Users are frequently interrupted while using a mobile device, a problem that is so much less important for desktop environments that desktop designers rarely have to consider it. Companies need to explicitly design and test applications to accommodate a user in multiple and changing contexts. Use all possible tools, including user response, current device state (e.g., network coverage or type), device location, time of day, recent activity, and anything else available to glean the user's context and react accordingly.

Usability vs. development: Companies, particularly small companies, try to save money by hiring developers who are also expected to wear the hat of a usability expert. The first major problem with this is that a developer will typically approach a problem according to what approach is easiest to develop, not what is best for the user. The second problem is that it is very difficult to see the problems with your own design or implementation. After all, even the most highly skilled journalists have editors to direct and review their work. If an industry centuries old has figured this out, shouldn't the software industry?

There is a whole consulting industry ready to help you. Use it — or hire an experienced user experience specialist to help you.

I don't think I want much in a phone headset, but nobody seems to make it. Am I asking too much? My headset should:

1. be reasonably comfortable.
2. have well-functioning noise cancellation (this means the microphone probably has to be near my mouth).
3. have good sound quality. Some environmental noise cancellation so I can hear the person in front of me would be nice.
4. allow me to extract the headset from pocket or bag, connect it with the phone, and insert it in my ear all before my phone stops ringing. (I'm an occasional user so you can't expect me to always have it out).
5. have easy-to-manage cords. No tangles! (Bluetooth is an acceptable option if you provide me with a Bluetooth adaptor for my phone).
6. be able to live in my pocket or in my purse without bending, separating, getting dirty, or breaking. A case is fine if it conforms with everything above.
7. be available for standard 2.5mm jack (i.e., non-Nokia) (if corded)
8. allow me to answer the phone from the headset

Sure, features like listening to music and Bluetooth would be nice, but really they aren't necessary to my life. I'm even willing to pay a premium for the above. But I can't get more than half of the above in a single product. (Yes, some of the iPod earpieces look very nice, and seem to have more of my options. They won't work for my phone.) I would very much like FrogTalk, just as soon as they make a Bluetooth adaptor to go with it.