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Mobile phones are used to keep in touch with friends and family. Why, then, do mobile phone games, when social, so often ignore family to instead have players interact with strangers?

Imagine a game intended to capitalize on, and extend, the connections and experiences shared by a group of friends. Party games perform this role in offline life. My favorite is Apples to Apples, a card-based game which gives one person an adjective card, and asks the other players to provide the noun card from their hand that best matches the adjective - in the opinion of the judge, not any actual measures. It is not a game well played with strangers.

This game could readily be extended to mobile, and played on an extended ongoing basis. A small group of friends might decide to try it, and one person could send the application to all via SMS. Game play could have a variable number of players: in any given round, only people who are available to participate will actually participate. A chat system would be integrated with play - or perhaps the chat client would have the game integrated?

The game could extend over days, weeks, or months. A round might be initiated either upon completion of the previous round, or whenever somebody felt like it. SMS would wake up the application for actual use. Game statistics would accumulate over time for each group of friends, and a user could play in multiple games simultaneously, although only one could be active.

If the game got old for a group, a new person could be added. Alternately, the group might migrate to a new game, such as Cranium.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this is that I could imagine participating in a game with my group of close friends. Each round is a quick "I'm thinking of you, and about who you are" sort of casual interaction. I'd want maybe 3 or 4 rounds a day, not too much. And I'm actually in the second-largest group of mobile game users, describing this segment's preferred mobile game use pattern. Perhaps there is something here.

Of course, Verizon won't allow the user to follow SMS links (at least on the RAZR), so they lose - users would have to play a text-only version of the game. Cingular's services agreement requires users to only use sites within their deck, so they lose too. Then again, Verizon is uninterested in services that "promote flirting", so Verizon loses again.

Hmm. Maybe this should be a Sprint exclusive application, at least in the US. That sounds "sticky" to me.

Mobile phones are potentially great for in-person comparison shopping. At Best Buy and want to know whether this product is any good or can be found elsewhere for less? Just pull out your phone, launch the browser, ... navigate to a shopping site ... enter the bar code or model information ...

Well. Not so easy.

However, new product recognition technologies using the camera may make this process less painful. Imagine this:

You visit Best Buy, and see that funny Dyson vacuum cleaner. You want to find out more, so you open your phone and push the camera button. You snap a shot of the vacuum cleaner, and pick "comparison shop" from the list of actions to do next. Your phone immediately sends the image to a server for analysis, and meanwhile loads the shopping application.

When the app loads, it shows all the levels of abstraction: are you interested in vacuum cleaners in general, upright cleaners, upright bagless cleaners, Dyson cleaners, or Dyson cleaners of that model? Pick one, and get a summary of pros and cons, price comparisons, and reviews by users. Order one from the store to be delivered to your home - and the application credits the current location (Best Buy) with part of a sale so they get part of the profit. It may even allow Best Buy to make a special offer to get the product right now and make the purchase directly from the phone, bypassing the line at checkout. Users could also add items to a wish list, or even make an impulse buy of some related item.

This sort of experience would be good for the user, good for the store, good for the carrier, and good for the retailer making the sale. It would not be good for a manufacturer making poor quality products. It would also be excellent for the company enabling the experience, who could charge retailers for higher levels of access, collect valuable user behaviors, and gain some advertising revenue.

What is stopping this system? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Device manufacturers (and carriers!) have to allow access to the camera application, at least as far as being able to add an action to it. This is not technically challenging, and could provide the carriers with signficant extra revenue from the comparison shopping engine. Retailers have to embrace the phone camera as a useful sales tool, not something to be banned.

When should usability and user experience be designed into a product?

Day 1. You can't "add usability" to a product. You have to design it in from the beginning.

Okay, if you are building a platform you can do a bit of proof of concept work before you start working on usability, but you need to start architecting the user experience even before you have any products.

Imagine if SMS was designed without considering (appropriate) use cases. Or imagine if they missed the fact that typing is difficult on a phone. The architects may have decided that each message needed a subject, or that each message could have a maximum 2000 characters. Either of these would have bloated the system to the point of unusability.

We have current evidence of the problem: MMS has a very lose standard, with lots of capabilities. It is very powerful - but building a collage of images and sounds on the phone is going to be very hard. It will even be very hard on a computer. Despite the ridiculousness of the standard, manufacturers and carriers valiently try to meet it.

Another example: XHTML was not architected to be usable on the phone. This is unsurprising, but it is hurting us now. HDML (Openwave's predecessor to WML which strongly influenced WML 1.1) was designed to be optimized for phones. It looks antiquated to us today, largely due the the lack of any sort of fonts, font sizes, colors, or graphics. That doesn't mean we couldn't learn from it: I can more readily add graphics to HDML than I can add cache control, navigation control such as subroutines, and multiple commands to XHTML. In fact, if I want to replicate the user experience from HDML, I would have to abandon XHTML browsers all together, and build my own system - both language and browser.

I have more than once been brought into a project partway through, been asked to design "the user interface", and been told repeatedly "we can't do that". Such projects turn into a long series of compromises between what should have been and what had to be, just because I was not brought in at the beginning.

So when I hear, we want to "address the usability once when the major features are ready", I cringe.

I recently met with the guys from nextBLAST, and agreed to take a look at their service. They seem to have a good notion about reforming mobile data usage through useful products and features, but have missed usability entirely. This lack of usability will kill their product.

It's tough to tell what you can do with this service. I had this problem when viewing their display at an industry event, as well as when looking at web site. I knew I could "mobilize" my blog, and that's great (see it at http://lsd.wwmdd.nextblast.com) and I could do RSS reading. Since I've been trying to figure out my ideal mobile RSS experience, this is what I tried to do.

I signed up for an account, and skimmed the hugely long terms and conditions. Some of the items in it are strange. It looks like, among other things, they put terms for all possible situations into one big T&C statement.

I successfully signed up, and still didn't know what the product was. I decided to click the "New User" link on the home page (they should have known I was a new user and simply walked me through the key pieces of information). I told them about my country and carrier, but they didn't have my phone model listed. I find it interesting that they can't detect my phone model using the user agent - they are creating extra work for themselves and the user.

When I told them about the missing model, as requested, the Contact page did not return me to the main menu upon successful complection - instead there was my entry looking like I hadn't done anything to it. A second look at the page revealed a subtle confirmation message, so I didn't submit the comment twice. I imagine other users did.

When I did return to the main screen, the alert telling me to add my account number was still there! I finally fixed that and started poking around. I was able to add several pre-existing news feeds to my account. I found one that I'm monitoring, and also created a new feed.

There were some very nice features, such as providing different presentations for mobile and desktop views. Like many of the features of the service, this one won't be used because it is too hard. Specifically, the service allows the feed to be filtered by keywords and by tags for both the desktop and the mobile view. This is terrific, but I have no specific recollection of what keywords or tags are used in a specific feed. A simple preview would make the feature more usable; a list of recently used tags and common unique keywords would be better still.

After all that, I'd also like to block specific tags or keywords rather than be inclusive. This allows me to discover new interests rather than being trapped in something I specified long enough ago that I don't even remember that I limited my experience.

There are a lot of nice features in this service, but so many of them are unusable because of usability. Fundamentally, the company needs to get an investment of around $200k to revamp their site. It looks like it will be a great service once people can figure out what it is.

I'll probably post a bit more as I get through the learning curve for the service. I know that they have all sorts of wonderful features I haven't seen yet.

I recently discovered Micheal Mace's web log, Mobile Opportunity. His is a well-reasoned set of entries on the business and marketing of mobile devices and services - a reasonable publication from a former Palm executive.

For example, Mace discusses the myth of the smartphone market. His core argument is that there is not one "ultimate" converged device that will serve everybody's needs, but rather several - one form for each market segment.

I'll add to that idea that Palm's research to understand what these market segments are is likely to be limited in time. I doubt the market will stay static, and as more people come into the "smart phone" market their needs will not necessarily match the needs of those already there.

However, the core idea of there being no such thing as one "ultimate" device is an idea with which I heartily agree. There are at least three lessons from the automobile industry we should learn:

• Minivans have as much use in the market as sports cars: buyers of one would not want to buy the other
• Minivans and sports cars use some standard design elements to allow transfer of skills between them: some standardization of phone UI components would help all users and developers, but too much standardization will fail
• The SUV market didn't appear until major innovation occurred: the market evolves over time.

Mace also argues that 60% of the mobile phone users in the US and major European countries are unwilling to pay for anything beyond voice and texting, such as picture sharing. Thus the added-feature market is only about 40% of the market.

While I believe he is right on this front, I do not believe that this will remain true: the market will evolve. What we are seeing is a marketing adoption curve - actually several of them.

10 years ago, few people I know had mobile phones. "What would I do with that?" "I'd just use it for emergency calls." In my own life, many of the people who said that 10 years ago actually have mobile phones now. My parents are contemplating dropping their land line in favor of their mobile phones. Late adopters are adopting.

Smart phones, however you define them, are not in late majority stage right now, particularly in the US. Particularly high-feature smart phones outside of PDAs, such as those with mobile TV, are still in the early adopter stage of the marketing curve. And lest we not forget: early majority market and user needs are very different from early adopter market needs. It's no wonder that the "added-feature" market is only about 40%.

Who knows what that number will be in ten years?