Recent Blog Posts

The last major mobile theme I noticed from MWC was web and local software. You know, content.

There's lots of evidence from all around the mobile industry. Opera Mini use increased 18% month-over-month in January. Orange’s SVP of personal communications services said, "We are very bullish on the mobile revenue model from the e-commerce perspective. "

The best information I've found is the Tellabs Nielsen survey on intended mobile data use. I was especially interested in the interest in use amongst non-users... nearly 50% of US non-users intend to use in the next 24 months. Obviously intended use is not the same as actual use, but this story is an interesting read.

Analysis Mason is bullish on advertising-supported mobile services. And the Mobile Entertainment Forum at MWC predicts an average revenue growth of 27% this year.

Customizing and Personalizing

Manufacturers and operators continue to slowly let go of control over the device idle screen. I think Windows Mobile may have done it first, by allowing manufacturers to have interactive skins, and technologies like Qualcomm's uiOne have certainly been around for a while. One operator is also working with Microsoft for customizing the Windows Mobile home screen. (Also note the comment that WinMob usability isn't good.)

Similarly, Yahoo is providing more personalization. According to FierceWireless, "Yahoo Mobile features an open environment giving consumers the latitude to create a customized user experience bringing together their favorite web content and services." Nice, and needed.

I think personalization for key, everyday experiences will be more popular on mobile phones than on desktop computers, as long as the customizations don't get erased over time. (For example, I am of the 4% who have customized anything on OpenOffice, but when I upgrade my changes are eliminated. Not encouraging.) Why will personalization be more popular on the phone?

• The phone is a fashion statement, part of your personality. This is an extension of the popularity of ring tones, wallpapers, skins, stickers, and more.
• The screen is small. I keep having to look at "music" on my phone (I use an iPod for that), and then have to dive deep to find Gmail. Let me put Gmail on my idle screen.
• I am unlikely to be sharing my device, so there's less penalty for customization.
• I live with this device all day, interacting with it dozens or hundreds of times. If I can save 15 seconds per interaction, I will.

Adding Functionality (software!)

The customers are spending: 16.5% of smartphone users spent between $100 and $499 in 2008.

What needs to happen to make a business model out of content in this environment?

Start with distribution. Figure out whether you'll have to rely on existing stores or decks, or you've got a great off-deck distribution model. Make sure you can thrive with the revenue models the stores provide. Select platforms accordingly.

Be sure your users are on the platforms you choose. Making a great S60 app won't help much for a U.S. user base.

Reduce price barriers. Until the various stores and devices enable previews and trial periods, users will be purchasing your application on faith. Even if we're talking about a web site rather than an app, many users won't be on unlimited data. $7 is expensive, 99¢ is essentially the same things as free.

Make sure your support model supports likely volumes. At 69¢ revenue per unit, a single support incident eliminates profits from as many as ten sales. Even more expensive applications can have their profits eaten away by support. Don't expect the operators to do this for you; their profits are eroded this way as well.

Design it right. Reduce the need for support in the first place. Oh, and improve brand perception at the same time. And stickiness.

App stores will help

App stores have finally come into their own. Everybody is launching a me-too effort, with Nokia's Ovi really breaking new ground (stuff I've been advising clients to do for about three years now, so this is exciting to me).

Some of the stuff Barbara talked about the other week was not so much writing, as specifying. Including imagery.

But writing and presenting is at least as important. I agree with pretty much everything Josh Kamler says here about writing as part of a design process.

I especially agree that a key portion of why I hire someone (when I did the hiring) was if they can express an awareness of why they made design decisions. I have hired a lot of people whose personal art or design style I despise; but they have one, and are conscious of it enough they can pursue any design they need.

Similarly, clients won’t keep working with us if we can’t write – or explain when asked – what it is we do, why we did it, and why it helps them.

This awareness of why you design is why I’ve been writing my process down for like five years (and making my employees follow it). And as I finish turning it into a book, I get more and more giddy when I read others who think the same way.

One of the things that makes writing this blog interesting is that we write for wildly different types of readers. These include:

• designers, for whom I wrote design strategy and Steven wrote portal theory,
• developers and builders, for whom Steven wrote issues with always-aware applications,
• mobile product owners, promoting user experience in general, such as the recent Ovi post.

This entry will resonate with designers, but it's really for product people and a little bit the builders. In a way, it's a conversation I've had several times with engineering-led startups.

Whitney Hess' recent 10 Most Common Misconceptions About User Experience Design really addresses what it is we do. As I read this article, I kept being struck by things that resonate with me in my job, to this very day. She outlines what we do, and what people perceive that we do.

User experience goes beyond pixels

While we like talking about pixels, color depth, and typography around here, take a look at what we have written about. This is an image of the top 75 words in our blog for the past month or so ... strategy, product, business, design, application, interaction, users, service, operators, customers, understand.

The pixel stuff is easy compared to the human side of things.

Only a component of what we do

Visual design is only a component of what we do. If what you want is sexy "skins" for your site or application (or one time, an entire Linux mobile OS), you should probably go somewhere else. And if you haven't yet spent serious user experience design effort on behavior, you need to fix your process (we can help).

Usability testing is only a component of what we do. It helps us measure how good a design is, and identify where major issues are. Then... we fix them.

User research is only a component of what we do. It helps us make sure we are designing the right products with the right interactions.

Wireframes are only a component of what we do. Page layout and content design are important, but we go deeper. How should your business processes be changed to improve user experience? What about database architecture?

Product strategy is only a component of what we do.

Christian Lindholm writes of three levels of user experience: bling, control, and utility.

All of us at the office think that "bling" has too many negative connotations, especially for something that he says includes, "visuals, colours, content density and partly motion." In fact, we prefer the different Presentation, Function, and Information... more on that in a later post. Nevertheless, frameworks help explain that we do more than just pixel-pushing.

Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted this week by Sachendra Yadav. The Carnival of the Mobilists is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you read our blog, you should be reading this collection each week.

Additionally, this week’s top post is mine from last Tuesday on how long it takes mobile hardware to cycle, especially in these economic conditions challenges for emerging mobile technology.

Friday is always different here. We go out for lunch, and usually spend the afternoon reviewing interesting industry news and so on. But first, cake! My wife, Alison, also works here and she made a layered chocolate macaroon cake for Jana’s birthday. Yum.

And, right before this I did a little more decorating of the no-longer-terribly-new office, and added the phone wall. Sorting through all our old phones, and mockups absconded from old jobs, was interesting and fun. And now it looks like a mobile design office.

We should have the rest of the office fully prettified so we can show it off a little at the Design for Mobile 2009 Conference in April. Maybe I’ll get Alison to make another cake for everyone.

Pay close attention to the Ovi Store announcement. Not the LG application store, not the Samsung store, not the Windows Mobile application store. Ovi.

From their press release:

From this point on, the media you consume is no longer just about “what” you’re buying, but also now about “where,” “when,” “why,” and “who” bought what. Consumers will be able to activate social discovery so that content enjoyed by their social network can be automatically surfaced and made available for download and repeat consumption. Content will also be presented based on location so that consumers will always have the most relevant experience wherever they are in the world. Consumers will be able to choose to pay for content with a credit card or through operator billing. By providing a choice of payment options for consumers, content providers and developers will gain access to consumers in markets where credit cards are not widely available.

Contextual recommendations, based on location and time. Social recommendations, based on friends and “people who bought this.” The strengths of Apple and the strengths of Amazon, plus even more.

And, though not in the press release, the developer revenue split is the same as Apple’s. Caveat: apparently the fine print says “after operator fees,” so that could be really tiny.

With Nokia’s smartphone market share, the disproportionate content use of smartphone users compared to feature phone users, and this massive improvement in user experience, the operators will be seriously hurt if they don’t manage to compete … in 2009, and at least as good as Apple.