All posts tagged as "Money"

There has always been a delay between getting a new technology to market and getting it well-adopted. For many mobile technologies, with their social or communicative nature, you have to get to a useful saturation point before the new technology is really useful to anyone.

My general guideline (when I was able to see such info directly) was that about 20% of users were using devices more than two years old. A surprising number use five year old devices. There are (unless explicitly kicked off the system due to technical incompatibilities) users of ten year old mobiles still hanging around.

This was always just a regular part of the segmentation; after 6 months so many people will have new devices, after 18 months, you can start to expect saturation as long as a majority of devices sold have the feature, so plan your marketing and advertising budgets for the long haul.

But this BBC article on Challenges to a ‘cashless’ world brings up a good point. The lifecycle we have gotten used to for the last decade or so has stalled. Drops in sales are not just mobile manufacturers doing badly, but consumers not buying things. Aside from straight revenue losses, they are not getting the new, exciting stuff into the field.

Although so far everyone is still plenty excited about just getting their websites onto phones and still ranting about touch, what happens when someone tries to implement, say nfc to support a mobile banking initiative? Or what happens to all those wimax towers?

I actually have no idea. I think I’ve reached the end of my ability to understand macroeconomics and business strategy. But maybe I can persuade Barbara to comment on it.

I keep fussing about details, because no matter how much wow factor your service has, missed details can erode your brand over time. Yesterday at the Mobile Device and User Experience, Scott Weiss (now of Human Factors International) talked about how the great transitions and visual design of the iPhone provided a “halo effect” that delayed users from noticing and becoming frustrated with the inconsistent back button placement, difficult text entry, the fact that the device never does learn anything about text input.

I just tried out the ABBYY Business Card Reader for S60 so I didn’t have to bring all the cards home. I’ll spend the money on the app, but I’m not sure why it consistently puts FIRSTNAME LASTNAME into the first name field, with nothing in last name. It seems a particularly easy bit of code, so what gives?

It’s way too easy to pick on pretty much any device and any service on getting details right. Scott does a great job of pointing out iPhone issues (though my chief irritants have to do with browser behavior), but what about Nokia? Well, here are some issues I found irritating. When I swap out the SIM on my E71 and launch messages and try to view one … nothing happens. I have to reboot it again. And then, there is the lack of keyboard shortcuts, especially on my QWERTY device. Not to mention, I learned that my device had predictive input at an industry conference, not having noticed it in the device.

By the way, XT9 is terrific! It learns words immediately. Love it so far.

Another example of missed details is the latest Gmail client. Two major problems for me:

• I keep getting cognitive dissonance when it announces that I have 6 messages in my Inbox but I can’t find them; I must go Options > Refresh to actually see the new messages


• It doesn’t realize I’m using a QWERTY device and thus my delete “shortcut” is # (two key presses) and there is no shortcut for archive

Why are these details wrong? It depends.

1. Not considering target audience and their goals, activities, needs, desires. The G1 is so developer-focused that small hands will actually cramp while typing.





2. Insufficient development & testing resources, and after all something had to give (think about the abrupt transition from Flash to Windows Mobile on many devices especially HTC)


3. Legacy code (I’m looking at you, Motorola and Nokia)


4. Insufficient knowledge of the domain (it’s shocking how many companies approach us and do not have an approach for dealing with device diversity


5. Piecemeal design, like a rambling home added onto by many owners in many architectural styles, without a consistency of purpose (like parts of the iPhone UI and also like the location of my very first job, the Winchester Mystery House


6. Product management processes that rate bugs on a scale of 1 to 5, then get all of the severity 1 and 2 bugs and some of the severity 3 bugs done before launch. Oh, and typically the worst UI bug can be is a 3.

How do you fix it? It’s hard. If you’re designing a platform, try to make the presentation layer flexible, including screen and even functionality. This will allow a bit more time before things start getting clunky. Rethink your paradigms every once in a while; don’t assume that a great user experience 8 years ago remains great. Features have been added, content has scaled, device capabilities have shifted, input mechanisms changed, and user expectations have evolved.

Set standards for user experience testing. Usability must score a certain level, perhaps benchmarked by the competition, before the product can launch; a bad task score must be launch gating. Don’t just test high-frequency things. And don’t just test usability: test learnability, speed to expert use, satisfaction by expert users. And definitely test the things that drive revenue and costs. Measure how well the experience matches with your brand goals. You do have brand goals, don’t you? A story about what you provide?

Get a second opinion. Even if you can’t invest in a lot of testing, get knowledgeable but outside resources to play with

We’ve had another speaker change at Design for Mobile. Now I believe the schedule is solid, so go check it out if you are still thinking about going. That said, it starts on Monday – just three days away – so if you are gonna sign up, I’d do so now.

Joe Grigsby, of Kansas City interactive agency VML, will be speaking Tuesday on The View of Mobile By Advertisers.

Since it’s relatively last-minute, we haven’t yet received the presentation from him, but I went ahead and put up the session page anyway. If you are an advertiser, a designer, a marketing guy or anyone who has an opinion, go there and give your thoughts. What do you think are the critical issues in mobile advertising today, and where will it be going tomorrow? Is this

AdWeek just posted this interesting article on companies creating interactive experiences for moviegoers. I think this is a set of great examples of breaking down the barrier between physical and virtual worlds. As always, the mobile is involved because it is the device actually in everybody’s pockets.

Briefly, the article talks about a couple of companies making interactive software (and I think hardware in one case) to be installed at movie theaters. Audiences can participate in crowd games, can vote on surveys, and so on. Results are displayed on the big screen.

Of course every game is sponsored (this is AdWeek, after all) and the advertisers are improving brand recall. But it’s also a win for the theaters, the filmmakers, and the audience.

I believe that a major area of growth for retail stores and other spaces is creating extra levels of customer engagement via digital services, accessed by the mobile. Examples can include

• interactive store directories, so you can figure out whether they have what you are looking for


• projects for home improvement stores or recipes for grocery stores, letting you figure out what could be done with the Sputnik-looking vegetable in front of you, and where to find all of that stuff in the store


• user and critic reviews, similar items, back ordering, and more at book and music stores


• increasing interactivity and audience engagement at theaters


• storing my preference for large mocha at my coffee shop, and letting me buy it without standing in line


• airport information interaction – when is my flight boarding, can I change seats, where was my luggage the last time it was scanned, etc.


• information, beer ordering, statistics, small-screen replays, photos to save as memories at sporting events

There are more ideas, but this is a start. Each is, essentially, the sort of interactivity you might put on a well-designed web site selling the same services, except accessible in the physical environment.

Oh, and don’t forget that every one of these has a location component. And many have a phone-as-wallet component.

Electronic cash cards, or rather the infrastructure to accept them, are a necessary precursor to mass adoption of mobile phones as payment. After all, the two things you need to use your phone at a physical point of sale is a way to present the data faster than you can reach in your wallet and a way to read the data. The current best technology for this is Near Field Communication (NFC); it’s the same stuff going into US passports and on smart cards all over Europe.

Of course it is a chicken-and-egg problem: most folks won’t bother carrying a special card when the only place they can use it is a single restaurant chain, but most retailers won’t bother installing the special reader when almost nobody carries the card. Similarly, mobile phone users won’t purchase a special phone when it won’t be useful many places.

That’s why I’m enthusiastic about transit payments, for things like subways and highway tolls. These are payments that people make very frequently, and have motivation to make them fast. The plethora of automatic readers for specific highways illustrates this need; even out here in Kansas we have the K-Tag for the Turnpike. We’ll learn if NFC in the London Underground works out very soon.

To look forward, it is useful to look to Japan and Korea. Events there can suggest (but not predict) events here. What Japan Thinks is an easy and sometimes entertaining method to look at what “real people” are doing in Japan, and its reported surveys frequently cover the mobile space. As of last month, over half of Japanese carry a cash card, dominated by Edy and Suica. The vast majority of those who carry one use it at least once a week.

This is a complex space, one which involves banking regulations, devices, operators, retailers, payment processors, things tried and failed, and more. It’s also one that the mobile industry is entering. The Mobile Payment Forum has worked since 2001 to build all of the relevant processes to make it work. We even helped them with their use cases.

It isn’t far from electronic cash cards to NFC phones. The infrastructure to support them are the same, and the phones have more flexibility: they can support multiple accounts on the same chip. We of course would like to see the system built to support multiple accounts seamlessly, but that is looking unlikely based on our various research efforts and conversations.

Instead, retailers can use multiple readers to start interacting with customers the way that online sites do. Possibilities include:

• The required Starbucks example: walk into a coffee shop, scan the reader, and your standard order appears on the screen. Verify or edit, and go sit down. No need to wait in line.


• Walk into a grocery store, scan the reader, and go shopping. Don’t know what passion fruit is? Snap a quick photo, get recommended recipes and nutrition information, and where in the store to find the best wine to go with it.


• Scan your phone on the way into the hardware store. Select your project from the application, or just get help finding those #2 screws. Store map, related products, and so forth.


• Oh yeah. You can pay with your phone.