All posts tagged as "User research"

I am thrilled to announce that we have announced the first of the speakers, more details, and the registration page for the first North American conference focused on mobile design, Design for Mobile.

Speakers include researchers, visual designers, interaction designers, UI developers, and design strategists. They work in operators, device manufacturers, open source, academia, content companies, technology companies. They work on web, applications, services, devices, and best practices.

We've more in the works, so stay tuned.

Register now!

I haven’t seen this posted anywhere in the mobilist-blogosphere, even though it is a couple of weeks old. The Pew Internet & American Life Project posted a report on Mobile Access to Data and Information. It’s fascinating reading for anybody interested in US mobile data use, and it’s collected by user surveys not server logs.

I trust this data more than the recently posted M:Metrics data that asserted that camera phone penetration in 2005 was about the same size as the percent of Sprint phones in the population. Since nearly all of the Sprint devices were camera phones, this seems unlikely to me.

Of especial interest is the degree to which mobile data penetration is far higher amongst the Black and (English-speaking) Hispanic populations than it is amongst the white population. Use is distributed by age about how you would expect it to be.

One of my favorite ways to measure the relevance of a given technology is how hard it would be to give it up. And there we find, right on page 6, that the mobile phone is harder to give up than television, email, Internet, or a landline. This measure changes a bit when you slice the data by age group, as you might expect.

A LinkedIn question asked challenges in the US off-deck mobile content market. Go check it out, answer it.

To my mind, you have to solve the following problems:

1. Discovery - the user has to find the content
2. Distribution - the content has to get onto the handset
3. Usefulness - the content has to provide actual value to users, to delight users
4. Usability - it has to be easy to use
5. Contextuality - the right function and the right content at the right time, while mobile
6. Monetization - content owners have to have a business model

I include under "distribution" things like typing a URL, dotMobi, install problems, signing, platform support, data plans, and so on. Content must be moved from a server somewhere onto the user's device in a state in which it can be run.

We address this entire list with pretty much every project. Without all six points, the product will fail.

Usability pundit Jakob Nielsen has done much to promote usability, especially on the (desktop) web. He and the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group do a lot of meta-analysis on usability methods.

So when he measures usability ROI measures, be sure he is doing it across a large number of sites. He reports the average ROI for usability on web sites has declined from 135% (2002) to 83% (2008). What I found particularly interesting about this article is the first of his two explanations for the decline in ROI:

We have now harvested most of the low-hanging fruit from the truly horrible websites that dominated the lost decade of Web usability (approximately 1993–2003). In those early years, Web design was abominable — think splash screens, search that didn’t find anything, bloated graphics everywhere. The only good thing about these early designs was that they were so bad that it was easy for usability people to be heroes: even the smallest study would inevitably reveal several immense opportunities for improvement.

Now, over in the mobile space, the “low hanging fruit” is usually still present – even on Nokia devices and Google applications. I thus expect the mobile usability ROI metrics to be closer to 135%.

Certainly the usability testing we do for our clients has delivered significant strategic and design understanding, resulting in products that better serve user needs with less friction. And more revenue and lower costs.

If you are afraid that your site or application might have some of that “low hanging fruit”, invest a little money in an expert review. We’ll do that for you, and it’s even cheaper than a small usability test.

All About Symbian posted a feature on The Future of Nokia Maps, and it provided some interesting insights into what was undoubtedly expensive user research:

“Interestingly, the Maps team talked about six “experience clusters”: drive, walk, discover, collect, share and meet. As Nokia Maps evolves, we can presumably expect more functions to allow sharing (of locations and stuff [e.g. photos, videos] associated with locations) and meeting (coordinating locations between two or more incidences of Maps?)”

This goes a long way to answering the sorts of questions numerous hopeful entrepreneurs ask (such as over in LinkedIn Answers), without us having to do explicit user research.

“Drive” and “discover” are well-supported with current applications and services; “walk” is only somewhat supported. “Meet” is supported well by non-map applications such as Dodgeball.

I’m curious about “collect” and “share” as location experience clusters. Do you have any examples? Or more examples of “discover?” Or great examples of any of these?

I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests for information on “what do I need to learn to get into mobile design?”. I always take this opportunity to mention my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written to help user experience, marketing, and product professionals translate their skills into mobile design and business.

Why? We think:

• iPhone awareness – in recent user research, one participant said of mobile Internet, “No, not on my phone. That’s what the iPhone is for.”


• one phone for every two people – 50% penetration is getting lots of business attention


• unlimited data plans – finally! For me, it’s one of the biggest draws of the iPhone.

Designing the Mobile User Experience has information about mobile users, differences in mobile use worldwide, design principles, some design patterns, sources for further design recommendations, industry structure, visual design for mobile media, and information on mobile user research including usability testing.