Design the Right Thing: 2009 Mobile User Experience Conference

A grey but unseasonably warm November greeted the Mobile User Experience conference in London this week.

Richard Lewis of Orange made a persuasive case that Orange 'gets' the concept of User Experience at the highest levels of the company. They've adopted the motto: “Design the right thing before we design the thing right” and have come to terms with the notion that in this post-iPhone world, personalization and customization are in the customer's hands and not the operators. They view their work from a service ecosystem perspective and are moving from product centric to customer centric. Among other things this means removing irrelevant services and products from the customer's path. Now, for the crowning jewel, they think about the entire customer journey from 'become aware' to 'leave'. Yes, they want people who choose to leave Orange to have a pleasant experience doing so, in the hopes that they will consider coming back someday. To someone who has worked in UX on the operator side for years, the thinking isn't new. That it's been accepted at the highest levels of the company is only moderately new. Executives have jumped on to the UX train in droves post-iPhone, but not all of them understand there's more to it than sitting down for a comfy ride. They will need to survive the 'bright shiny object' syndrome and the 'we need something big for next month' demand. It takes vision, focus, and patience to get it right.

Ian Curson of Vodafone informed us that social networking is not new. “It's tens of thousands of years old” he announced with a grin, pointing out that the mobile phone is a social networking tool from day one. Point well taken.

His insights then progressed beyond the witty but obvious to trends like the shift in personal broadcasting from 'share by exception' to 'hide by exception', and messaging has moved from 'often demand a response' to 'rarely demand a response'. Vodafone took trends like this into account as they designed and launched their new cloud-based, people-centric service…Vodafone 360. You can sign in on different handsets and receive the same summarized, interactive version of your social network.

After Madava Enros of Mozilla Corporation spoke about their new browser for mobile devices, I was eager to see a demo. In the break I had a chance to play with it, and can see why Mozilla doesn't call it a 'browser light' or similar…it is a full, grown-up browser with tabs, an Awesome bar (more on that shortly), and cloud-based memory. Let's take those in reverse order. The cloud-based memory allows your mobile browser to know what you searched for on your PC, or to look at the tabs you have open on your PC. This feature makes the Awesome bar, quite awesome indeed. By the way, it's the bar that pops down when you start to type a destination into the URL field on your desktop browser. It shows you destinations that you've been to before, been to often, or been to recently that match the initial characters you're typing in. Most of us pick from this list of choices before we finish the URL without even thinking about it. The extension to the mobile phone is even better, you see the list of choices (based on this Mozilla cleverness algorithm) before you even start typing and the algorithm takes into account your desktop activity as well as mobile. Lastly, there are tabs and I'm pleased to see them there (I standardly have 30 to 40 tabs open on my laptop at any time), but the visual treatment needs some work. In their current version, each tab as a large X on it, to show that you can close it. It just looked like a row of errors to me. Overall it's well thought out barring a few usability issues (like the tabs); I'm eager to see the polished version when it comes out.

Marjana Spasojevic, Head of User Interfaces Team, from Nokia's offices in California spoke about designing for families not individuals. She pointed out that when we do think about families, we are not always thinking about them in the broader context…thinking about the extended family and how they are often spread out around the globe in this modern world. Her team discovered that families frequently use Skype to connect across distances, but they understood that video is now always easy. Especially for small children and grandparents, a group who very much want to connect with each other. Through collaboration with Sesame Street Workshop, Nokia built a prototype device with a physical frame to hold a book and two wirelessly connected screens. Magnets sense what page the book is on, the first screen shows a variety of Elmo clips based on just the person, but you can also see their book so you know what page they're on. Yes, you've got it now, it's a virtual-yet-real storybook reader that lets Grandma and grandchild have storytime together. As a parent of two children thousands of miles from their grandparents, I'd like to order several of these immediately. Alas, this is not a real product. Just a prototype done by an insightful, creative group of researchers and designers.