Dec 13th, 2006
Mobile User Experience Manifesto
The MEX organizers have published a Mobile User Experience Manifesto as the theme for their upcoming conference in 2007. Readers are encouraged to read and respond.
The manifesto covers some familiar (1-3, 5, 9) and some bleeding edge (4, 6, 7, 8, 10) themes. I’ve given these a 10 second breakdown, but it’s well worth the 10 minutes to read the manifesto.
1- Too much industry focus on getting to market quickly, instead of getting to market effectively (in other words, the features are there, but the UE suffers).
2- The walled garden is holding back industry growth.
3- Mobile advertising can be useful if it’s contextual. Replicating traditional disruptive advertising is a recipe for failure.
4- Phones should adapt to an environment and employ multi-modal input.
5- User experience performance must be measured if it is to be improved. Organizations aren’t recognizing the value of user understanding because they don’t know how to measure it.
6- Embedded information, or the ability of handsets to communicate with an environment represents a big shift.
7- Deeper personalization at every level of the value chain; beyond wallpapers and themes
8- Enhance, don’t replicate, the desktop experience (user-generated content, social networking and community interaction)
9- Improving and simplify input from the “standby” screen, or as we call it, the idle mode.
10- Service pricing is misaligned with user spending behavior. (Or, carriers pricing is whack.)
