Archive for December, 2006

Joe Pemberton

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.)

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Here’s the online version of the Economist future phone article.

Highlights:

  1. Use of the term “approximeeting”
  2. Motorola and Nokia’s pseudo-infinite storage of “…all music ever recorded…” & “…life recorders…”.
  3. Decoupling hardware (separate screen, earpiece, keypad, etc)

Here’s a link to the article at Economist.com

Joe Pemberton

New California hands-free law in 2007

California commuters not wanting to spend $30 to $90 on a handsfree device have found a $2 alternative in order to comply with the new hands-free law in effect this year.