Mobile Entertainment

I'm often asked which part of the mobile user experience I consider the most important. Is it the highly visible elements like the graphical user interface (GUI) and the hardware design? Does price ultimately dictate everything?

Or do soft factors like the marketing message, brand image and customer service play the greatest role in defining a consumer’s overall impression of a product.

In reality, they are all critical. So too is the way in which they are combined and delivered to the market. Regardless of whether you are a content provider with direct customer relationships or a chipset designer several layers removed from the end-user, the ability to see how your components fit in an overall experience is vitally important.

Unfortunately, we often find there is a fundamental misconception that a great UI will automatically equate to a great user experience. As such, responsibility for the user experience is frequently confined to a team of UI designers.

A good interface is essential of course, but so too is the requirement to apply customer-centric thinking to the building blocks beneath. This thinking must also be extended to the way a company works with its partners, its marketing strategy, the sales approach and the other myriad elements that play a role in forming customer perceptions.

Take the example of accessing a premium weather service from a mobile browser. The UI team may have spent months refining an interface optimised for the minimum number of clicks and lavished with the latest visual effects, but the customer will never even see this if the user experience falls at early hurdles like payment processing or ease of content discovery.

These elements often come under the responsibility of an entirely different team, leading to inconsistencies that hamper the user experience.

Moreover, when we talk to users about their experiences with mobile content we find with alarming frequency that their frustrations result not from errors caused by the content provider, but from failings at other points in the value chain.
But customers don’t differentiate in how they allocate responsibility.

The user who can’t download a game because the payment processor hasn’t integrated properly with the operator billing system doesn’t stop to think about which company is at fault – he simply moves on.

As such, good mobile user experience comes not from a set of technologies, but from an approach. It starts with ensuring everyone within the value chain is able to empathise with the customer. A great first step is to do a simple reality check on every major decision: ‘How’s this going to work for customers in the real world?’.

It sounds so simple and obvious, but the industry is littered with failed product launches which suggest this basic tenant of user experience is often ignored.

Video calling, an application touted for many years as the ‘next great thing’, is a classic example. The industry could have saved itself a lot of time and money if some of the engineers involved in the early development had thought about how unsuited most of the mobile environment is to any application that requires both the visual and audible attention of the user simultaneously.

No amount of marketing, interface enhancement or cheap tariffs can change the fact that it’s physically impossible to make a video call while walking down the street and not crash in to something.

There is no silver bullet. You can’t buy-in great user experience. You can’t outsource it to a team of designers. It is a competency, an awareness of user requirements that needs to be deeply ingrained in the mobile business, from CEO to engineer and network operator to software developer.

Marek Pawlowski (marekpawlowski@pmn.co.uk) is editorial director at mobile consultancy PMN and founder of MEX, the Mobile User Experience conference (www.pmn.co.uk/mex/). The next MEX event is in London on May 27th and 28th 2008.