News
Conventional thinking challenged at MEX
Stuart O'Brien May 4 2007, 11:15am
'Simplexity' was the name of the game at MEX '07 as the likes of Nokia, Vodafone and Blyk tackled mobile user experience head on.
The two-day MEX conference in London had a straightforward remit - to debate how mobile products and services can be designed so that Joe public will use them more.
Unsurprisingly, most of the discussion focussed on data services and content in particular.
Cliff Crosbie, Nokia's global director of retail marketing, said the industry could learn a lot from age old high street retail techniques - namely the need to train sales staff in the ways of mobile content.
"The customer is no longer king but capricious dictator," he said. "In the early days of mobile, handsets just flew off the shelves, but in developed markets we have to work harder to sell devices like the N95 as consumers also want to spend their money on plasma TVs."
He added: "The question most asked by people that walk into Nokia stores is 'how do I lock the keypad?' - that says a lot at a time when we're trying to sell them phones with GPS, music and video functionality. We need people to fall in love with their phones and for that to happen we need to educate them."
One wag coined the term 'simplexity' to describe the need to provide the public with straightforward guidance in how to use what are often quite convoluted content and data services.
Vodafone UK's head of content Al Russell approached the user experience issue from the perspective of an operator moving into a brave new 'off-deck' world.
"The four million Vodafone Live! customers in the UK love logging on to find the latest football scores and news, but what they really want are the services they use on the fixed line Internet," he said.
"Things like data plans are too complex and all operators are guilty of that, but the amazing thing is that despite the barriers people are exploring the wider mobile Internet."
Russell revealed that 10 per cent of Voda's UK live! customers are already using third party mobile social networking sites, based analysis of its WAP gateway logs.
Voda also launched its much trumpeted YouTube 'lite' service on live! last week, which Russell said would act as a bridge between mobile and the full web experience. He also confirmed that Voda would be following 3, T-Mobile and Orange and launch a flat rate data plan this summer.
Meanwhile Antti Ohrling, co-founder of ad-funded MVNO Blyk, dismissed suggestions that 'pushing' ads to mobile phones - the business model on which the company is built - is the very definition of 'bad user experience'.
He said: "Seventy one per cent of teenagers would accept ads to their phones as long as the content is relevant. Mobile is inherently a push channel. Just look at voice and text - people pick up the phone because they know who the caller is."
A full MEX '07 report will appear in the June issue of Mobile Entertainment magazine.
