1. We believe mobile user experience will be defined by a desire to connect entertainment devices, health appliances, car dashboards, smart architecture elements and other digital nodes, leading to the new world of multi-platform experience.
   
   Full agenda >>
2. We believe the industry is missing the opportunity to create new experiences with the voice network and is disproportionately obsessed with designing apps purely for the visual dimension.
   
   Full agenda >>
3. We believe functional efficiency is a basic right, not a privilege, and true functional identity is achieved by imbuing interfaces with a sense of beauty and emotional connection.
   
   Full agenda >>
4. We believe latency is the enemy of usability and must be eliminated before new interface technologies become suitable for the mass market.
   
   Full agenda >>
5. We believe the increasingly diverse range of wireless form factors leads to increasingly diverse behavioural patterns and usage environments, where the established rules of mobile user experience must be rethought.
   
   Full agenda >>
6. We believe data is specific to individuals, not devices, and requires new service architectures which afford users multi-platform access to their data, their way, according to their individual preferences.
   
   Full agenda >>
7. We believe people enjoy serendipitous discovery of the world and, if the industry builds trust and designs playful, meaningful interaction flows, mobile devices are the ideal interface.
   
   Full agenda >>
8. We believe the industry must learn from the usability failings of early touchscreens and intelligently combine new sensors, haptic mechanisms and improved touch panels to create a multi-dimensional input/output experience.
   
   Full agenda >>
9. We believe multi-platform experiences rely as much upon physical as they do upon virtual connections, and seamless wireless transfers should be complimented by the reassuring tactility and solidity of well-designed hardware linkages.
   
   Full agenda >>
10. We believe mobile technology can bridge spacial and social distances by allowing users to indicate what they want and when they want it.
    
    Full agenda >>
11. We believe wireless devices with larger displays and multiple screens drive new forms of content far beyond passively consuming games, video and music.
    
    Full agenda >>
12. We believe enhanced call quality is a forgotten opportunity to improve user experience, allowing customers to recognise emotional nuance more clearly.
    
    Full agenda >>
13. We believe multi-platform experiences must anticipate a state of continuous partial attention, where users rapidly switch their focus between several devices, screens and channels in ever shorter timer slots - the old rules of designing for a single point of focus no longer apply.
    
    Full agenda >>
14. We believe the need for user control and undo functions increases in direct proportion to the number of multi-platform touchpoints and data sources.
    
    Full agenda >>
15. We believe mobile advertising will succeed only once it is a one-to-one conversation, augmented by new contextual data and reflective of individual personality.
    
    Full agenda >>

100 of the brightest minds in mobile and user experience will come together at MEX on 19th - 20th May 2010 to learn from a carefully selected line-up of expert speakers and create a collective response to the Manifesto. If you’d like to take part, delegate passes are priced at GBP 1499 each. MEX always sells out in advance, so register early to guarantee your place.

Register now >> or Get more info >>

Source: Admob ]]> http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?feed=rss2&p=867 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=866 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=866#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:45:45 +0000 Marek Pawlowski http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=866 17 The largest single age group using the iPod Touch is those under 17, accounting for 65 percent of the user base. In contrast, the largest single group for the iPhone is 35 - 44 years old, accounting for 21 percent. 25 - 34 year olds are also strong iPhone users, representing 21 percent. Source: [...]]]> >17 The largest single age group using the iPod Touch is those under 17, accounting for 65 percent of the user base. In contrast, the largest single group for the iPhone is 35 - 44 years old, accounting for 21 percent. 25 - 34 year olds are also strong iPhone users, representing 21 percent.

Source: Admob ]]> http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?feed=rss2&p=866 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=865 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=865#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:45:00 +0000 Marek Pawlowski http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=865 27.4% Roaming in revenues at Telefonica’s Spanish mobile unit were nearly a quarter lower in Q4 2009 compared to Q4 2008, highlighting the impact of the new EU-imposed price caps on wholesale roaming prices. They totalled EUR 153m for 2009, down 22.8% on 2008. (PDF Link)

Source: Telefonica ]]> http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?feed=rss2&p=865 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=864 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=864#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:44:13 +0000 Marek Pawlowski http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=864 Christmas in March

Christmas may seem a long way away, but there’s something rather magical about this splendid musical decoration built using mobile phones.

The 2010 MEX Awards is the 3rd annual design competition for cutting edge mobile and multi-platform user experiences. It provides a global platform for showcasing your innovations through the online MEX Awards gallery and at the MEX Conference itself.

The winners will be honoured at the 7th international MEX Mobile User Experience conference in London on 19th May 2010, receiving the famous MEX trophies in front of an audience of 100 of the world’s leading user experience experts.

You can see TV coverage of previous MEX Awards on Reuters TV or check out the photo gallery on the MEX Awards site. Also, see the full list of winners from 2008 and 2009.

Entry is completely free - just visit the MEX Awards web-site to submit online. Entries must be received by Friday, 30th April 2010 at 23:00 GMT. Enter now >>

There are no limits on what you can enter, including concepts, applications, devices and services. Your submission should include 2 parts:

1) A detailed description of your target user

Describe who they are, what they do and what motivates them. Include as much information as possible to show you have conducted thorough research into the unique requirements, preferences and behavioural traits of your target users.

2) An illustrated guide to the user experience you’ve created

Using a combination of written explanation, images and video, show how the experience you’ve designed meets the needs of the users. Each entry must include a written summary, an image and a PDF with further details. Contestants can also link to an optional video of their entry - this is highly recommend and greatly assists the judging panel.

It is open to everyone, with specific categories for companies, professionals, freelancers and students. There are 5 awards - 1 for each of the 4 categories and 1 overall MEX User Experience Innovator of the Year. It is completely free to enter.

“All of us have great ideas but there are many who lack a platform to showcase these ideas to the world. The MEX Awards symbolises encouragement and confidence for an individual who has an idea. Winning the 2008 MEX Award gave me that encouragement and boosted my confidence in pursuing my own ideas. Being judged by industry leaders and experts, it also reinforced the marketability and potential viability of my concept.”

– Gaurabh Mathure, founder of Desolve, winner of the Freelance category in 2008 with ‘Cloudaware‘.

Enter your innovations today >>

It would be easy to assume the value of user studies is proportional to the sample size: identifying trends from 10,000 users will give you a clearer picture than talking to 10, or so prevailing wisdom would suggest.

However, what if the inverse were true? Is there an argument larger and larger sample sizes actually lead to business decisions which take you further and further away from delivering an experience tailored to each of your customers.

I was prompted to think about this at a recent meeting of The Foundation’s Forum in London, entitled ‘Business needs data not intuition’ where leaders from a wide range of sectors, from banking to hospitality, were quite vocal in their support of using customer data for trend analysis.

Identifying trends within large data sets can be a useful aid to decision making when thinking about how to structure your business (e.g. how many blue widgets should you be stocking versus red widgets), but is far less effective at delivering something which actually meets the needs of individual customers (e.g. deciding whether a particular person is more likely to prefer blue or red widgets).

Customer preferences are infinitely complex, not to mention changeable. You might look at your user base and see clear segments of user behaviour, but no user actually identifies themselves as being representative of a segment: they are representative only of themselves and, everyone, when the data becomes granular enough, is unique.

Try asking a real person on the street which segment they belong to and I’ll be surprised if they don’t ask you in return whether you’ve gone mad.

The mobile industry provides customer experience practitioners with an interesting testing ground for developing products tailored to ’segments of one’. Each device can be uniquely identified and an increasingly detailed set of contextual data can be gathered about each user.

Married to the latest database technology, the two-way communications links and growing number of contextual sensors in mobile devices allow every nuance of customer behaviour to be understand.

The problem, however, is that most business models are incompatible with responding to users as individuals. Companies are still built around ageing principles such as economies of scale, mass production and distribution. Within these frameworks, it is far more convenient and cost effective to group behaviours into segments, thereby moving you further from the reality of what each customer wants as an individual.

Of course, there are limits to what can be achieved with current technology. Today it is simply uneconomic to produce phones personalised for each customer at the point of manufacture - but this is changing. The percentage of the mobile experience abstracted into virtual, customisable elements is growing daily: what staretd with ringtones and wallpapers has expanded into applications, user interfaces and input methods. With haptics, even the tactile qualities of the device be personalised. In the future, the colour of the exterior casing will be virtualised using new skin display technologies.

The challenge for businesses is to build their architecture with a long-term goal of being able to make each customer feel as if they are receiving a service tailored to them as an individual. This infinite personalisation will become possible by degrees over the next several years and companies who put the foundations in place today will find their advantage grows daily as they become better and better at meeting customer expectations and competitors who did not plan for this shift find it harder to respond.

It would seem, therefore, that more data are the solution. However, businesses must ensure they can ask different questions to every customer and respond to their answers as individuals.

Question: Which methods does your business rely on to understand customers as individuals? How do you address the challenge of translating that understanding into an individual dialogue with each user? Will the mobile industry ever truly be able to offer a personalised service for customers? Post your comments on the blog…

Source: BISG/Mobile Opportunity ]]> http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?feed=rss2&p=859 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=862 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=862#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:03:52 +0000 Marek Pawlowski http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=862 The Sausage Stylus One of the dirty secrets of capactive touchscreens like the one found on the Apple iPhone is that they don’t work when you’re wearing gloves. That may not be a problem in California around the Apple HQ, but for substantial parts of the world which have sub-zero temperatures for several months of the year, it causes a bit of a problem. It is therefore inspiring to see South Koreans taking matters into their own hands and discovering that an inexpensive ’snack sausage’ is actually electro-statically compatible with capactive touchscreens and using it as their stylus. Read more on this through the link. A great example of low tech user subversion. ]]> http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?feed=rss2&p=862 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=861 http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=861#comments Tue, 02 Mar 2010 07:02:44 +0000 Marek Pawlowski http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?p=861 27.5% More than a quarter of TV sets purchased by US consumers in January have been connected to the internet. 41.9% of those connections were direct from the television itself, 12.3% from a video box such as Roku, 20.3% through a games console, 13.2% through a web-enabled Blu-ray player and 12.3% through other methods such as internet modules.

Source: iSuppli ]]> http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/?feed=rss2&p=861