“A fundamental axiom of management is that you can not control that which you can not measure. Mobile experience is no different,” says Paul Nerger of Argogroup, will speak at the PMN Mobile User Experience conference on 2nd – 3rd May 2007.

As Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Argogroup, Nerger has a deep understanding of the technical challenges and strategic requirements of measuring user experience performance. He has spent 15 years in software industry marketing roles, joining Argogroup from Informix where he led wireless strategy and brokered partnerships with Symbian, Psion and Nokia.

We challenged Paul to respond to point # 5 of the MEX manifesto, which reads: “User experience performance must be measured if it is to be improved. It must be constantly tracked through quantitative and qualitative methods. We think organisations throughout the value chain are failing to recognise the importance of
understanding customers because quantifying the return on investment is too difficult.”

He told us: “Content suppliers, aggregators and mobile operators all make attempts at measurement, but often these fail because they embrace capacity and performance rather than the user experience. It is relatively easy to measure the raw performance of a GPRS sub-system or the bandwidth of a circuit; but the difficulty comes when trying to measure how well the video is rendered or how the user percieved the voice call. Consumers don’t care about speed and throughput they care about how quickly a page renders, what it looks like aesthetically, and what it does to help improve their lives.”

Nerger joins a wide range of industry leaders who will respond to the MEX manifesto at the conference. Others already announced include Cliff Crosbie, Global Director of Retail Marketing at Nokia, Al Russell, Head of Mobile Internet & Content Services at Vodafone and Bill Schwebel, Senior Vice President, AOL Wireless and President, Tegic Communications. Stay tuned as we announce the other speakers on a rolling basis over the next few weeks.

To book your place at MEX, please visit www.pmn.co.uk/mex/register.shtml.