The Mobile Web
Those within the industry are much too focused on what they would like to do on the mobile web instead of thinking about what consumers are doing, what they want to do and how to make it easy for them.
A great example of this discrepancy is described by Ricky Cecil, Director of User Experience, FRY in the US, specialises in mobile behaviour and its motivations. He developed a character, Jane, loosely based on his wife, who likes to shop and would also like to be able to show her friends the shoes she’s trying on and ask them what they think and which pair(s) she should buy.
He says, “I wanted to find out what kind of pictures people take of themselves when they’re shopping. I looked at Flickr. If you type in dressing room, you get a huge number of people taking pictures of themselves in the mirror, posting it to Flickr and tagging it to dressing room. However, most of the pictures are taken with digital cameras, not camera phones. That means they take their digital cameras with them for this purpose.”
Why don’t they use their camera phone and send SMS with thumbnail or an MMS to people in your address book? Mr Cecil reckons, “Ease of use. If you’ve ever tried to send a text message to several people at once, it’s difficult. It should be about making it seamless, so that if the application is set up right, then the user just sends their message or picture to a short code and the app will be able to parse.”
Instead it seems that ease of use beats immediacy, in this instance.
It is often argued that handsets are holding mobile data usage back, but Cricket Wireless and Metro PCS account for huge amounts of data traffic, according to Quattro Wireless, although their users aren’t tied to a contract with a smartphone.
Conversely, figures garned from Bango, AdMob and Quattro Wireless suggest these percentages of all users access the Internet via their mobile devices.
US - 19%
UK - 24%
Spain - 26%
China - 33%
Germany -34%
Japan - 100%
There are several interesting things going on here. The US market largely comprises people who are locked into set term contracts and particular devices, typically for two years. Google’s recent attempt to overturn the status quo by laying out conditions under which it would agree to bid for 700MHz spectrum coming up for auction next year, including open devices and applications (the moment the operators pretty much controls what apps can run on a phone), really put the cat among the pigeons and resulted in Verizon suing the regulator, the Federal Communications Commission.
For all the moaning about locking their customers in, the operators did allow their them to go off portal without imposing punitive extra charges for leaving the walled garden. In the UK however, which has always had a strong pay-as-you-go sector, you can unlock just about any mobile device and use it on almost whichever network you choose, but until recently consumers were charged an arm and a leg by some operators like Vodafone for going off-portal. This is disappearing as flat data rates become much more commonplace (although there is grumbling about what operators described as “unlimited” in fact has a “fair usage” proviso, which isn’t that generous).
The clobbering for going off-portal meant that most UK users chose to stay within its confines, whereas in the US, Google, Yahoo!, AOL and MSN attract far, far more users than the operators’ portals, at least in the 25-34 age group (according to research by Quattro Wireless) whose traffic largely derives from news and weather services. And yet, usage in the US is significantly lower, with American 18-24 year olds opting to stay on-portal, again according to Quattro Wireless – another example of evidence disproving received wisdom. Quattro Wireless’ research also found that there has been a 400% increase in mobile browsing in the US in the last year.
Aside from Google arguing for open devices and applications, Sprint too has been engaged in some fancy footwork for the cause. In October, made interesting announcements at WiMax World in Chicago about the WiMax service, XOHM, it is to launch next year. In an unprecedented move, Sprint said it would embrace an open business model, meaning that it will supply the bandwidth and the user can chose how they access it. Users can sign up for a day, a month or year without being tied into a contract without it including a specific device for use with the service. Payment by credit card OTA.
In other words, Sprint has defined success in this arena as being about fostering take-up quickly by acting as an ISP rather than absolute control. To this end it is in cahoots with Intel – WiMax’s main proponent and promoter, which hopes to shift wagonloads of chipsets very rapidly – as well as Samsung and Motorola. It’s much too soon to fathom whether this change in thinking will spread to other parts of the business or whether the mobile WiMax model will work, but it does smack of lessons learned and an appetite for change – after all, Sprint needs to do something.
In fact there is no doubt that all operators need to work much harder and more imaginatively to make the mobile web a more compelling proposition: Paul Goode, M:Metrics’ VP of product development and senior analyst argues that if the effects of proliferating 3G and better devices were removed from the equation, mobile browsing would be declining slightly overall.
**This really great article was written by Annie Turner for BKI Media in 2007 - but I am publishing it as it is still relevant today.**
Related News:
Leave a Comment