Ratings: Techies think of the end user!
This is a common problem in technological products just not mobile UI (User Interface). So many products/services are built by techies who often don’t think how the end user will interact with them. Not only that but because the techies use it a certain way they presume the end user will follow this path as well.
A lot of techies think because they understand it the average end user will, wrong, the end user can’t even operate their video recorder and they have only been with us for a mere 20 + years. It is something I feel strongly about – what ever projects I have worked on whether it was a game/marketing campaign for Carphone Warehouse/The Sun or designing a personal security solution for the Nokia N95, the end user has to be able to use it and feel comfortable with it, quickly. There is no point having the greatest technology in the world if only a few % can use it.
They say: Fierce Mobile Conte report that usability challenges, not pricing, are slowing the adoption of new mobile data services according to a new report by service adoption management vendor Olista. The data was collected from “11 million users and hundreds of millions of usage events across five different mobile operator platforms”. “More than 60 percent of mobile video and music downloads are made off-portal”, which Olista argues “graphically illustrates the pressures facing operators in luring subscribers to their own content offerings.”
They go on to say that while “30 percent of consumers downloaded the same content over and over again, 85 percent of mobile TV users abandoned the service after just one viewing, underscoring the user interface difficulties facing mobile multimedia services. Moreover, greater than 70 percent of subscribers who signed up for content bundles failed to actually consume any mobile content, indicating that usability, not price, was the culprit.” The report adds that around “50 percent of all application downloads failed to complete successfully.”
We say: I wrote a piece the other day that quoted figures stating that only “15% of mobile gamers say their games always work” and that “35% of games don’t work at all”. Here we are again talking about failed downloads, “50 percent of all application downloads failed to complete successfully.” I’m sorry, but am I the only who thinks this is a disgrace??? If the mobile industry, with its combined technology prowess, cant solve a simple problem like this, then don’t expect any users to adopt to services or technology even slightly more complicated.
The UI is king, always has been, always will be. It is what made Nokia phones so great, you could just pick one up and use it. We grew up with Nokia and their UI made sense, it’s this area that Apple and RIM are both making huge progress in, but as Olista’s report points out, a lot more still needs to be done.
