Mobilize panel on user experience
Last week I was invited to speak on a panel at Om Malik’s Mobilize conference. The topic was “What creates good mobile user experience?” and other speakers included Jyri Engestrom, founder of Jaiku (now at Google), Jeff Taylor from the carrier “3″, and UX expert Rachel Hinman from AdaptivePath. Moderator Dylan Tweney from Wired wrote a great summary of the panel and you can watch the whole discussion at the Mobilize site. (That link doesn’t take you directly there; click “Thinking Experientially” in the column on the right of that page.)
My advice to the audience? Remember that in mobile there are lots of factors that are both outside your control and unreliable: the connection, the device, how your service is delivered and provisioned. If you want to create a superb user experience, you need to control every part of the process as Apple and RIM try to do, or you need to have complete confidence that the parts that you do not control work very well – which is why so many application developers are concentrating on the iPhone.
Can a startup emulate Apple or RIM? Yes, especially if it focuses on simple, single-purpose devices. Think of the Flip camcorder – not wireless, but mobile – or the new Peek email device, or even the original Blackberry.
Another approach is to build software and services for carriers and handset manufacturers to help them improve the user experience on their devices. Aricent is a very successful Valley startup that built the Celltop interface for Alltel, and Ontela makes cameraphones much easier to use.
Skydeck has so far dodged the problem of how to build great applications for your phone by building applications for the web that complement your phone. (Don’t worry, we’ll get to the phone.)
What won’t work is building an application that has a gorgeous user interface, but that takes half an hour of work by a skilled technician to install on your user’s phone. Unfortunately, most mobile startups keep trying this approach.