Mobile User Experience conference, 2-3 May 2007

30 April 2007 by Rod McLaren

I’m at the PMN Mobile User Experience conference in London this week, Weds 2 – Thurs 3 May. The agenda has each speaker responding to one of the 10 points on the MEX manifesto (pdf), followed by either panel discussions of breakout sessions/group debate. Looks like a good format, and I hope we will be bathed in wifi.

I’m particularly interested in the mobile user experience around and outside of the device and its software. Cliff Crosbie’s keynote looks like it will address some of this from a consumer point of view: the marketing, retail, unboxing, customer service, repair experiences and so on.

Being close to your consumers is the number one priority to ensure you fill their needs in the best way. You do this through great experiences delivered by passionate, well trained teams of people. A phone is no longer just a phone and educating consumers in what’s now possible and available to them is the key to moving the whole industry forward. I will address how we are looking at taking the whole consumer experience of buying a mobile device to a new level.

What’s the equivalent experience in enterprise and public sector? In our experience, new technology rollouts often become the tangible expression (and sometimes battleground) of the mismatches of alignment, politics and personal aims of management and employees, of business and IT. I’ll be writing more about this topic generally in the next few weeks, and from MEX specifically in the next couple of days.

BlackBerry outage and announcements MEX 2007: open and closed approaches to user experience