MEX 2007: open and closed approaches to user experience

8 May 2007 by Rod McLaren

I’m going try post a more detailed set of notes on Mobile User Experience conference (MEX, 2-3 May 2007)’s sessions in the next few days, but here’s the summary. The conference was 100+ folk from across the mobile industry: operators, handset manufacturers, app developers, technologists, designers and erm, bloggers. No (or few) media or content people though. They seemed like very smart, very nice people, and I managed to make some unflattering drawings of some of them. MEX is very consumer-market focused, and whilst this is entirely understandable I’d like to see some discussion of enterprise mobility next year.

The conference was very well managed by PMN’s Marek Pawlowski, and its sessions took the format of talks (each a response to one of MEX’s manifesto points, pdf) followed by either panel discussions or by breakout-discussion and subsequent reporting back to the entire group. For the most part I enjoyed the breakout groups, but would say that fewer, longer breakout sessions – or mixing up the groups themselves – might have allowed us to get past some of the more superficial and unquestioningly techno-utopian points (and, in our case, might have allowed our leader, Fjord’s Mike Beeston, to work with a slightly less curmudgeonly group!).

So it was a good event.

Everyone present was interested in improved mobile user experience. However, one underlying theme that kept coming up for me was that the two points most frequently made on how to achieve improved mobile user experience appear to be incompatible with each other.

calls for greater openness

There was the usual discussion of openness, tearing down walled gardens and flat data tariffs, and obviously these are coming gradually. There’s a natural desire on the part of application developers for the operator to just get out of the way, and there are many appeals to the experience on the web (Twitter and Flickr getting namechecked, as ever). Similarly, that operators could reduce their iron grip on the handset UI and expose APIs to handset functions, encourage and allow mashups, “mobile web 2.0”, tags, and so on… The argument here is that when the ecosystem is sufficiently open, many amazing value-creating services will flower, and it’s an argument with some force. But this tends to ignore the equally natural desire on the part of mobile operators to resist being seen as mere “bit haulage” (as Jo Rabin put it) pipes and keep some of that created value for themselves. (It also ignores the fact that on the web too, the pipe providers – yeah, often the same companies as the mobile cos in these quad-play days – are also increasingly resistant to this, cf the net neutrality debate.)

the exemplars of great, simple user experience.

On the other hand, there were many appeals made to the great user experiences and it-just-works simplicity that have been achieved by the likes of Apple’s iPod and forthcoming iPhone, RIM’s BlackBerry, the Oyster card ticketing in London, Mercedes-Benz, DoCoMo, and others. The problem here is that these are organisations whose achievements tend to come from rigorous control, often end to end. Outside of the desktop Apple tends to be a closed shop, RIM makes it very easy to develop Java apps whilst seducing you down a BlackBerry-only path (and making you cross a financial barrier to deploy not letting you deploy unless you’re a RIM partner), and DoCoMo was described as enforcing a “commercial fascism” upon its partners. So here we were essentially rehashing the truism that it’s easier to design well when you’re single-minded or have a narrower focus.

Thus we seemed to be making simultaneous calls for both more open and more closed approach to mobile services. This is problematic.

One way to address this might be for a key player in the value chain to vertically integrate with respect to mobile activity, into say the underlying payments systems. This seems to be DoCoMo’s strategy: their arms-length, systemic control perhaps allows them to step back a bit at the granular application level, allowing content/application partners more local control (whilst DoCoMo still takes a cut from the content, the data pipe and the underlying financial transactions). But, as has been said many times, Japan isn’t the rest of the world. I don’t claim to have the answers here, but am continuing to think about it.

Ultimately, we have to acknowledge that the politics are hard for a reason, that mashups aren’t a silver bullet, and that if we want more openness the price may be a shifting, messy world of user experience, sometimes of poorer quality.

1. Well said… there needs to be a single vision of what makes good User Experience, keep it simple, focus on what the user will do most, make it fun ie ‘usable & fast’.. this sought of approach does need control.

   
   — James Calvert    15 May 2007, 23:27    #

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Mobile User Experience conference, 2-3 May 2007 Carnival of the Mobilists #73 at Xellular Identity