I was recently in London presenting on Mobile UX and the importance of data. The conference organizers just edited and published the talk online (shameless self-promotion.) The Hospital Club space was cool – a film screening room with theater-style seats, bean bags chairs in the front row, and a huge screen to present off of. The lighting wasn’t ideal (as you can see in the video) but it slowly adjusts so you can see what’s on the screen.
Thanks again to the folks at UserZoom for putting on the event and inviting me to join them!
Starting on Black Friday two malls in the US – Promenade Temecula in Southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va. — will track guests’ movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones.
While the data that’s collected is anonymous, it can follow shoppers’ paths from store to store.
From a information standpoint this could be interesting, albeit with a lot of noise. User’s are tracked via a unique identifier on their phone. Although the use of the data is anonymous, there is the potential that this location information can be tied to your personal info – name and cell phone number for example.
The cell phone carriers like T-Mobile and ATT track tons of this information already, so this is nothing new (theirs goes pretty deep – they can tie your location, data usage, purchasing, credit card, etc. together – and they are trying to figure out how to monetize all of this.)
So the question is: is this just another step towards us losing all privacy online, or are we kidding ourselves that it ever actually existed? And is this moving beyond purely digital now that our motions in the real-world are being tracked?
Check out the GigaOM post for more details.
Great post on how specs are becoming more and more meaningless. I agree that this is particularly true for mobile (the point I was trying to make in my last post before seeing this article.)
Good stuff by MG Siegler: Death of the Spec
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
I’ve started to hear the term “Superphone” pop up from time to time, first last year at a company meeting and industry event, to the latest in one of today’s MediaPost articles (superphones)
Somehow the evolution of the smartphone – our beloved iPhones, Androids, and Windows Phone devices, among others – is becoming super-sized, and mobile industry analysts (and some folks that read them) are defining a new category. Supposedly once the smartphone begins to break the 4″ screen size and the 1GHz processor speed, it has become “super”.
Why? Has your phone become more capable? Will you start to use it more? Will it augment your thinking and multitasking in ways you’ve never dreamed of? What is special about this arbitrary barrier?
On mobile, bigger and faster isn’t always better. It is not a desktop computer. There are trade offs, most notably in battery life, weight, and overall usability. Some of the 4″+ Android devices I’ve tried die after about 6 hours of use, and some of these are difficult to fully use one-handed, making it hard to reach all parts of the screen with my thumb. And, as Apple has shown, tight integration of the hardware and software brings efficiencies in performance, making the processor specs less and less important.
“Superphone”? Seems unnecessary and arbitrary to me.
Nelson recently released their findings on how Americans seem to be using their tablets. Similar to mobile phones, the majority of people treat their tablet as a personal device that they aren’t particularly interested in sharing with others. The report also highlights that tablets are impacting use of desktop and laptop computers (which I can back up with many anecdotal examples from family and friends.)
All in all it looks like this new category of computing devices is here to stay.
Read more about it here.
Interesting, bite-size findings on smartphone user behavior, with implications for purchase consideration and decision-making. Some nuggets:
Nine out of ten smartphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.)
79% of smartphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, finding more product info to locating a retailer
74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase, whether online, in-store, or on their phones
70% use their smartphones while in the store, reflecting varied purchase paths that often begin online or on their phones and brings consumers to the store
74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping
88% of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day
http://googlemobileads.blogspot.com/2011/04/smartphone-user-study-shows-mobile.html
A big thanks again to our frends at the Design Commission for hooking us up with iPhone stencils for our recent School of Visual Concepts mobile design workshop. We had a great turnout and the attendees were super-excited when we handed the stencils out. (there is still space available for our March session if iterested.)
The stencils are made by UI Stencils and come in many flavors – iPhone, Android, iPad, etc. They also have some great sketchpads to do your concepting on. We find that they come in handy for putting together some quick mobile ideas to share with the Creative and Dev teams (and even clients.)
Very cool.
(cross-posted at ZAAZ Blogs)
I’ve had many people ask about the UX guidelines we refer to at work when creating mobile app and site experiences. Thought I’d put them together here. There are more extensive lists of guidelines out on the web, but these are the ones I find we have been referring to the most.
My colleague Nick pointed me to this in the context of usability testing (he is a UX research master – always thinking about testing.) Basically a way to collect physiological data on people using a simple webcam. Of course from a usability standpoint, it would be great to have something like this in our lab – I would love to be able to show a client when a participant’s heart rate and blood pressure rise because of a poor check-out experience or an off-target campaign.
http://player.vimeo.com/video/12192224
Cardiocam from Ming-Zher Poh on Vimeo.
I did notice that they had a mock up running on a mobile device – uses the forward-facing camera to sense your face and then display your vital signs. Combine this with calling/video and location and you have a pretty powerful way to remotely diagnose medical emergencies while help is sent. Wow.
Well, it finally happened – after many years of speculation on when AT&T’s exclusivity on the iPhone would end, Verizon announced yesterday that they would be carrying the iPhone 4 starting next month. There are some slight feature differences between the iPhone 4 on the two networks:
- Verizon’s iPhone will offer wifi hotspot functionality, to go with it’s solid wireless network and lower dropped call rate
- AT&T’s iPhone will still allow users to talk and surf simultaneously on a faster (i.e. data transfer) network.
But the big story here is not on feature differences. It is about how the iPhone reach will expand now that it is on the two biggest wireless networks in the U.S. And how Android will be impacted. To date, Android has been Verizon’s answer to the iPhone and they’ve sold a ton of Android devices on their network. But now that Verizon will carry the device they have competed against for the past few years, what will happen to Android’s market share here in the U.S.? I think we’ll see it dip a bit, but the fact that it is still carried on all four U.S. wireless networks (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) will keep it big.
I think Verizon’s plan to carry the iPhone will accelerate Android filling in the low-cost smartphone market. The iPhone is a premium product that the carriers pay large subsidies on, eating a lot of up front costs when a customer subscribes to an iPhone and voice/data plan. But Android devices, based on the free OS, cost much less for a carrier to offer and allows them to bring the price down into the sub-$100 range. Whereas as recent as last year the majority of phones sold in the U.S. were inexpensive “feature phones” that lacked many smartphone features such as large touchscreens and app downloading, moving forward we will see the smartphone filling that role, with Android (and perhaps other players such as Windows Phone and Blackberry) capturing much of the sub-$100 market and Apple filling the $100-$300 range. Apple will have competition for sure – Android, Windows Phone, HP (with WebOS) and others will fight for this territory too – but this will be the market that Apple will continue to dominate for the foreseeable future.
As with many consumer electronics products, there are magical psychological divides when someone purchases a phone: $0-$99 is a set range that many people will only spend in, whereas $100+ connotes more of a premium mobile experience. Soon that premium mobile experience will be the norm – a good smartphone can and will be had by all.
I was recently in London presenting on Mobile UX and the importance of data. The conference organizers just edited and published the talk online (shameless self-promotion.) The Hospital Club space was cool – a film screening room with theater-style seats, bean bags chairs in the front row, and a huge screen to present off of. The lighting wasn’t ideal (as you can see in the video) but it slowly adjusts so you can see what’s on the screen.
