Great, great, article in Information Week on Google’s Mobile User Experience Strategy.
I am particularly fond of how they segmented their user base:
- “Repetitive now”
- “Bored now”
- “Urgent now”
Anyone designing mobile user experiences should spend 2 minutes reading this interview. It reminds me a lot of the work we did on Gateway’s Destination PC/TV convergence product in the mid-90s where we looked at lean-forward and lean-backward type activities.
I do think they are missing two very important aspects of mobile user experience design (or perhaps it just did not come up in the interview).The first is that mobile phones are very much modal devices that revolve around several axis. By and large, today’s PC is a view and keyboard device that is always connected to the web. Mobile phones are view, keyboard, hear, and speak devices that are intermittently connected to the web. Depending on the context, the user can be using any combination of those modalities and the next generation of killer user experiences, should know how to work in those environments.
The second is that mobile phones consumers are cost-sensitive. It looks like we will reach the tipping point of mobile data subscribers in 2008, at least in the US. But these are just subscribers who have some sort of data plan. Until the tipping point is reached for AYCE data plans, consumers will avoid services that leave hefty deposits on their monthly bill.
April 17, 2007 at 7:27 am
[...] rationalized subscribers into three models: repetitive now, bored now, and urgent now (see my previous post on this subject). In two of these models, the subscriber is in a highly focused task-oriented mode [...]
April 24, 2007 at 8:41 am
[...] back to a previous post on Google’s mobile user experience, one of the three behavior models was “urgent now” — this means getting to a [...]
May 3, 2007 at 10:50 am
[...] you recall Google’s mobile user experience model, two of the three modes are what (”urgent now” and “repetitive now”). [...]
June 25, 2007 at 8:11 am
[...] using a phone to accomplish a task (”Urgent Now” or “Repetitive Now”, as described by Google), the anything that gets between them and task completion becomes a pain [...]