Dayspring Technologies

Three Things

At a Java developers’ conference a couple years ago, I remember hearing a keynote where Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, talked about the three things that a person always has when they leave the house: their keys, their wallet and their mobile phone. The point is that mobile phones have become a critical item which people always have on their person. Those three things (and not much else) are definitely on my list of what I leave the house with.

My question is: when will those three things become a single thing? That is, when will our keys, mobile phone and wallet be replaced by a single smart device? I think that future is not actually too far off. South Korea, with the highest broadband adoption in the world, is a good example of where things might be heading. When I visited a few years ago, in some of their fancier apartment highrises, entry into your flat was already keyless. At that time, it was not connected to access via your mobile phone, but that doesn’t seem like a great leap. A text message code or some encrypted software key sent to the security system–and we’re there. We already have keyless entry to cars and Toyota Priuses have push button starters. We’re not that far off from getting rid of our keychains. (OK, we’re probably a ways off from completely getting rid of our keychains, but we’re not that far off from getting rid of a bunch of keys…)

Reducing Interaction Friction

I think, however, that one of the biggest issues that will need to be solved in the move to replace wallet and keys with the smart device is reducing the friction of using our mobile devices. While reducing friction is always important in promoting usability, on the mobile platform more than anywhere else, friction has a critical impact on the degree to which a user is willing to engage in using your site or application.

What do I mean by friction? Each extra click, unnecessary page view, thumbwheel spin required because important information is not onscreen at the moment—each of those adds to the friction of a user’s interaction with an application. And on a mobile phone a little extra friction can mean the difference between an application that gets used and one that gathers dust.

For example, anybody who has used a touch-screen mobile phone knows that typing on it—even with all of the smart error correction technology you can employ—is still an enormously unsatisfying experience. A touch typist used to typing 80 words per minute could find themselves tearing their hair out trying to type an address or a series of numbers on a touchscreen keyboard.

I had that experience recently on the Google Android phone that a Dayspring developer picked up at the Google I/O conference—a clever marketing ploy to promote their Android mobile operating system (which is a competitor to the iPhone, BlackBerries and the Palm Pre) to the 4,000 developers in attendance. And probably the most audacious conference schwag I’ve seen. But I digress. Typing on the touchscreen was incredibly frustrating. I imagine that I could have gotten better over time, but not enough to want to do any serious composing on it. That’s for sure. Flipping the phone to landscape mode can help, but it will still be painful.

I wanted to see if this experience was just limited to Android touchscreens so I had an admittedly unscientific competition with a colleague to execute a search on Google. He searched on his iPhone and I searched on my smartphone, which has a miniscule (but nevertheless physical) keyboard. I ended up taking only half the time to execute the search. He had the same problems with mis-hitting keys that I did on the Android phone even though he’s had his iPhone for over a year. And I guarantee you that on my desktop I could have executed the search in less than half of my mobile personal best…

New Solutions for Mobile

So, a better route is to come up with new solutions for mobile format. For mobile web sites, the best strategy is not to take your existing site and just make it the mobile version. Even if you only care about access on the iPhone’s full Safari browser. Better to make an optimized site for the mobile experience and solve some of the user’s problems before they have them. And in the e-commerce area, companies are working on reducing the friction for making mobile-based payments (see NY Times article). Instead of taking our normal e-commerce paradigms (of filling out a form with our credit card number, for instance), they’re striking agreements with carriers and tying authorizations to phone numbers, for instance. When you try to make a purchase, a text message is sent to your phone. You reply with an authorization and the charge then appears on your phone bill.

There’s still clearly a lot of work to be done, but the mobile platform is going to require unique solutions in order to really move it forward.

Tags: android, cellphone, iphone

This entry was posted by Chi-Ming on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 5:10 pm and is filed under E-Commerce, Mobile, Usability, User-Centered Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.