mTrends - mobile media lifestyle trends - m-trends.org

After lengthy review by the panel of independent judges (including myself - see below), Marek just announced the short-lists for 2008 MEX Mobile User Experience Awards. The winners will be officially announced at a special evening reception in London on 27th May, the opening night of the 4th annual MEX conference.

Commercial category

- Taptu

- Zeemote

- Mobyko

- Vuzix

Freelance category

- Flat Music Player

- Cloudaware

- BSR Blind Phone

Professional category

- My Link Wireless Accessory

- Couple IT

- MoDist

Student category

- Context aware

- Pixie TV

- MyView

MEX Mobile User Experience Innovator of the Year

- Taptu

- BSR Blind Phone

- MyView

The judges:

Ken Blakeslee, Chairman, WebMobility Ventures

Steven Dotsch, Managing Director, WirelessMatch

Mike Grenville, Director, 160characters.org

Stuart O’Brien, Editor, Mobile Entertainment

Marek Pawlowski , Editorial Director, PMN

and myself.

One of my favorite conferences last year, the MEX Mobile User Experience Conference, has published its agenda for this years’ conference on May 27-28 in London. Check the agenda and speaker list for full details.

A special discount is offered to mTrends readers (check details at the bottom of this post).

The conference helps executives to gain a deeper understand of customer behaviour and translate that knowledge into better mobile products. The key objective is raising awareness of user experience issues as a strategic priority for everyone in the value chain, encouraging the mobile business to put consumer needs at the heart of the industry.

It is a very different style of conference. Each event is researched and developed by a team with a passion for mobile and unique insight drawn from years of industry experience. Corporate pitches are outlawed, everyone plays a role in setting the agenda and we go to extraordinary lengths to provide the highest standards of service.

This years’ conference programme is based around a 10 point Manifesto (download pdf here) for enhancing the mobile user experience. Each of the 10 Manifesto statements is addressed through a diverse range of presentations, panel discussions and collaborative breakout groups.

Topics include…

1. Content itself will be the interface of the future
2. Handsets are no longer just for the hand
3. Fragmentation is the enemy of innovation
4. Fashion is a stronger motivator than functionality
5. The developing world is the new frontier for mobile user experience
6. Search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment
7. Intelligent contact lists are the future centres of the user interface
8. Mobile payments herald the next generational shift
9. Users as individuals: uniquely complex and contradictory
10. The potential of smart voice

Some of the speakers include:

On the opening night there is also a reception to announce the Winners of the 2008 MEX Design Competition. Check it out, some really great stuff out there! If you design interfaces and have a compelling idea or product to delight customers and enhance the mobile user experience, you can still participate, the deadline for entries is 23:00 GMT, Friday, 2nd May 2008.

MEX is now less than 5 weeks away and, as with all previous MEX events, the organizers target to sell out well in advance on the conference date. If you’ve not yet reserved your place at the event, now is the time to do so - passes are selling out fast.

mTrends readers can get a 10% discount on a conference attendance pass (priced at GBP 1499). Go to the registration form and enter ‘MM24′ in the ‘partner code’ box on the registration form.

Hope to see you there!

This is one of a series of guest articles by Marek Pawlowski, Editorial Director at PMN and founder of the MEX conference, examining the key mobile user experience issues facing the telecoms industry in 2008. These themes are highlighted in PMN’s 2008 MEX Manifesto and will be at the heart of the agenda for the 4th annual MEX conference in London on 27th - 28th May 2008.

Mobile phones were traditionally designed with the comfort of the ear in mind. The original Motorola flips, the Nokia ‘banana phone’ and the numerous chunky ‘bricks’ of the 1990s were all built primarily around the need for a device which could be held to the face for extended periods of time. If we look at how the market has evolved today, the design requirements are very different because phones are as much about visual activites like texting, email, photos and web pages as they are about the traditional function of voice.

Consider the ratio of screen size verus the overall ‘face’ area of the device. Over time, displays have come to dominate the main interaction surface of the mobile phone. If you could track this ratio over the lifetime of the mobile industry, it would show a steadily increasing trend, starting with the single line ‘dot matrix’ displays of the 1980s and rising through to the massive screens of the iPhone, Prada phone, Viewty and HTC Touch.

The iPhone and its touchscreen have ushered in a boom for the UI design industry. Faced with Apple as a new competitor, rival handset manufacturers are recruiting UI experts as never before. Spurred in to action by the fear of being left behind, management teams throughout the device business are now mandating a selection of touchscreen products in their portfolio. iPhone sales volumes may still be less than a single digit percentage of the market, but there is no doubting the device has established a new design benchmark.

This sudden willingness to embrace the touchscreen is providing UI designers with more scope than ever before to create flexible interaction layers which adapt to provide the best interface method for individual applications.

What we are seeing is the digitisation of the man machine interaction (MMI) layer and the consequences will be profound.

The iPhone was the first device brave enough to implement the MMI entirely in software. In doing so, Apple prompted the industry to consider what could be achieved once it was freed from having to interact with every application through the same three or four hardware buttons.

The manufacturers with an established and consistent DNA for hardware-based MMI are now pondering how they can maintain the value of their existing investment in MMI consistency and still introduce new innovations with the same ‘wow’ factor as the Apple UI. It’s a very tough question and one that is currently keeping a huge number of UI designers and consultants in well paid work!

However, while UI teams around the world are getting to grips with this major strategic issue, I would like to sound two notes of warning.

Firstly, a funky new UI is never the answer to all your user experience problems - there’s no silver bullet. Any new UI or MMI innovations must be part of an overall commitment to user experience. This is the most fundamental principle of everything we do with our MEX research and consultancy work - it is also the main theme of our 2008 MEX conference and the MEX Design Competition.

User experience is not a set of technologies or a layer within the product design process: it is about having a customer-centred approach at the heart of everything you do, from marketing strategy to after-sales support.

You need only spend a couple of hours with the a device like the HTC Touch to recognise that, however attractive the top layer of the UI, the overall user experience will be fatally flawed if you don’t invest in the deep level of integration required to make a new interaction methodology really work.

Secondly, the priorities of interaction design are about to change again. Handsets will no longer just be for the hand (this is one of 10 key Manifesto statements for the 2008 MEX conference).

The mobile phone started as a device for the ear and has since become a device that is also for the eye. In both of these scenarios, the consistent factor is that the phone remains cradled in the palm of the hand - in 30 years of mobile handset design, this has been one of the few constants.

Finally, that is starting to change. Driven by applications like mapping, music, video and tele-conferencing, the handset is increasingly migrating from our palms and finding a new place in the environment around us.

We are starting to see phones attached to the car dashboard or pumping out music from the bookshelf of a teenager’s bedroom. They are being propped up on tables so kids can watch videos on holiday and plugged in to TVs to drive photo slideshows.

Over time, the average interaction distance between the users and their phones will increase significantly from the few centimetres we see today. Interaction designers can no longer take it for granted that the user will be holding the device in the their hand, with their face close to the screen.

This has big implications for the design of software, the choice of input method, the use of haptics and the role of accessories to extend the experience.

As an example, I have my Nokia N95 mounted on the dashboard of the car. It can provide GPS-enabled mapping, speakerphone and even play my music tracks through the car audio system. However, many of these features are simply too difficult to use unless I’m actually holding the device in my hand.

The keys are too small to press accurately while driving, so searching for an address in the mapping application is impossible unless you are parked. Similarly, I am unable to find the song I want in my music library or build a new playlist. The font size on-screen is also difficult to read at that distance. At night, when the dashboard of the car dims to make it easier to see the road, the handset continues to blaze at full brightness.

This is not meant to be a criticism of the N95 in particular, but rather an illustration of how the new capabilities of mobile phones are enabling out-of-hand applications while the user interaction model is still centred on in-hand scenarios.

There are all sorts of technologies emerging which could improve this experience. Voice recognition is getting better all the time (e.g. Nuance’s ’speak-to-search’ application). Nokia is implementing touchscreen support in Series 60, allowing for more flexible, adaptive UI design. Start-ups like Zeemote have even developed Bluetooth remote controls, allowing you to interact with your mobile phone at a distance (its initial focus is on handheld gaming).

Microvision, with a long-history in new display technologies, is one of several companies which has created a ‘pico’ projector using laser technology to beam videos and photos on to remote surfaces. Along with others, Microvision has also developed wearable glasses which display the screen as a tiny image in front of the eye which, because of its proximity, appears equivalent to a large home cinema screen.

For music, more and more handset manufacturers and third parties are offering speaker systems which turn mobile phones into compelling audio systems. One of the most attractive I’ve seen is the Bowers and Wilkins iPhone speaker dock designed by Native (Thomas Kleist, Director of UI Design at Native, is one of our speakers at the 2008 MEX Conference on 27th - 28th May in London). It transforms the iPhone from a personal media player into a room-filling audio experience that puts the mobile phone at the heart of the environment.

The industry faces a real and complex challenge over the next few years. On the one hand, device manufacturers must grapple with the immediate competitive implications of the iPhone and the growth in touchscreen devices. On the other, companies throughout the industry are seeking to expand the role of the phone into every area of our daily lives, including many scenarios where the handset will actually no longer be held in our hands.

We’ll be tackling these issues from several angles at MEX, the 4th annual PMN Mobile User Experience conference, in London on 27th - 28th May 2008. ‘Handsets are no longer just for the hand‘ is one of the 10 key statements on our MEX Manifesto and will be addressed by Steve Chambers, President of Mobile and Consumer Services at Nuance. He will give a presentation to provoke and inspire a series of breakout discussions, where 100 leading thinkers from across the mobile business will work together to explore a number of questions relating to this topic.

Thomas Kleist, Director of UI Design at Native, will speak on ‘Content itself is the new interface‘. Also addressing this topic will be Ocean Observations, before we open the session to a conference-wide debate.

Join the debate on our blog before the MEX conference opens

Can we further refine the standard twelve key monobloc design to give us greater flexibility to support these functions? How much flexibility do we have in software platforms to support these different usage methods? At what stage in the design process do we focus on particular user requirements and build them in to the hardware specification? Post your comments using the link below…

http://www.mobileuserexperience.com/ 

“Understanding Consumers and delivering exceptional customer service is just as important a part of the mobile experience as the latest technology and the size of the marketing budget, it can be a key differentiator for a business”… was a perfect kick-off quote in the presentation of Cliff Crosbie (see image left) at the MEX: the Mobile User Experience conference some weeks ago in London.

The report and all presentations of this unique and excellent conference are now available here (buy on-line for GBP 795). The report harnesses the combined knowledge of some 100 leading mobile executives who attended the MEX conference in May 2007. Delegates participated in a series of keynote presentations, panel discussions and breakout groups to define a response to the MEX manifesto. From this rich pool of creativity and exclusive research notes, Marek Pawlowski and his team have produced a detailed analysis of the industry’s approach to mobile user experience, a must have for anyone working in the mobile industry or for any internet, content or media company who has plans going mobile in the near future - if you haven’t, start asking yourself some questions

The report includes detailed info on each of the 10 topics covered:

• MEX Maps: graphical brainstorm of the conference’s response to the manifesto.
• Speaker’s response: written summary of the keynote presentation.
• Presentation slides: copy of the keynote slides.
• Discussion summary: written summary of the panel discussions and responses from the breakout groups.
• Research notes: thought-provoking articles and detailed research from PMN’s analysts.
• Stat Spot: selection of metrics relating to the manifesto topic.

For me personally, the conference was a really good experience, not only because of the zen environment the conference was held at (Wallaspace) but above all Marek and his team have done a great job in preparing this conference with a unique feel for detail and attention to create a good athmosphere, ideal to foster collaboration amongst the delegates - an exceptional mix of mobile telecoms industry people, design and other industry experts, startups, etc. A lot of interesting people with different ideas to share and open-minded to think about the challenges this industry is facing: to cope with a rapid and huge shift from ‘voice & text’ devices (mobile 1.0) to truly multimedia devices, soon always connected to the internet (mobile 2.0), to shift from walled gardens business models to open connectivity and services acces.

I’m not going to write down all my notes here from the conference, I enjoyed the interesting and thought provoking presentations from Cliff Crosbie (Nokia), Christian Lindholm, Antti Öhrling, Co-founder of Blyk, Mark Rolston (Frog Design) and the insiders view from Paul Nerger (Argogroup) and Al Russell (Vodafone).

The size of the conference also left enough room to meet and discuss with the other delegates, I met a lot of great new people! The idea of bringing all delegates together in smaller groups to discuss the manifesto and presented topics was a good idea too, this brought extra dynamics and conversations to the overall conference, an idea to continue exploring further in the future.

The 10 MEX Manifesto topics covered and the keynote speaker who inspired the discussions and research:

Download a sample of the MEX 2007 Report

This extract from the MEX 2007 report covers 1 of the 10 issues discussed in the full version: “Understanding the extent of the user experience, from retail environment to customer service.”

For more details and purchase, please contact Marek Pawlowski (marekpawlowski@pmn.co.uk or +44 7767 622957)
Here you can view my Flickr Set of the conference.

Next Wednesday and Thursday I’ll be attending the MEX: The PMN Mobile User Experience conference. MEX is a two day strategy forum for the leading minds in mobile telecoms. At the heart of the conference is the 10 point manifesto for enhancing the mobile user experience. This is a blueprint for delivering better mobile products through a deeper understanding of customer requirements. I’m looking forward to meet and discuss with some great minds in this often overlooked area of the mobile industry, thanks to Marek Pawlowski for setting up this event. Here’s some more info on the event:

“We’ve invited 10 of the industry’s most inspiring speakers to deliver 10 keynote presentations and provoke a series of breakout groups and panel discussions. They’ll address topics ranging from graphical interfaces and industrial design to mobile advertising and customer satisfaction.

Delegates work side-by-side with industry leaders in the unique Wallacespace environment to respond to the manifesto and set the user experience agenda for the mobile telecoms business. All the ideas shared at the conference will be summarised in the MEX 2007 report, a copy of which will be delivered to each delegate after the event.”

Some of the speakers include:

Cliff Crosbie, Global Director of Retail Marketing, Nokia

Al Russell, Head of Mobile Internet & Content Services, Vodafone

Christian Lindholm, User Experience Expert

Matthew Menz, Head of Interaction Design, Motorola

Antti Öhrling, Co-founder, Blyk

Bill Schwebel, Senior Vice President, AOL Wireless & President, Tegic Communications

Paul Nerger, Vice President, Worldwide Sales & Marketing, Argogroup

Markus Grupp, Director, Handset User Experience Design, TELUS

Hampus Jakobsson, Vice President of Marketing, TAT

Dr Nick Allott, CTO, OMTP

Herbert Vanhove, Vice President and General Manager, Qualcomm Internet Services & MediaFLO Technologies”

And a lot of other interesting people, do check the speaker’s list. I’m really looking forward to this one! Anyone who’d like to catch up with me while I’m in London, drop me a line. I will be sharing thoughts and impressions on the conference as ‘lively’ as I can