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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

Mark Vanderbeeken makes a good point in his Where to study experience design? at - always excellent - Putting people first blog:

Experience design has become a hot industry theme. Companies are looking to hire experience designers. New consultancies devoted to experience design are being founded nearly every day. Major industry players like Apple, Microsoft, Nokia and Philips are increasingly putting the user experience or experience design at the heart of their innovation strategy. And experience design is now also making inroads into other fields such as education, healthcare and tourism, to just name a few.

But where can you study it?

The short answer is that you can’t really study experience design.

Read his post and act if you know about some experience design study directions or schools.

Now that mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they increasingly have internet access, isn’t it time to think about “mobile experience design study” directions too, or at least start to include them in the existing programmes?

Last week I have been working on a project with Kelly Goto from gotomedia. Kelly has been at the forefront of web and online usability for 16 years. Kelly and I both share the same vision:

While the wireless market has largely been dependent on the experimentation of the youth culture (especially in Asia) and the early adopter, the next wave of mobile success is dependent on creating sustainable brands, products and services that offer real value in the migration process to mobile.

Mobile usability design and user experience research and testing will be an essential key in helping defining successful mobile business applications and services for companies. The next coming years, any serious business needs to be easy accessible globally through diverse mobile devices and different network technologies.

The success of mobile products lies in the fact they need to be simple to use, they need to work and they need to have a clearly identified added value for the end user. This looks simple ‘on screen’ to write down but mobile professionals know how difficult this is; just look how many mobile products & services fail due to not respecting one of the above reasons…

Until now the mobile usability design space has been merely used by mobile value chain players but the convergence of 3G/UMTS/WiFi networks in combination with the availability of hybrid phones will open a different kind of mobile market space to content providers. The arrival of MVNO’s introduces a new era in mobile. More initiatives are to be expected coming from existing and/or new internet services moving in the mobile market space.

The mobile industry gathered around theW3C’s Mobile Web Initiative is busy working to develop a set of technical best practices and associated materials in support of development of Web sites that provide an appropriate user experience on mobile devices and that is needed.

In order to start a new dialog around web usability and discussions towards mobile, Kelly has launched the gotomobile blog, that will focus on mobile usability, mobile user experience (mUXP) and convergence.

In a recent article on mUXP - mobile user experience, she writes:

“Wireless companies and developers are typically put in the position of either chasing developing trends or taking the costly risk of launching new products and services that may never catch on. How can mobile designers, developers and content providers create effective mobile user experiences with the speed and accuracy required to succeed in the market?”"The answer lies in adopting mUXP, a user-centered approach to mobile authoring that focuses as much on the needs of specific consumer lifestyles as on technical considerations. The purpose of this blog is to provide an overview of both the cultural and technological trends shaping the wireless market from a usability and user centered point-of-view, and to outline best practices for incorporating these factors into the development and deployment of mobile products and services.”

I am encouraging this initiative - and will help guest-writing the blog, because we are talking for more then 5 years about the mobile internet but, personally, still I haven’s seen too many webs, applications or services correctly working on a mobile phone. A lot of work needs to be done still so I think more focused information and disseminating knowledge in this area is valuable for the mobile industry, no doubt about that. What about you?

TAGS: gotomobile gotomedia muxp mobile user experience mobile usability mobile usability design participitary design user-centered design interaction design ethnographics design research mobile web mobile internet contextual research mobile trends mobile life m-trends.org mtrends