As a heavy data-using Vodafone customer of over 6 years with an average monthly bill around the £100 mark, imagine my surprise when my recent upgrade renewed my voice contract but dropped my data contract. And my even greater surprise on calling customer support at being offered a month’s free data usage so I could “try it out”.
Surely, as long as mobile operator’s continue to regard data as an exotic bolt-on, mainstream consumers are going to regard it in the same way.
Yet the Internet is actually at the hub of most consumers’ desktop experience and is certainly not an exotic bolt-on. Why then does my mobile phone company, which has invested billions in infrastructure, completely fail to realise that Internet access on my mobile phone should be a natural extension of my desktop Internet user experience?
By setting artificial boundaries around a particular segment of the Internet and dubbing it ‘Mobile Internet’, or ‘WAP’, or ‘Vodafone Live’, or any other one of dozens of marketing monikers, has the industry not artificially limited its own diversity of offerings? Isn’t it time to climb down off its high horse and come clean – we can access the Internet via a hand-held terminal – big deal! Price it sensibly, and the services, the content and the consumers will come naturally, driving organic growth in the process.
Unquestionably, the market for on-line data services is well established, but ridiculous barriers still exist to any content or service provider interested in extending its reach out to mobile users. The most obvious of these are the technical barriers raised by ad-hoc and proprietary platform and infrastructure implementations, as well as the fragmentation arising from competition within a nervous and volatile market.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The technical barriers are slowly lowering, whilst at the same time, friendly desktop faces such as Google and Yahoo are gently luring the tech-curious into experimental Internet access on their mobiles.
Clearly, selling consumers on the concept of using the Internet on their mobiles can be accelerated by aligning the mobile user experience more closely with the desktop one, in particular, by providing consumers with cross-platform content and services that are both useful and familiar. This is the basic foundation on which we have implemented RubberSquid.
RubberSquid neither started on the desktop and went mobile, nor vice versa. We built RubberSquid’s desktop and mobile “views” (we prefer that concept to “versions”) concurrently from the ground up, and in fact, we have a third , which is the set-top box view. Although mobile is key to our business model, it is vital that those customers who need it have the opportunity to become familiar with RubberSquid in their most comfortable environment, the desktop, and can migrate to mobile when they are ready.
Our experience has shown that delivering continuity of user experience across different platforms without resorting to a ‘lowest common denominator’ implementation has helped us to attract and retain users. But not without challenges on the way; challenges posed, ironically, by the very mobile industry ecosystem that so many of us increasingly rely on.
User Experience: Is the Mobile Industry Its Own Worst Enemy?
June 3, 2008As a heavy data-using Vodafone customer of over 6 years with an average monthly bill around the £100 mark, imagine my surprise when my recent upgrade renewed my voice contract but dropped my data contract. And my even greater surprise on calling customer support at being offered a month’s free data usage so I could “try it out”.
Surely, as long as mobile operator’s continue to regard data as an exotic bolt-on, mainstream consumers are going to regard it in the same way.
Yet the Internet is actually at the hub of most consumers’ desktop experience and is certainly not an exotic bolt-on. Why then does my mobile phone company, which has invested billions in infrastructure, completely fail to realise that Internet access on my mobile phone should be a natural extension of my desktop Internet user experience?
By setting artificial boundaries around a particular segment of the Internet and dubbing it ‘Mobile Internet’, or ‘WAP’, or ‘Vodafone Live’, or any other one of dozens of marketing monikers, has the industry not artificially limited its own diversity of offerings? Isn’t it time to climb down off its high horse and come clean – we can access the Internet via a hand-held terminal – big deal! Price it sensibly, and the services, the content and the consumers will come naturally, driving organic growth in the process.
Unquestionably, the market for on-line data services is well established, but ridiculous barriers still exist to any content or service provider interested in extending its reach out to mobile users. The most obvious of these are the technical barriers raised by ad-hoc and proprietary platform and infrastructure implementations, as well as the fragmentation arising from competition within a nervous and volatile market.
But there is light at the end of the tunnel. The technical barriers are slowly lowering, whilst at the same time, friendly desktop faces such as Google and Yahoo are gently luring the tech-curious into experimental Internet access on their mobiles.
Clearly, selling consumers on the concept of using the Internet on their mobiles can be accelerated by aligning the mobile user experience more closely with the desktop one, in particular, by providing consumers with cross-platform content and services that are both useful and familiar. This is the basic foundation on which we have implemented RubberSquid.
RubberSquid neither started on the desktop and went mobile, nor vice versa. We built RubberSquid’s desktop and mobile “views” (we prefer that concept to “versions”) concurrently from the ground up, and in fact, we have a third , which is the set-top box view. Although mobile is key to our business model, it is vital that those customers who need it have the opportunity to become familiar with RubberSquid in their most comfortable environment, the desktop, and can migrate to mobile when they are ready.
Our experience has shown that delivering continuity of user experience across different platforms without resorting to a ‘lowest common denominator’ implementation has helped us to attract and retain users. But not without challenges on the way; challenges posed, ironically, by the very mobile industry ecosystem that so many of us increasingly rely on.