Right tools for the right task

More stats have come through showing use of the web from the iPhone. It looks pretty solid: Google traffic from US iPhones (2% of the market) is about level with traffic from Symbian operated phones (63% of the market). Even if you factor in that iPhone users might be particularly inclined to access the web or that iPhone is still a novelty there is, as John Naughton points out, a lesson here. In a different context Quentin Stafford-Fraser comments ‘pixels are like broadband. Once you have them you don’t want to give them up’. And what iPhone demonstrates is that when pixels are limited applications need substantial design effort, right from user interface through to underlying processing, if they are to produce a good user experience. Without that design effort we might accept fewer pixels in exchange for mobility, but we may also limit the tasks we do on the move, saving the more demanding ones for a large display, possibly more processing power, efficient input device and the environmental comfort that a desktop or laptop computer is likely to bring.

Is this just a fogey’s view of the world? I have seen teens make these ‘horses for courses’ choices too, with the significant dimension of cost also putting them off accessing the internet from their phones. Last week on Digital Youth Research’s blog danah told the story of a teenager buying a dress, and using a suite of digital tools to help her make the best purchase. While possibly at the more extreme end of consumer decision-making the story reflected a trend of digital trying-before-buying. And the teenager’s choice of tools all made sense: a digital camera to take pictures of herself in a range of potential dresses (probably better lens than her phone camera and more memory for multiple images, also saving her phone battery for text and talk); Facebook on her computer to circulate pictures (ease of selecting pictures to send on her computer, larger images for her friends to view, and way, way cheaper to exchange images and get feedback via Facebook than MMS) and, similarly, computer to research her decision and find the best possible price (‘free’, fast, usable interface and lots of visual bandwidth). Her choices were made effortlessly as part of the flow of using digital technologies. Why should she have compromised her project at critical points by sacrificing pixels, or processing power, or comfort (the current corollaries of ‘fixed’ computing)?

When iPhone was launched in the UK a journalist asked my opinion on whether mobile phones would now become an important medium for creating and sharing marketing presentations in business – to be fair, this angle probably wasn’t his choice. Yes, one can see contexts where mobile presentations could add to the mix of business communications but, also, no, a key role for marketing presentations is for shared exchanges between presenter and audience, ideally in the same place (video-conferencing sometimes bridges gaps, but isn’t most people’s first option). It’s hard to see how a presentation delivered to a mobile phone could have the same impact as a shared exchange (will I regret saying this?); it might support or augment a traditional communication, but wouldn’t seem to be the medium of choice.

The iPhone web data open up the horizons for mobile browsing. But let’s not extrapolate from this to ‘everything mobile’. We connect through physical as well as virtual space (and weren’t Nintendo clever to recognise this). The things we do have cognitive, emotional and social components that can’t all be supported by hand-held devices. A friend recently described his iPhone as ‘THE best device I’ve ever owned.’ I’ve no doubt about that. But just as digital communication has not yet made us paperless, so the larger scale and (relatively) fixed technologies have their role which will be augmented, rather than completely supplanted, by mobile connectivity.

Entry Filed under: Understanding users