Archive for February, 2008
This week the Washington Post celebrated the watershed of 3.3 billion mobile phones active on a planet of 6.6 billion people. In retrospect it seems unremarkable (a no-brainer, as Mo Ibrahim puts it) that mobile phones have penetrated the developing world as rapidly as they have, possibly outstripping the impact of computers (mobile networks are now being used to support computer-based internet access in areas where there is no conventional computer link to the net).
Over the past four or five years Nokia has been carrying out research to understand consumers’ needs in these important emerging markets. Some of this research (carried out in shanty towns in Mumbai, Rio and Accra) was reported by Younghee Jung at the 2008 Lift conference. Recognising the limits of observational research in communities with which the researchers lack familiarity and where language is a barrier, Nokia augmented standard observational techniques with competitions for local people to express what they wanted their phones to do for them. It’s good to see innovative research approaches and this particular idea seems to have generated a rich response from community members.
Most of the research participants’ ideas had a strong practical orientation. The request for genuinely rugged phones that survive local conditions over a number of years struck a chord with me: I have heard similar from people working in manual trades in the UK (they also want a volume level that makes callers’ voices audible against the background noise of a building site).
Another idea that came out of the competition was a single phone that could hold up to four SIM cards, allowing the user to get the best out of a range of tariffs without swapping SIMs manually or carrying multiple phones. How sensible is that. It would be welcomed in the UK, too, particularly by 16-24s, many of whom juggle SIMs and handsets in order to get the most out of their mobile phone spend. A Google search reveals there is at least one phone (apparently aimed at business users) that can accept two SIMS, plus an N95 clone that can take three SIMs, and some third party hacks to bring two SIMs into one phone.
Handset manufacturers and operators haven’t exactly jumped at this opportunity so far. Operators are hardly likely to want to share customers with their competitors. They gain from people’s inefficient use of their tariffs (not using their full allowance or running over allowances and paying for additional use at a premium). This inefficiency might be reduced by easy swapping between SIMs and tariffs. And multi-SIM handsets would disrupt the prevailing model in the mobile industry: give the phone, sell the tariff (in his Wired article, ‘Freeconomics’, Chris Anderson has tracked this type of cross-subsidy back to Gillette’s tactic of giving away free razors to create a market for disposable blades).
I wonder whether Nokia are responding to the multiple SIM idea. No doubt they are constantly reviewing the relationship between phone handset and operator, and how their technology might develop to meet changes ahead. Disruptive companies like Blyk, where any unlocked, MMS-capable handset can be used to receive the service, are already signalling the possibility of change in the traditional relationship (advertising sponsors phone use, rather than phone use sponsoring the cost of the handset).
I’ve focused on this particular research snippet because it shows how users can come up with design ideas that have the potential for disruption. It’s common for people to claim that user research never generates any ideas that haven’t been thought of by industry already. In this case, the research hasn’t come up with anything that’s brand, spanking new, but it has shown an idea in a context where it has real meaning and where there is, surely, potential for development. The milestone of 3.3 billion phones has been achieved with restrictive handset/operator conventions (played out to an extreme in the launch of iPhone with just a single operator in each country). It will be interesting to see whether the traditional relationships will continue to hold into the future.
February 29th, 2008
Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.
In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by “interface.” (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into “Original” and “New with XYZ.” In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the “features.”
Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??
Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.
We all know that youth talk about certain products as “sooo last year.” This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is “so middle school” and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption “10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.”
Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to “personalize” your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?
I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.
If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.
Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me - you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.
Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.
February 23rd, 2008
When operators came up with the idea of topup accounts - or pay-as-you-go, as they say in all the right places, we all jumped in total euphoria and exclaimed “Whoopie-Doo!”. What we really meant was: “Here is a cool way for me to run around with three mobile accounts, therefore piling up the free-texts, and living the life of almost zero mobile costs”. The downside was to mess about with three different mobile numbers, sim cards, chargers and so forth. Why, oh why is it always so hard to save a penny or two? Happy- hour at the pub, Orange-Wednesday at the cinema, two-for-one and all the rest of it.
Why do we feel that this top-up business is not for us anymore?
Quite simply, because this type of account pricing was invented in 1999, when we were thirteen, and nowadays, we are all in our early twenties, and some of us in our first job. What we want is better tariffs at affordable prices, not pricing schemes that make us feel all weird at the newstand, as if we had just moved into the UK from a far away country where the telephone lines are still analogue and we have to pay with coins at the telephone booths. Not now, that we feel pretty good about ourselves, we can finally kick about getting paid - though minimally - by our first employer, and the opposite sex talks to us in a bar because we are interesting, if not coolly chilled and with good vibes. Just when being young is what makes us all super-special…. Society should reward us better for that, isn’t it?
Blyk got that, and hence worked up a way to match the economic need of this generation with some real sense of self-respect. Just because I get minimal salary because I am young, does not mean I need to go through the “top up the SIM card” process at a kiosk.
I’m not trying to be cheap here. I’m not trying to dodge the system. I just want to feel that being a student or a first-time jobber does not kill my mojo when I hit the streets and I run out of credit on my phone and have to run into a shop to keep my life connected…
Are you with me?
February 19th, 2008
Yesterday, Microsoft announced that it is buying Danger, the maker of the Sidekick. The Sidekick is an interesting phenomenon in the United States. The phone itself is only available through T-Mobile and it is barely available outside of the U.S. Although talking on the phone is like putting a piece of toast up to your ear, it is one of the best devices for inputting text. Its qwerty keyboard, flip-top screen, and easy interface makes it the ideal device for sending text messages an IMs. While getting a data plan for the iPhone or Crackberry can be quite costly, the $30/month data plan includes infinite web, IM, email, and text messaging use. Unlike plans for other phones, Sidekick users do not need to have a voice plan to activate the data plan.
The Sidekick’s user base is rather unique and quite passionate about the device. For a while, the Sidekick was THE device for hip-hop stars and celebrities. Paris Hilton’s use of the device became well-documented after someone managed to socially hack their way into her data. The device appeared in all sorts of music videos, without prior consent from the company behind it. While it’s hard to know whether the egg or the chicken came first, the Sidekick became extremely popular amongst urban youth in the United States. (While youth are the most visible users of the SK, deaf and hard-of-hearing users are also passionate about the Sidekick, particularly because it supports IP-Relay and i711 services which allow deaf users to make phone calls using an operator as a go-between.)
When I interviewed urban teens about social media, I consistently heard about the Sidekick. Some teens told me how they learned to IM through the Sidekick; others told me how the Sidekick was their first non-school device for accessing the Internet. Amongst certain circles, those who didn’t have one wanted one because it was seen as the “cool” thing. It was a guaranteed way to communicate with friends no matter where you were, no matter how badly you had gone over your minutes. As Shean (17, LA) explained: “When you have your Sidekick, you can text message so fast – and it has AIM. And everybody has AIM. And all my friends have Sidekicks so it’s like the new network for kids or teenagers and people, like, everyone wants a Sidekick because it’s easier, rather than just getting on the phone to call people.”
I started using the Sidekick in 2003. When the iPhone came out, I thought about switching… but then I tried typing on it and found myself completely frustrated. Many of the teens who were addicted to the Sidekick felt the same way I did - the iPhone sure was pretty, but it wasn’t as useful as the Sidekick. Given Microsoft’s tiff with Apple, there’s no doubt that this is part of the appeal.
There are certainly problems with the Sidekick. Danger’s relationship with T-Mobile has been a complete disaster for the product. T-Mobile won’t let users upload their own programs to the device, making it a non-generative technology even though the APIs for the OS are available. T-Mobile has refused to launch new versions until years after they’re finished, meaning that the device is always outdated at launch. The web capabilities are dreadful and many of the applications need a breath of fresh air.
All that said, I can’t help but scratch my head at Microsoft’s acquisition. Most of the original Sidekick team had long since left Danger for Google. (They are the folks behind Google Android.) The Sidekick doesn’t really need an operating system; Danger’s OS is hands-down the simplest phone interface on the market. (Personally, I dread the idea of Microsoft inserting their wonky mobile OS into the device; this will be the end of my personal SK use.) Danger is completely hogtied to T-Mobile making it impossible for the phone to be used on other carriers.
I respect that Microsoft wants to get into the mobile space, but what does this acquisition mean for the passionate youth userbase? Will Microsoft manage to break this deal or are they going to continue to let T-Mobile dictate the terms of what goes on the phone? Will Microsoft force the carriers to allow people to develop for the SK? Will Microsoft implement their UI on this device or learn from what Danger did right? Will Microsoft help launch the SK outside of the U.S.? Will Microsoft work to get the SK in the hands of youth outside of urban settings? Or will Microsoft buy it and squash it?
I still can’t make sense of this acquisition. Anyone have better insights into what’s going on?
February 13th, 2008
CBS Mobile have announced the first US trial of location-based advertising to mobiles, in partnership with Loopt, the friend tracking and networking site. The service will be opt-in and the ads will arrive at CBS web sites on subscribers’ phones. Having worked on ‘future concepts’ of this kind some years ago (with the luxury of not having to join up the underlying technology, nor worry about the protection of individuals’ privacy) it will be interesting to see the service develop. (In fact the concept I worked on was peer-to-peer, rather than advertiser-to-consumer: a sort of location based Gumtree, where individuals could advertise rooms to let, yoga classes, lost cats etc. And I’m sure such a mobile service will emerge sooner or later.)
I wonder how many people will opt in to the CBS Mobile service and, once in, will use their web sites often enough to get the benefits of the advertising. It will, of course, depend on what the deal is and whether the content is enticing. With the delivery format as described, it’s likely to be a service people with conventional cell phones use when they have some down-time ‘let’s see if there’s anything interesting near here’ rather than always on. How many times would you go through the process of accessing a web site and finding nothing relevant to you before you stopped altogether? Still it’s early days and I’m sure this is nothing CBS Mobile and Loopt haven’t thought of.
If the location-based element is combined with personal profiling the service could be powerful, e.g. just as I’m going into a bookshop to buy a birthday present for someone, I’m notified that there’s a sale on all SciFi (having previously listed SciFi in a profile of my reading). Anecdotally it seems there might be broadly two sorts of response to this kind of prompt: some would welcome it (just as they welcome Amazon recommendations ‘those who bought this, also bought…’); and some would dislike the intrusion (and probably wouldn’t sign up to the service anyway). In any case, the combination of location and personalisation might be too ‘micro-personalised’ for advertisers who may want to prompt more serendipitous buying. And (although it’s hard to tell from the available information) that sort of personalisation may not be possible with the current CBS Mobile plan, where advertising is to be delivered anonymously.
Now that mobile advertising is up and running in several different implementations it will take some time before effective delivery formats bed down i.e. until users vote with their feet about what is acceptable and what isn’t. And my suspicion is that it might be quicker on mobiles than on traditional internet (i.e. via computers), where many companies continue to use advertising practices that frustrate users (despite the admonishments of usability guru, Jacob Nielsen). With mobile phones, however, there’s less space and, in most, less processing power to play with, plus a sensitivity to cost that is largely absent from computer use. Indeed the whole context for use differs dramatically from the computer. So people’s acceptance of formats that don’t suit their actual use of the phone may be limited.
So much of acceptance depends on the right implementation for the device being used and the context of use, as a quote from John Strand, attending this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, highlights
“One thing is to come out with an announcement. The next is to deliver. At the end of the day, the user decides who is the winner and who is the loser. The winner is the one who can give the best experience.”
Thanks to Richard Linington for pointing out the CBS Mobile/Loopt announcement.
February 12th, 2008
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