Persuasive Mobile Design and User Experience

I went to an interesting mobile event this week called "Mobile Persuasion" all about mobile user experience and design.  It was hosted by City University and Human Factors International. 

"Persusasion, Emotion, and Trust are the design rage, but how are they applied to mobile user interfaces?"

I really enjoyed this event as it really pushed into some of the hardcore user-experience areas of mobile rather than the normal general/ business/ market type discussions.  When you think about it web 2.0 was largely driven by design/ user experience (e.g. ajax, big buttons, large text etc etc) and mobile 2.0 is probably going to be the same - lots here to think about...

I also saw someone in front of me with FOUR phones out on the table - two phones is becoming quite normal now (work, personal or blackberry/ normal phone) but i've not seen anyone carrying around four handsets before... (btw he was using three of them all throughout the talk so not just for show!)

Here are my notes:

Bryan Rieger, Co-Founder & Creative Director, Yiibu

Bryan is a designer and developer working in mobile at Yiibu.  Great talk with amazing, beautiful slides - really enjoyed it. 

- mobiles lack long-term pull as a product compared to something like cars where people really identify with them

- most phones now have a fairly standard form factor, but consistency, simplicity and usability can become predictable, limited and boring

- example - music phones have storage, let you buy music, small headphones doesn't necessarily fit with different types of music lovers - too general, ho-hum, impersonal

- need to inspire - hard to do this with just a feature set

- Nokia 5800 music phone comes with a plectrum/ stylus - hmm interesting but have they taken this far enough e.g. just another type of stylus could be much more

- looking back the Nokia 7600 was different but pointless innovation

 

- gimmicks not enough, need to surprise and delight every day - "the long wow" e.g. going back to cars for a BMW lover it might the way the gearstick moves

Control- balance between too much and do little - too often mobiles ask "are you sure you want to do this, or do that"

Language - needs to be polite, honest, attentive, forgiving, clear, coherent

Craftsmanship - push beyond acceptance criterior and usability requirements

Can we make mobiles that really last? Something you would use long afterwards? Need to think about sustainability issues in all this. 

Some great points/ questions followed:

- example of a guy in the Mumbai terrorist attacks who died because he didn't know how to put his phone on silent and was discovered by the terrorists - how can we expose functionality like this?

- agree it is hard to sell on features, guy in audience who worked on Vodafone Simply phone (designed for old people) - it failed - impossible to sell it effectively through operator retail channels

Priya Prakash, Head of Product, Flirtomatic

Flirtomatic is a mobile dating/ flirting site and they are absolute pioneers in virtually every area of mobile at the moment, including design and user experience.  Priya is a really incredible speaker and really engaged the audience - fantastic stuff and loads of learnings. 

- timing and context is key, not just features and functions

- Flirtomatic always have a call to action, participation in their landing pages, ads etc

- interesting that people are now starting to request ways of finding iphone apps as there are now so many on the app store

- mobile apps really lack shop-fronts, distribution, everyone is struggling, its a real barrier to entry (interesting point for me as we are trying to do something about this with mjelly.com in terms of helping to improve mobile search and discovery for mobile sites and apps)

- every time Flirtomatic create a new feature they try and tap into existing behaviors or amplify them

- its hard to send a text on a phone you don't know well let alone enter a URL - lot of work to do!

The Flirtomatic Funnel [invented by Flirtomatic CEO Mark Curtis)

- Marketing to Registration to Active User to Payment

- at each point Flirtomatic have a clal to action, at each point they try and flatten the barriers

- Marketing - we need new mobile ad formats! Flirtomatic use calls to action like "Flirt for free" or "Start Flirting"

- Registration - no email address required, automatically detect phone number

- Active User - act of registration helps user to find people or start chatting or message someone

- Payment - selling value added services, virtual goods (Flirtomatic are really pioneering this in amazing ways)

Principle 1: Help people do things

- turn emotional goals into actionaable statements, help people do things

- e.g. Flirtbomb (sends flirts to multiple people on Flirtomatic) - three step rocess quick, automated chat up lines helps male flirters to get going on the service

- action brings reach - e.g. facebook newsfeed - action brings a reaction, which creates another reaction and so on

Principle 2. The action Pallet

- keep consistent, regognisable and minimal navigation/ trigger design (e.g. send flirt, send gift etc) on all pages

Principle 3. Easy Sampling

- most dating sites registration process is boring, too much commitment - like filling in a tax return!

- Flirtomatic make it easy, act of searching for someone on the service registers the user

Princple 4 Make benefits socially meaningful to user context

- brand is cheeky, naughty, funny

- use seasonal virtual goods e.g. valentines, summer, Feb 29th etc

Principle 5 - Monitor Usage

- Flirtomatic constantly looking at data on things like new user logins, conversion rates, activity across the site etc

- basically they use quantitative data to manage and optimize the service 

mjelly directory links

Flirtomatic on mjelly (PC)

Flirtomatic on mjelly (mobile)

Kath Straub, Ph.D., Chief Scientist of Human Factors International

Kath was also a brilliant speaker and approached the questions around persuasive design from a slightly different perspective focusing on barriers to usage and adoption.  Another great talk:

- what is stopping people today from using mobile services ? (by demographic)

- "My handset can play the fole of connector, concierge, corach and court jester" ... "but not all for the same person. Yet"

- cost a bigger problem in UK than US, (lack of flat rate data plans), also Canadians using twitter DMs as way of texting as their SMS costs are so high there

- Older and middle aged market is a big opportunity for mobile

- Example of a bank using mobile as part of the security process for online banking - clever move as helps to get people using the device for banking

- consistency across platforms - similar design for ATM, online, mobile

- device moving into the background - it's all about applications

- new text display formats have potential for mobile e.g. different spacing etc to help people read more easily

- don't design for platforms, design for life!

All in all a great event, thanks to the hosts and speakers!

Tom Hume has also written up the event here http://www.tomhume.org/2009/01/mobile-persuasion-city-university.html

Comments

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[Personal Concierge]

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