Mobile Internet User Experience

Having Internet access on mobile devices is about the freedom to utilize Internet anywhere, anytime. The more our daily lives are interlinked with the Internet, the more important it is to have Internet access whenever you need it. So far, the user experience has not been good enough to encourage the masses to start using the Internet on mobile devices.

To many people today, it seems absurd to use the Internet on our limited mobile devices. The Internet is not so important that one cannot wait to get to a PC, right? It is too laborious and expensive anyway. All this sounds very much like the critique in the early days of mobile phones. It was asked why would one not wait to get to a landline phone? Why pay so much more for mobile phone calls? Why carry a brick with you and learn a new way to dial a number? But what happened? Phone calls were so valuable for people that today almost everyone in the developed world owns a mobile phone. Thinking about the scope of the Internet, compared to phone calls, the importance will be even greater. It is inevitable that the Internet goes mobile. We just have to ensure the user experience is good enough for the mass audience.

I use the term user experience, because it refers to the overall feeling a person has about using the Internet on a mobile phone. Although the actual value should come from the content and information available on the Internet, there are many potential pitfalls in the Mobile Internet system that might ruin the user experience. If the connection is slow, pages will not load quickly enough. If the device does not support easy text entry, login may bee too laborious and people will not bother to use sites that require login. All the components in the Mobile Internet system need to work reliably so that the user experience is good enough for the broad audience.

So, what are the components that affect the Mobile Internet user experience? On a technical level, there are zillions of components. From the user’s perspective, the list is simpler. According to our user studies around the world, the following aspects will determine if people can happily access the Internet on mobile devices [1].

• User
• Context
• Device
• Internet SW
• Connection
• Service

As user experience is a subjective feeling that the user has, it is not only the Mobile Internet system that affects user experience, but also, for example, the physical and mental resources the user has at the moment. User experience always takes place within a context, which includes the physical, temporal, and social circumstances. For example, if you want to update your Facebook status while running to an airplane with a big bag, the user experience will be very different from doing the same while killing time on a sofa.

On the system side, users need to have a good device with good software that enables Internet access on the mobile device. The connection, with possible gateway transformations, needs to be not only fast and reliable, but also inexpensive. The actual Internet service, be it a site or a database, needs to be valuable for users in mobile contexts.

All different players in the Mobile Internet system benefit from working together towards a better Mobile Internet user experience. This is why Nokia (disclaimer: I work for Nokia) not only provides the device and the Web browser, but works together with connection providers and promotes dotMobi to get more mobile-friendly Web sites. However, no one of us has the luxury to assume a single perfect solution from the other players, so we need to keep in mind the vast variety of others’ solutions while building our own solutions. This is why Nokia devices work on so many different wireless networks, and provide a Web browser that is able to show both dotMobi compliant sites as well as full Web sites.

Most of the readers are probably most familiar with Internet service development, and face the problems of the vast variety of different devices, browsers, connections, and gateway transformations. It is refreshing, however, to think about a simple case of a person in a mobile context accessing your service. What would be the thing that delights her/him? What would be an ideal Mobile Internet system to enable that delight in a best possible way?

If you are interested to think innovatively along (or against!) the lines above, or provide a solution that impoves the Mobile Internet user experience, you are welcome to share your thoughts in Mobile Internet User Experience workshop in Amsterdam in September! It is a workshop in conjunction with MobileHCI conference, and we hope to gather an experienced group of 15-25 people from academia and industry to discuss this exciting and still immature field. To get in, please send your views and/or solutions in a short “position paper” by May 5th, 2008. More info: http://wiki.research.nokia.com/index.php/MIUX08. It will be fun!

References

[1] Roto, V.: Web Browsing on Mobile Phones - Characteristics of User Experience. Doctoral dissertation, Helsinki University of Technology. (2006)