First and Last Impressions

First and Last Impressions

I was thinking of going to the cinema this evening, so I thought I’d check out what movies were through my operator portal. I was first greeted by an advert that took up three quarters of my screen but eventually was able to navigate to the entertainment section where normally you find the cinema listings. From here I would typically go to the listings supplied by a third party site, but today found that it are no longer listed there.

So I thought, fair enough, they must have another supplier, and I so I tried a few of the sites listed and found all of them simply listed entertainment gossip. Eventually, after a number of these sites and one ‘content not supported’ message to one of their listed sites, I finally (a total of 10 minutes, 2 disconnections and 400k downloaded later) gave up and tried the site I was looking for directly.

And then the operators wonder why uptake is slow? The operator portals are the first introduction that people have to the mobile Web. If such an introduction is as ham-fisted (and expensive) as the one I had to endure today then it’s more than likely that they will not bother trying to use it again in the future. It really is quite soul destroying to try to publish good content for mobiles when three quarters of your potential users will have already given up after such poor first experiences.

Knowing the operators as I do, there’s probably a PowerPoint presentation about this issue that was written by a committee or task force charged with looking at it, after which something (the presentation) was deemed to have been done about it and nothing’s been done since. Bah, Rant over.

Gaddo F Benedetti (gaddo at gaddo dot net)