RnaLabs

I’m not sure if all the WAP browsers on the mobile phone are going away overnight but the iPhone, with its Safari browser, has certainly showed everyone that mobile browsing need not be a compromise. The folks over at Mozilla have been working on a mobile version of Firefox for some time and the latest version looks like it’s progressing nicely. It’s an interesting take on a mobile browser with user-configurable spaces and touch-based slides in various directions that give the user access to common browser functionality. That last bit is an interesting approach to maximizing the real estate that’s pretty limited on a mobile. Also, I agree with the comment that typing on a traditional mobile number pad is “like trying to remove a contact lens with a cotton ball; it’s just not fun.”

I’ve heard that the browser on the Nokia N810/800 is a Mozilla version.  It works very nicely.  Can’t wait to try this new version of Firefox on other mobile devices.

The mobile is the new computer!

Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Our UI design for Monsoon Multimedia’s HAVA for the Nokia Internet Tablet was covered in the press this week at CTIA.   The HAVA Player lets you take your TV anywhere and access either your DVR, Cable, or Satellite boxes (Standard NTSC or HD channels) connected to a HAVA at home, via the Nokia Internet Tablet, as long as it is connected via WiFi or now WiMax via Sprint.

Since screen real estate is limited, the UI is divided into modes each giving the user access to a different set of virtual remote buttons.  There’s a channel flipping mode, a PVR mode, a set-top box mode and a favorites mode which gives the user 1-click access to their favorite channels.  The quality of the HAVA streaming video is quite amazing on the Nokia tablet and I love watching my TiVo shows while traveling, at the airport, a hotel, or drinking a latte.

Press coverage: Engadget, G4TV, Internet Tablet Talk, Tablet Blog

I still run into a few people that don’t think the iPhone is all that great of a user experience. Well, it looks like the hard data is telling a different story. It appears that iPhone owners are using the Internet many times more than their non-iPhone counterparts. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona Google revealed that there are 50 times more searches originating from the iPhone than any other mobile handset. This finding has also been reported by O2 who found that 60% of U.K. iPhone users are sending or receiving more than 25 MB of data a month.

From a user experience perspective, this is quite amazing. For years, many companies in the mobile arena have been building mobile hardware and mobile UI’s that they’ve deemed usable and now Apple comes along and is getting 50X the usage. Incredible! There was obviously room for improvement. I can see why Google originally thought the high iPhone usage was a mistake…

“We thought it was a mistake and made our engineers check the logs again,” Vic Gundotra, head of Google’s mobile operations told the Financial Times.

For US carriers, increasing the average revenue per user (ARPU) has been the new financial target as voice revenues are steady or decreasing. They need to find ways to make their mobile data services more attractive. Besides the obtuse pay-as-you-go vs. all-you-can-eat data pricing models, mobile users have had to deal with the walled-garden decks, poor hard-key usability, unclear soft-key button labels and maze-like navigational paths. It’s no wonder that users have stayed away from the mobile web. Personally, I’d rather use my laptop.

“The world is changing. Users want an internet without fences. They know how to type in
Google.com if they want to get to it. Two years ago the operators were still playing the role of
gatekeepers but that is no longer the role for them,” Mr Gundotra said.

It looks like ux does matter when it comes to mobile data services. Let’s see which approach everyone takes moving forward.  I hope the sequel is not going to be an “Attack of the iPhone Clones”.

Barry Schwartz, author of the book The Paradox of Choice, has some insight and research into how people make choices and filter the number of choices they have.

I’m interested in the ramifications of Barry’s book on information architecture and website design.
In a nutshell, the author asserts that we’ve always thought people should have more choices rather than fewer yet his research is saying there’s a point at which too many choices can be paralyzing.

From the Boxes and Arrows interview with Barry…

Barry Schwartz: In 50 years of research and psychology, there is study after study showing that people who are able to choose X were more satisfied than people who simply got X. But in all of those studies, the contrast was always with two options. And if two options are better than no choice, then three must be better than two, and four must be better than three, and so on. But no one ever studied that. The empirical basis for the idea is that the more choice people have, the better they are. And it seems perfectly reasonable.

What economist have said, more as a matter of theory than as a matter of empirical evidence, is that if you add options, you can’t make anyone any worse off. If you’re happy alternating between Cheerios and Rice Krispies, you can just keep doing that. And, if I add 50 other cereals, you’ll ignore them. And if I don’t like Cheerios and Rice Krispies, chances are that one of those 50 cereals that have been added will be just the ticket.

Adding options is bound to make somebody better off, and further, it won’t make anybody worse off. The more choice people have, the better they are. So how could it not be true?

It’s not true.

But it’s only in the last five years that people have started doing research where instead of having two options, people have 20 or 200. And when you cross a line (and you are probably going to ask me “where’s the line?” and I’m going to say, ”I don’t know; nobody knows”), choice goes from being beneficial to being paralyzing. So one effect of too many choices is that people can’t choose at all…

The consistent problem in all of this is that people don’t know what’s good for them. If you offer people a limited range of options and a large set, most people will choose the large set. They’ll go and try to pick something, and they’ll walk out empty handed shaking their heads. So everyone’s kind of swallowed the ideology that more is better than less.

Read the full interview on Boxes and Arrows >>
Watch the Google video of Barry’s talk at Google >>