John Rhodes over at Apogee has published a very interesting article on the how information that is mobile is the new future of usability.

A mobile phone is a complex mix of hardware and software. Mobile phones are finally coming out of the primordial soup. Small, light, powerful tools usually beat big, heavy, slow tools. To put it another way, your mobile phone is getting to be as powerful as, if not more important than your desktop or laptop computer. That means more people having more problems for more reasons. The future of usability is mobile.

Technology is extremely mobile but information is now more mobile too. The future of usability isn’t just mobile technology but the increased mobility of information. In years past, information moved more slowly than it does now. It was also narrower, more refined, and more controlled. Simply compare the distribution of news 20 years ago via TV, radio and newspapers compared with the internet, satellite radio, and email. The difference in information mobility is over the top.

link to full article >>

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”.