Somewhere between counting the firings of neurons and calculating profit and loss statements is a useful set of boundaries that define what to consider in a design process, and it’s not just making things easy to use. Usability does not equate to user experience. The specific boundaries vary with each product, audience and situation. I have found the following to be a decent working guideline: The user experience consists of all of the factors that influence the relationship between the end user and an organization, especially when a product mediates that relationship. The key part of this definition, for me, is the relationship of the organization to the product. To me, the user experience is incomplete without a consideration of the organization that created the experience. The end result is the intersection of an organization’s goals and that organization’s understanding of users’ goals, and it’s the designer and researcher’s role to mediate a compromise between these. This means, more simply, that you must look inward and understand why you’re making something at the same time you look outward to understand what people want from it.

From Mike Kuniavsky

The W3C published a set of best practices on how to improve the User Experience of mobile web content. That is a relevant approach, since the mobile web content at the moment has a very varied quality especially from the usability and the accessibility point of view.

Users seem to be happy (and sometimes surprised) about being able to access any site from their mobiles, mostly because they are used to more limited access though a portal provided by their operators. But in the long run, this ‘happiness’ or ‘being surprised’ is not enough - when the mobile web is accessed by masses, the user experience of the content needs to be improved and more uniform.

(Via S60 Blog.)

Telecom Asia “With more advanced services rolling out across the planet, ease-of-use is becoming crucial to their success, but today’s user interfaces aren’t quite cutting it. Solving that will be a complex task, but the place to start is the users - not just by asking them what they want in future, but what they’re doing with their handsets now

As the mobile industry moves toward more advanced non-voice services, from MMS and instant messaging to mobile TV and video calls, the underlying mantra for manufacturers, operators and apps developers alike has been a strikingly contradictory one: offer simple, easy-to-use services using mind-bogglingly complex technology. That means shielding the user from all that state-of-the-art wizardry behind the scenes, and making any new service appear as though it’s so simple even your Luddite great-uncle could figure it out - ideally without once having to consult a manual.”

A November 2005 study of 6,800 consumers in Europe and Asia from mobile device management company SmartTrust declared that users trying to keep up with the latest features and services were suffering from “mobile service fatigue.” Report author and SmartTrust comms manager Tim De Luca-Smith said that poor handset configuration and network settings were contributing heavily to slow take-up of services like MMS.

Half Of All Gadgets Returned To Stores Actually Work: “More and more, Americans are being caught in a dilemma: They love electronic gadgets with lots of bells and whistles. But they’re also frustrated when they get their new toys home and find out they aren’t easy to install or operate. Half the products returned to stores are in good working order, but customers can’t figure out how they work, says a recent study conducted at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands. On average, American consumers will try for just 20 minutes to get a new gadget to work before giving up, the study adds.”

(Via Gizmodo.)