Description: Mobile phones offer a slew of features these days. But how many of us are actually using them? Peter Baldwin of MSX lays out the problems with mobile user interfaces and proposes how designers - not engineers -- should approach the "phonetop" and streamline the technology.
Hello. My name is Peter Baldwin. I'm the CEO of MSX. What I'd like to talk to you about is making phones easy to use. I'm sure most of you have a camera or music or games capability on your phone, but how many of you are actually using it?
But don't worry, there's over one billion mobile subscribers in the world that have the same problems as you. Unfortunately, this is only going to get worse. There are innovative technologies like TV, which will allow you to watch TV on your phone or WiFi for doing voice over IP free phone calls. That's only going to make it even more complex. Let's look at some examples of these pain points.
For example, buying a game, what you'd have to do as a user, you'd have to go into the browser, you would have to find a particular page, you'd have to locate the game that you're looking for. Then you would have to fill in your details, accept the download. Then you go into the Java application-you'd have to find Java. You'd have to then look at, from a list of games that are there, select it and then play it. That's over 25 key presses just to buy a game.
Another example is sending a photo to a friend. So, taking the photo is the easy part but then what you do with it, you have to then go to the contacts, find the person. You actually have to select the method for sending that photo. Then you have to choose to send it. So that's about 30 key presses. So no wonder the photos are staying on the phone, and not being sent to friends.
Media companies are advertising driven and they see the mobile phone as a third screen. So TV, web, phone. However, on a phone to consume an advertisement you have to go into the Java, find an application, run it or go into the browser and it can take up to five minutes to see an advertisement. So, ads will not equal dollars with the current way of operations.
So there's an obvious problem with the mobile industry and they should learn from the consumer electronics world where you design functionally focused devices that work out of the box. So, one area that phone manufacturers can benefit from is the phone top. So where you make your phone call, have that where you actually play music, have advertisements or data services driven to the phone top.
So the phone top is where you're going to have the compelling experiences and really use these mobile data services. But you really need to enable designers, not engineers, and we need to as an industry, need to enable those designers to create the experiences, to make mobile phones easy to use.
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