Back to Basics: Why the Mobile Experience Needs to

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Martin Migoya

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Back to Basics: Why the Mobile Experience Needs to be Simplified

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Yesterday, while I was trying to show my kid a song on my mobile device, I realized that every day it’s becoming more difficult to find what we are looking for in our smartphones or tablets. We can do whatever we want on those devices, but the effort and “friction” it takes to get where we want, keeps increasing just as the amount of apps available increases.

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Take, for instance, the moment you go out running of course if you choose to.You may want to track your exercise while listening to music. In order to do that, you can use a tracking app with your GPS and a streaming app to hear music. Think about the moment you want to open your phone to see how long have you been running. Think about the friction you get to unlock the phone, toggle between the apps, if the app with the focus was not the app you wanted, go back and forth between both of them, to finally get the result you want.

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It’s just like walking down the most populated commercial street. All the important stores are there, but they are filled with people, so the buying experience is not a good one. You can’t find available fitting rooms, you can’t find clothes in your size and so on. This feeling of saturation is what I’m starting to get when I use a mobile device. I know I can do anything there, but it’s getting harder to do even the simplest thing like calling someone.

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The concept of a single-device is attractive, but realistically not everything will happen in a single and universal device. Today, we have a smartphone, a laptop computer and even a tablet, as different venues to do your day to day things. Practically everything that can be done in one device is available on the other. However, if we want to answer a long email, we will choose to use the computer. If we want to read a book, we will go for the ipad. And maybe we will use the smartphone when we want to send a whatsup message.We naturally choose a device for the task we want to perform thinking about how it adapts to the specific real life situation.

 

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140627011736-1368707-mobile-and-wearable-devices-2-evolutions-to-reduce-friction?trk

7/2/2014

Back to Basics: Why the Mobile Experience Needs to be Simplified | LinkedIn

So how will the industry evolve to cover these needs and reduce the friction? Mobile phones and tablets will continue to grow, but I foresee two evolutions happening to reduce that friction: 1) On one hand, it is becoming more likely that new and specific hardware devices (we can call them “wearable” devices or the “things” on the ”internet of things”) will surge, specialized in specific functions. We are starting to see some companies align with this new paradigm. Think about devices like the Amazon’s Dash, which allows you to recognize a product and directly add it to your shopping cart, or some bracelets with specific sensors (like the nike fuel band, or the fitbit) that let you see how much “fuel” you burn when you run. All these functions could be performed in a smartphone, but by offering less friction and specific functionality, people will choose to use them instead of keep on crowding the smartphone with new apps. Industry will work the path to de-saturate them by taking certain activities to other venues. From smart watches and glasses, to smart clothes and books. These new “venues” will be the leading actors of new experiences with technologies. 2) On another hand, the Industry will need to work on new features for the mobile operating systems that can minimize friction. Today, everything on the mobiles phones are apps, each one with their own look and feel. With this current model, apps tend to pile up and get lost, like a very messy desktop filled with papers. The new features should be capable of understanding what the user wants to do without friction. If the user wants to use the GPS, call a relative, send a message or listen to music, the device should be able to recognize it in a proactive way, and become more centered on the users than on the apps. It would be interesting to see how these evolves to reduce friction on our devices. At the end of the day, users deserve to get it right. Photo: LDprod / Shutterstock

 

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