TPile

The mobile industry offers enormous opportunity right now for entrepreneurs who can create excellent user experiences.

And doing that doesn’t require a degree in rocket science or access to high-end technology. Startups like Jaiku and Twitter have created huge communities of excited, engaged followers based on little more than SMS, an antiquated text-messaging system that limits users to 140 character per message and for which carriers charge usurious rates. The key? They focused on creating fun, easy-to-use tools that satisfy some human need.

That was the takeaway from a panel I moderated yesterday at GigaOm’s Mobilize, a one-day conference devoted to the mobile industry. The topic of the panel: "Thinking experientially: What creates good mobile user experience?" You can view the 35-minute panel via GigaOm’s online video archive. (The preceding link is supposed to point directly to my panel’s video, but you might need to click on the panel’s name in the "Archive" menu on the right anyway.)

I was especially happy to be moderating this panel because mobile user experience is a topic I’m passionate about. And that’s because, for most mobile devices and applications, the user experience is frankly terrible. Phones are hard to use, carriers are huge and impersonal behemoths that charge too much and limit what you can do, applications are too often disappointingly hard to use and buggy. And the mobile web? Don’t even get me started.

That’s why Apple’s iPhone stands out so starkly, and why it’s had an electrifying effect on the mobile industry:
It is the first handset designed from the ground up with user
experience in mind. As a result, it’s fun to use — even addictive –
and lends itself to become a true "tool for thought" in a way that no
mobile phone before it has ever done.

The question now is whether other products can replicate that kind of success.

I’m sure they can, provided that entrepreneurs and inventors take
the right approach. Such people could do worse than by taking this
panel’s advice as a starting point.

On the panel were several excellent commentators: Jason Devitt, the
CEO of a mobile startup called Skydeck (and veteran of early and
excellent mobile venture called Vindigo); Jyri Engestrom, the founder
of Jaiku (and now a Google employee, sincle Jaiku’s acquisition by the
search giant); Rachel Hinman, the mobile design strategist for
consultancy Adaptive Path; and Jeff Taylor, the marketing director for
the handsets group of Hutchinson Whampoa, a giant multinational that
apparently owns the Panama Canal, as well as a number of 3G phone
networks.

All of these four had terrific advice on creating good mobile user experience.

Hinman recommended that developers start not with features or
technical capabilities, but by focusing on human needs. The essence of
a good user experience is not a great UI or sexy hardware — it’s that
the product fulfills a need.

Engestrom advised people to build on what works, like SMS — even if
it’s not particularly sexy. He also suggested that entrepreneurs look
to other countries, like Finland, for ideas. For instance, people there
can pay parking tickets or write checks via SMS — why not here?

Devitt suggested audience members take a look at the Peek, the Flip, and the Kindle for examples of great mobile user experiences. These devices are simple, single-purpose tools that are fun and easy to use.

Taylor recommended location-tracking social network Loopt
as an example of great user experience, and talked about the ways his
company is rethinking  mobile devices — for instance, with a dedicated
Skype phone that lets people place calls via Skype using a 3G data
network.

But it was Hinman’s comment about the opportunities in the mobile
space right now that got me most excited. (Her comments are in the
video starting at about 23:30.) Hinman:

It’s a
really special and important and magical time in the mobile industry
right now, because opportunities are really opening up like they
weren’t before. The role of startups right now is to be inventive and
to be courageous, because you have the opportunity to define what
mobile experiences are for people, and that’s really powerful. It’s
much more difficult when you’re inside a Nokia or a Samsung or even a
carrier, because you can’t be as quick on your feet. … A lot of these
experiences for people are very broken, and in that is a lot of
opportunity to invent what mobile experiences should be for people.

Hearing that, I was about ready to jump out of my chair, ditch this journalism gig, and go build a mobile industry startup.

That feeling intensified later in the day when iPhone game developer
Steve Demeter told a panel of VCs that his Bejeweled knockoff had netted him $250,000 in the past few months.

There’s no doubt about it: The mobile industry is simmering with possibilities.

Photo: James P. Wells/Flickr

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