This is the presentation I have at the ExperienceCamp09 in Milan.
Tha main objective of the presentations is to explain which are the difficulties we need to deal with when thinking about mobile user experience at the operator level.
Huge number of mobiles, market speed, and flexibility of the vendors are some of the elements we need to cope with on a day by day basis.
2. This document represents personal opinions on the
subject, and it is not recommended or endorsed by
the Company I work for.
This is not a representation of past, present, or
future strategy of my Company.
All the information and data in this document are in
the public domain.
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My name is Alessandro Galetto and I am Head of Product Development at 3, a mobile telecommunications operator in Italy.
My job is to look after Industrial Design, User Experience, User Interface, Graphical User Interface and Marketing Requirements for all of the mobile phones in our portfolio.
Let’s start by explaining why we are talking about big numbers.
H3G has UMTS operations in 9 countries in the world.
Each single country has its own requirements in terms of portfolio composition, user interface and user experience. Most of the times these requirements are driven by market peculiarity and cultural elements that need to be take in consideration while talking of User Experience at a global level.
As of today we have 20,7 millions customers (Source HWL 2008 Annual Report)
Each of our customer is a unique and we need to keep in mind that we need to design for them.
This is a very high level representation of the architecture of a mobile phone.
When we think about User Experience we need to think about each single element of this architecture in order to deliver to the customer the best experience ever.
I usually refer to this as the “gift box experience”.
We have very clear ideas of what a good user experience is but we need to cope with a variety of different form factors.
Candybars, Sliders, Clamshell, Touch Screen, etc.
This basically means that every single time a new form factor or technology comes to the market we need to rethink our approach and check if what we have already designed in the past is still good with the new technology.
The same concept sees in the slide before applies Operating Systems.
Different Operating System will force you to different directions while thinking about User Experience.
It is quite clear that from when Apple launched the 2G iPhone the rule of the game have changed.
New hardware, new operating system and, most important, new approach to User Interface and User Experience.
Since the launch each single mobile phone manufacturer has tried to follow the stream of the iPhone, therefore introducing new hardware, new OSs, new applications that we need to understand in order to adapt our concept to the new architectures.
Mobile phone manufacturers flexibility.
You may have designed the best User Experience ever but you need a flexible mobile phone manufacturer in order to implement in on real devices.
Each single vendor in the market has different degrees of flexibility and each of them os proud of the user experience they designed.
User Experience designers have to deal with technical limitations.
The early they understand limitations the better. On the other side engineering must understand the reasons of the user experience designers.
The market is fast.
There are cultural difference that you need to understand and react to.