"The 'Mobile First' User Experience" Talk at Web 2.0 Expo April 2, 2009

The "Mobile First" User Experience
Location: 2001

Abstract:

The number of mobile users are growing at an exponential rate, with a plethora of new mobile devices, mobile Internet services and powerful user interfaces vying for consumer attention and adoption. The mobile web is not just about accessing the Internet from your phone; it’s a revolutionary technology and communication platform transforming our experience of the Web, the world, and ourselves. Mobile devices are a highly personal extension of the individual, and have unique sociological and technological attributes – they are location aware, temporally situated, and socially connected.

In the highly fragmented mobile space, it is increasingly important to offer consumers an elegant and satisfying user experience and mobile services that are intuitive, yet stunning and feature-rich. However, if we look at the broader mobile industry – how do companies and individual developers create scale by reaching users with the same products with the same user interfaces that run across hundreds of different types of devices, operating systems and carrier networks? As the mobile Internet experience evolves, it’s not about simply porting the PC experience to a smaller screen – the user experience and the user interface demand that the industry create ‘mobile-first’ products – services that harness the unique strengths and attributes of the mobile device while negating the limitations of size, memory, speed and processing power.

As the importance of mobile development increases, developers will need to deliver indispensable mobile user experiences through increased focus on building contextually relevant content, leveraging the mobile environment and allowing consumers the ability to choose and customize their content and experiences.

‘Open’ mobile experiences are another key element to take into account when designing user experiences. While open applications are a powerful element of the mobile experience and allow consumers access to services tailored to their needs, they present an interesting challenge to incorporate into designing user interfaces – how to create open systems that ensure 3rd party services render and operate effectively, efficiently and harness the UE they are created for? If there are design flaws within the application, and/or the way the consumer navigates to their 3rd party content, the user experience is spoiled.

Ultimately, design and user experience revolves around personalization and customization. Those who are able to develop innovations to that end will find success in meeting the expectations of mobile users, and shaping how they interact with their mobile devices when on the go. This session will discuss the current and future user experiences on mobile, and how to design experiences that run across multiple mobile platforms and address some of the problems the mobile industry will have to overcome.

Speaker Bio:

Marc Davis is Chief Scientist of Yahoo! Connected Life and Vice President of Early Stage Products. His work focuses on creating the technology and applications that will enable the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers. His research encompasses the theory, design, and development of sociotechnical systems that leverage contextual metadata and the power of community to enable people around the world to produce, describe, share, and remix media, and to connect to each other in new ways. As Chief Scientist for Connected Life and Director of ESP (Early Stage Products), Marc and his team invent and help realize the future of mobile, social, media, monetization, and platforms. From 2002 to 2006, Marc Davis served as Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information where he directed Garage Cinema Research and co-founded the UC Berkeley Center for New Media. In 2005, Marc Davis worked with Yahoo! Inc. and UC Berkeley to create Yahoo! Research Berkeley where he served as Founding Director. At Garage Cinema Research and Yahoo! Research Berkeley, Marc Davis and his teams developed and deployed pioneering prototypes for context-aware mobile media tagging, sharing, and browsing, and technologies for video capture, tagging, and remixing. In 2006, Marc Davis joined Yahoo! to bring his vision of social media and mobile media to billions of people around the world. Marc Davis earned his B.A. in the College of Letters at Wesleyan University, his M.A. in Literary Theory and Philosophy at the University of Konstanz in Germany, and his Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory.