August 2009

The Agile 2009 conference closed with a fascinating talk by Jared Spool. He's an extremely entertaining speaker, but what made Spool's talk especially engaging was the topic: What kind of teams are good at design? Or, to put it another way, why are some people user experience artists, and others just hacks?

Inevitably, when you talk about user experience, you wind up talking about Apple, the company that has based its success on building products that people really want to use. However, Spool gave a very different version of the Apple story than the one we usually hear. The starting point was this video, the view from 1987 of how people would use computers in 2010:

We recently surveyed over 100 interactive marketers about their on-line measurement practices for my report "Committing to Meaningful Digital Metrics." I was intrigued to find that interactive marketers are not very confident in their ability to measure their on-line marketing. While traditional media is notoriously hard to measure, it has been around for a long time, so marketers are used to the metrics they have and essentially accept them. However, interactive marketing is still new, so while it seems very measure-able, few marketers have established reliable measurement techniques. In fact, even direct response marketers have major room for improvement. Here is how marketers rated themselves across three different types of interactive marketing measurement.

At the end of this year, Forrester expects mobile Internet penetration to reach 17% in Western Europe — the same adoption rate for the PC Internet a decade ago. At that time, mobile phone penetration was still below the 40% threshold and mobile shops were opening at every high-street corner. Companies were only starting to launch their web presence and to anticipate the impact of the Web. Operator-branded mobile Internet solutions would only launch 3 years after and 3G in 2003/2004.

10 years after, the mobile Internet is reaching critical mass and a virtuous mobile Internet cycle is kicking off. Consumers who have a flat-rate data bundle spend more and more time on the Internet from their mobile phones, brands begin to launch their mobile Web presence to monetize these growing audiences and engage with their customers via more relevant mobile content and services, which in turn attracts more and more consumers to unlimited mobile Internet tariffs.

The current economic climate will lengthen handset renewal cycles, foster the development of low-cost offerings, and boost the uptake of SIM-only contracts. Operators are likely to postpone major investments in new networks such as 4G / Long-Term Evolution, despite early trials and commercialization in the Nordics. However, it will only slightly reduce the pace of growth for those elements that stimulate mobile Internet usage: 3.5G and Internet-centric mobile phones as well as all-you-can-eat data plans will be widely available in the next five years. That's the reason why Forrester expects mobile Internet to grow to 39% by the end of 2014. That's a lower end point than for the PC Internet in 2004, but the growth curve per se looks quite the same.

Here’s a funny finding: The youngest members of the workforce aren’t the drivers of social technology use in business. How can this be? Haven’t we been told that the generation that made MySpace and Facebook popular would be the one that dragged stodgy, old companies kicking and screaming into a 21st century where corporate hierarchy is flattened through Web 2.0? Don’t companies need to adopt wikis and blogs in order to recruit and retain Gen Yers? Well, the early returns say the answer is, “no.”