The answer is unclear, but it’s probably more important on mobile. With the agility of a desktop, we can more easily search for what we’re looking for. Not so on the mobile. There’s no denying that mobile is about economy. Users simply aren’t going to spend too much time clicking (unless it’s to play a game).

With a mobile, users don’t - or won’t - spend too much time “surfing” around. They will use search as a shortcut, just like many of us do with Google - we simply type in the name of the company or product we’re looking for in order to speed up getting there, not to amble around in search results. Hence we use search in mobile to speed things up, such as entering the song name for a ring tone. Hopefully it comes up number one in the results, though not always. In my own non-scientific tests of various mobile portals, I have often found the search to be inefficient, even with apparently exact search strings. Often the latest hot content is missing from the search engine altogether, even though it’s probably available somewhere on the portal. The reasons are to do with catalogue update frequency and how (badly) some search engines are set up.

What about using personalisation for recommendations? Well, you probably already use Amazon and perhaps iTunes. How often do the recommended or featured products take your fancy? It’s a very inexact process when it comes to cross-selling. Sure, if I bought CSI Miami Season 3, then I probably want Season 4. That’s a no-brainer. But do I want Miami Vice?

Again, with mobile, economy is important. If the content is there ready to try and use, within a few clicks, then users might buy it. Make them root around for it and they might give up. Killing time is still the killer app for mobile data, so a user will typically be quite nonchalant towards content viewing and consumption. Mobile surfing or “doodling” (doing something without thinking) is more like channel hopping on the TV, all about effortless clicking without any real motivation to get somewhere in particular. That’s why exploiting the short-head (is that the opposite of long tail?) can still work, especially if it’s pre-loaded on the phone using an on-device portal. It’s also one reason that Mobile TV is going to work and probably be the number one service outside voice+text. It’s also why channel-zapping time needs to be short and there are all kinds of clever system tricks to speed it up for both unicast and multi/broadcast systems. Channel zapping is essential to the experience.

Pre-loading content on mobiles is important and should be exploited more. There are all kinds of neat tricks to do this. With increased convergence and the use of new access modes like femtocells, caching data at the edges of the network and pre-emptive loading can be used intelligently to improve the user experience and drive content consumption.