In recent posts I have talked about the importance of understanding the user experience. The difference between understanding the experience versus a more conventional use-case-like view is deceptively subtle. For those, including myself, trained in thinking about use cases and functional requirements, then it can be very difficult indeed to figure out what user experience is all about. The fact that so few people understand it is underlined by the inescapable fact that the whole mobile-data enterprise has suffered interminably from pursuing so many dead ends, beginning with the WAP fiasco.

When I first talked about this problem many years ago, it was under the rubric of ‘whole product design,’ a topic brought to our attention by Moore in his influential book ‘Crossing the Chasm.’ By his standards, and pretty much everyone else’s, mobile data was clearly NOT a product at all. As discussed in the first edition of my book (’Next Generation Wireless Applications’ - page 50), the differences between a ‘mobile WAP experience’ and a ‘desktop PC browsing experience’ comprised a giant chasm that is still not to be crossed.

We insist on thinking in terms of ‘browsing,’ but is there such a thing in the mobile context? I don’t think so. A basic observation of the vast number of eye-scanning, skim-reading, link-hovering, link-clicking, page-jumping, coffee-sipping, chair-reclining, mouse-shuffling, Google-jumping activities that go on in an average desktop ‘web browsing’ session would demonstrate how nearly all of these activities are insufferably difficult on a mobile device in a mobile context - e.g. standing in the suffocatingly hot linkway between two carriages on the train leaving Paddington station.

I shan’t go on about this, but I remain utterly convinced that the experience that we know today as ‘web browsing’ will not be the ‘killer app’ for mobile data. That is not to say that the various increasingly better attempts to mimic the desktop experience won’t get better and won’t be important. We know that there is a void in many of our daily routines where killing time is the only thing to do. Mobiles can meet this need in various ways, which is probably why some form of Mobile TV will be successful (although there are many regional differences in the need for Mobile TV). Again, as was my favourite opening line in many workshops on the topic, ‘Mobile TV is not the same as TV on the mobile.’

I prefer to think of a very old device when it comes to mobiles, which is the humble compass. We still need compasses to find our way. This is what I think mobiles should do - literally and metaphorically. That’s why I got so excited about Michael Osborn’s (Times Newspapers) talk about achieving ‘flow’ as one his criteria for a good user experience. He wanted users effortlessly to find what they wanted click after click after click through his mobile portal - like page-turning I guess, which might be an old idea re-applied to mobile. It made me think of that old anecdote told by so many of the early digital explorers, which was the commuter reading a personalised newspaper.

What happened to that idea? Are we there yet? Not by a long way. It’s interesting to me for two reasons. Firstly, given that my mobile goes everywhere with me and is involved in my daily activities on various levels, it is amazing that it knows so little about me. Personalisation in general seems to have got no further than picking a colour scheme, if you’re lucky. In all the many years I was with Vodafone (my entire cellular life until iPhone came along) I don’t once recall being offered anything personalised, apart from my name overprinted on a paper coupon perhaps, or something like that.

As a side point, the under-utilisation of the computing resource in our mobiles is one of the great untapped areas of mobile. If I’m going to carry a tiny computer around with me all day, then it should at least do something useful in between vibrating and producing an RF aura every so often. It could at least talk to me.

The second reason that the ‘flow’ metaphor is so interesting to me is because I am an absolute fan of the CoverFlow part of iTunes and Mac OS X Leopard. And there it is, in all its beauty, in the touch interface of the iPhone. So why can’t I use it to ‘flow’ through information? Won’t The Times give me a personalised copy of their paper downloaded overnight into my iPhone? I just flick through all the pages, page after page after page. Now, that’s flow!

I might prefer not to have ANY links in those pages at all. For a mobile user, links are a distraction, not an asset. They interrupt flow, distract the reader and seldom add value to the immediate experience, which, after all, is part of ‘being in flow.’ (Think ‘Zen and the Art of Mobile Design.’) If I want to get ’side bars’ on pages, then I just pull the page up to read the ‘foot notes.’ This, after all, was the original hyperlinking model. Moreover, in the world of digital compasses, perhaps something else should be putting the links in my pages, not the originator of the page necessarily.

How all this works isn’t the point. There are plenty of clever UI possibilities to achieve ‘flow’ and ‘point the way,’ should we decide that this is what the mobile is all about. The point is to forget browsing (aka ‘desktop web browsing’) and think of something else. I doubt that browsing is a useful mobile experience. If we insist on this metaphor, then, to re-purpose my TV line, ‘mobile browsing is not the same as browsing on the mobile.’

User experience is, it seems to me, essentially about questioning and determining the best metaphors to describe the user experience. Returning to TV, whilst it seems obvious that TV is about ‘watching,’ it’s also about ‘catching up’ and ‘hopping’, both of which have very different realisations on a mobile device, if, indeed, they are still relevant.

With all the focus these days on open mobile platforms and other techno-widgets, all of which I thoroughly welcome and enjoy, it seems that we are just headed further and further along the path of technical-mimicry of the desktop and Web 2.0 world with all its metaphors. Is this really where we should be heading?