A classic dinner party conversation in the life of a We Love Mobile acolyte.

“So, what do you do for a living?”

“I work for an advertising agency.”

“What type?”

“Mobile phones.”

(at this point the conversation goes one of two ways)

1. “Oh really! Well, I have had my phone for (insert shortish time period here) and I still can’t work out how to (insert relatively simple phone task here). Can you help?”

2. “Well I don’t know. Why are phones so complex these days? All I want to do is call and send texts. All these other features just get in the way (rant continues for half an hour).

Route 1 is annoying but acceptable, especially if the other person is older and has clearly suffered at the hands of the dreaded ‘Network Customer Services’.”

Then there is usually a giveaway pained expression of righteous indignation that has been beaten to a pulp by repeated contact with indifferent ineptitude. Helping is the least you can do. It’s like helping an elderly lady to change a tire on the motorway.

Route 2 however, is far more common these days. People no longer seem to get annoyed at the speed at which they learn a new device. Instead now they just rail at the fact that their phone has become a mini computer, with thousands of features that they do not need, want or care about.

This to me is the biggest single consumer trend in mobile. People are lusting after the old days of a totally useable Nokia S30 more and more, and this can be seen by the cost of second hand Nokia 6310i’s on eBay.

Isn’t it weird that this isn’t really being picked up by any of the networks?

That’s not totally true of course. Voda did a good job with the Simple Phone, despite the pig ugly product design, and according to Scott Weiss the retention rate on those is fantastic. However other networks seemed to have missed the boat here. User experience is all about fulfilling the users needs, and there is
a large group of users who don’t need to listen to My Chemical Romance while playing Doom, BlueJacking everybody in sight, IMing everyone else and checking their stocks on the mInternet.

Like my mum, for example.

So where are the devices for this market? Well I have heard argue that the lower end Nokia S40’s do the job, but there is clearly a disconnect between the retailer and the brand, as when I go into a phone shop (as I often do) I can never get them to offer me one without them sneering at it.

Maybe hope lies in companies like Tattu, the low volume niche phone design outfit in the UK that produced the fun Disney device, and many others. Or maybe it will take a bold move by an MVNO (Tesco?) to take up the simple banner, and give the market what it craves.

Tags: bluejacking, complicated, design, mobile phone, mvno, Nokia, Nokia 6310i, scott weiss, series 30, simple, simple phone, tattu, tesco, user experience, vodafone

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 30th, 2008 at 8:56 am and is filed under Mobile user experience. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.