Featured Research
Mobile User Experience Issues
and the Mobile Ecosystem - Summary
As with nearly any high-tech commercial endeavor, the development and delivery of mobile services is accomplished through the interaction of several entities forming an industry ecosystem. In the United States, the ecosystem is dominated by five major carriers. This carrier-centric model has emerged in part because carriers own the network “pipelines” through which content and services are delivered. Like their predecessors, the telecommunications companies , mobile carriers not only operate the networks, but they also retain control over the design and development of phone handsets, applications, and content through proprietary agreements. The carrier-dominated ecosystem also exists because of the fragmentation caused by multiple technological interdependencies among development platforms, operating systems, and network standards. However, mobile is a rapidly evolving area, and new models promise to emerge.
As part of our background work in this research group, we felt it was important to understand the industry factors affecting the mobile user experience so that we would be better able to ground any recommendations arising from our inquiry. After a fairly exhaustive search of both academic and industry sources, however, we were unable to find a cohesive representation of the mobile ecosystem. The knowledge map Mobile User Experience Issues and the Mobile Ecosystem is the result of our efforts to create the missing representation. This map will inform our continued research efforts by providing a basic understanding of the mobile ecosystem, framed in terms of user experience issues rather than revenue models. It is also a beginning. Because of the wide swath of user experience issues in the mobile realm and the complexity of the interdependencies that affect and are affected by them, this map has been intentionally limited to top-level paths and synopses of user pain points so that the larger picture is the focus. Each user experience area identified and each path of interdependency is rich with opportunities to explore and express narrower and deeper relationships.
Outside of our research efforts, we hope that the map will be useful to others who are exploring the mobile user experience by collecting the threads explored in the literature into a local vocabulary. At a time when the mobile user experience landscape is exploding well beyond the boundaries of voice and text and into Internet and multimedia capabilities, understanding the way that humans experience the technology is crucial. Successful products will be developed out of an understanding of what user goals need to be met, where there is room for innovation and change, and how user delight can be fostered. This map and the representations it may parent can help designers to identify those places.