A Conceptual Map: The Mobile Web as a Social Space

Following last month's release of the iPhone 3G, along with the launch of the App Store, and what Brian Fling called the "first true Mobile 2.0," everyone around here is talking about the emergence of the mobile device as a critical facet of web strategy. My colleague Anders Rosenquist, who is seriously deep on mobile, presented a first take on the company point of view on mobile strategy at a recent meeting; another colleague, Justin Marshall, is knee-deep in an iPhone app; and in general things are just all abuzz about mobile.

And Brian has pretty much convinced me that mobile is, in fact, a huge deal. But I don't think it's a huge deal in quite the obvious way. The initial reaction to everyone's sudden attention to mobile seems to be along the lines of, "We need to make our web site accessible on mobile!"

Not so fast.

I got  a lot of help on this diagram from Anders and Justin. It's meant to be a framework for thinking about the mobile experience, in particular about how the mobile web experience is different from the web experience in general. There's quite a bit to debate in that question, and we could talk about it for hours. And of course, this kind of diagram certainly oversimplifies a very complex system in a complex space. It doesn't show all the elements, and it doesn't show all the relationships between the elements. What I hope it does do is provide a framework for thinking about the mobile space that makes it easier to uncover opportunities to create real value for real people.

I do think there are some issues unique to mobile that go beyond form factor, device compatibility, and the challenges of adapting content. Let's get this one out of the way: It's not enough to just take your web site, add some new CSS, and deliver it to the mobile device. If that doesn't strike you as self-apparent, bear with me.

In the longer term, the mobile device will become the hub of our social worlds, an indispensable tool for navigating our physical, cultural, and relational landscapes. Does that sound like an overstatement? I don't think it is.

Let's take a closer look at the major elements of the diagram above. Taken together they illustrate what I think is interesting about the human-centric view of mobile computing sketched above:

The mobile context is fundamentally different:

• A contact is the combination of 1) a person you know and 2) the ways you communicate with them. Because it goes with you everywhere and it directly enables communication with people, the mobile device is the logical primary home for contacts.
• Task orientation is the focus on a single primary task at any given moment. The mobile device lends itself to neither multitasking nor complex tasks. Unless you're waiting through a flight delay or sitting on a train somewhere, your focus on the mobile web is probably singular, with a specific goal and a discrete activity. And as mobile evolves to support more kinds of tasks, a self-reinforcing cycle will emerge, where the mobile device becomes the device of preference for an increasing number of activities.
• Location awareness is a critical differentiator between the mobile and, um, non-mobile web experience. Whether or not the device itself includes location awareness per se, the context of use is, well, mobile--away from the desk, network-independent, and out in the analog world we'll always call home. And the more things you can accomplish untethered from your desk chair, the more time you'll spend that way.

And the mobile device has a different relationship to content:

• Regardless of the advances in the browsing experienced introduced by the iPhone, the mobile device will not soon become the preferred medium for web surfing. Mobile content will be increasingly targeted, driven by subscription, syndication, filtering. It will adapting dynamically to the context of use: Locations, tasks, and relationships.
• Web sites have a different relationship with content consumed on the mobile device. The New York Times site will still be the New York Times site, of course--web sites per se aren't going anywhere. But the mobile context creates demand for different uses of the site: The site will increasingly function as a container we interact with through services like syndication. My friend Chris uploads baby photos to Flickr, I subscribe to Chris, and his photos are delivered to my device. The site is a holder of content, syndication is the delivery mechanism, and the device is the receiver; and, APIs deliver content to the site from, you guessed it, the mobile device:
• Artifacts are the things we create on our mobile devices, like pictures and videos. Part of the reason I think mobile really lends itself to social applications is that it is both a producer and consumer of content: A two-way channel between you and the world. And not just any world or the world at large, but the world of your choosing, your place and time, your relationships.

So the most important difference between the mobile web experience and the computer-based web experience is that the mobile web has a context of use that features place and activity: What I've labeled on this diagram Task Orientation and Location Awareness. Also, the mobile device, unlike desktop and even laptop computers, is essentially a communication device. Its heritage remains the cell phone, and its core use, despite its profound evolution the past several years, is to enable communication between people. It's the context that's different for mobile.

Developing web sites and services for mobile requires a keen sense of this different context. Users of your mobile site are out and about--and they're less likely to be reading the New York Times or researching a health care topic than they are to be trying to get directions to a restaurant where someone is waiting for them, maybe take a quick look at the menu, and send their friend a quick SMS apology and ETA.

None of this is to minimize the challenges of designing and developing for mobile. There are still a bunch of screen sizes to deal with, hundreds of devices with different functionality, and no fully-effective standard for adapting content to the variety of requirements. And as important as the iPhone is, it's still only a small slice of the overall market. These are all real challenges you still have to address.

Nonetheless, the opportunity is huge, and soon you might not be able to afford to ignore mobile. Look to Asia and northern Europe for a sense of mobile's future importance in the US.

So what does your business have to offer your customers via mobile? And maybe even more importantly, what do your customers have to offer each other?

Comments

[Barbara Ballard]

We find that mobile context goes beyond just location. Sure, location plays a big role, and relative location is also big. Movement, proximity of things, proximity of people, and more.

What about calendars? I can make a good guess as to context based on what the user's calendar currently says.

Ideally, we should be able to determine whether the user needs to snack right now, or is needing a more immersive experience. ESPN, for example, gets a lot of simultaneous mobile + broadcast use during games. The person sitting on the sofa watching the game needs different information than the family at the park wanting to keep up to date with the game.

A few of the speakers at our forthcoming mobile design conference will talk about different types of context and how to design, develop, and research them.

Conference:
http://design4mobile.mobi/

Blog entries on context:
http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/category/context/

[fling]

Ryan,

This is a great examination in what makes the mobile user experience tick. It is really hard to capture all of the facets of how people interact with content, people and services using a mobile device. Especially as it is unlike any other medium before it not to mention that the users goals are constantly shifting context.

You've done a great job at capturing the concepts!

-Brian

[Peter Cranstone]

>> There are still a bunch of screen sizes to deal with, hundreds of devices with different functionality> and no fully-effective standard for adapting content to the variety of requirements.<<

Yes there is.

Just use the HTTP protocol (about as standard as it comes and it's extensible)to add the additional contextual data.

Then all you have to do is read it at the other end. About as simple and standard as it comes.

Cheers,

Peter Cranstone
5o9 Inc.

[Anders Rosenquist]

I read Ryan's comment on adapting content given the wide range of requirements to be less about the technical aspects of how to do it and more about creating the best user experience. We can certainly take content off of existing sites and port it to a mobile device - if the mobile has a decent browser, this content can be rendered as we intend. However, deciding what content to port and how to package it so that it is highly usable in a mobile context is the trick. And of course there isn't one mobile context, but a whole range of contexts and situations to be thinking about.

I wanted to say too that I appreciate Ryan's articulation around how the mobile context is different, and would add that the task orientation can often jump between multiple tasks. Basic multitasking does exist on mobile devices and can be leveraged to provide an enhanced user experience at times. At a basic level, on many devices you can play music while reading email or surfing the web. But there are devices out there - the T-Mobile Sidekick being a good example - that truly support multitasking, enable quick shortcuts between running apps, and present a highly usable interface for running concurrent tasks. So the device almost asks you to listen to music while keeping several IM conversations going while surfing the web while taking a picture and sending an MMS. All this is to say that there are different levels of use of mobile devices, from the single, directed, information-seeking task to the more immersive information flow across multiple channels. So the device serves different needs at different times, underscoring the importance of device design and how to take advantage of particular designs (e.g. landscape vs. portrait orientation) to afford the best type of user experience.