90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Some passing thoughts:

Wouldn’t it be so useful if you could have group SMS conversations via a “reply to all” feature, just like you can with email? Imagine how much more profit the mobile operators could be making. What a lost opportunity!

By the way, if you like mulling over half-baked ideas, you should check out halfbakery.com. It used to be a favourite of mine a few years ago. Ideas on it tend to be quite fun in a brainstormy outside-the-box kind of way. Good for creative thinking.

Oh, and another thing about SMS. Did you know how ridiculously easy it is to send a spoofed SMS these days? It’s scary.

Some stunningly awful usage of the evil asterisk by three.co.uk for their X-series package (The UK mobile operator) -

Actually, if you dig into the Ts & Cs, the limit is 1GB a month. This is a big difference from unlimited, but not unreasonable since it’s an ok price. Why not just be honest and say it?

Actually, you have 5000 minutes of skype-to-skype calls. This isn’t bad, but they don’t make it clear that they mean skype calls only (no skype out, i.e. no calls to real phones included).

Actually, you have a hard limit of 10,000 messages a month. This is plenty, but by this point, you are likely to feel very suspicious of the asterisk. What’s silly here is that the X-Series package is a pretty nice deal by UK standards. There’s no need for all this cloak and dagger stuff. Good, honest simplicity would get them a lot further.

This is a pretty interesting presentation from Anssi Vanjoki, Nokia’s Executive Vice President (4/12/07). He says, fairly bluntly:

• Right now, the Nokia Handset User Experience has scope for improvement
• There are inconsistency problems between applications.
• Discoverability can be a problem (apps and content can feel ‘hidden’)
• Syncing and storage is currently difficult

Admitting there’s a problem, as they say, is the first step towards a cure. With a message like this coming from the top, we can expect some pretty radical improvements coming soon.

The iPhone isn’t mentioned, but I can’t help thinking that it’s spurred on a user-experience supremacy race. Great news for end-users.

| View | Upload your own

Do you remember when you stopped paying per minute for your dial-up modem connection? Suddenly using the web became a real part of your life rather than something you occasionally “dipped” into with one eye on the clock.

If you look at the mobile web, the situation is all still very early ‘90s. Up until recently mobile users in the UK were paying over £2 per megabyte downloaded (often much more). But now we have some promising developments:

• £5 / month for 1Gb data transfer on Three UK [”X-series Unlimited”]
• £7.50 / month for “unlimited” data transfer on T-mobile [”Web’n’walk”]

Now it’s not cheap yet, but it’s starting to make sense for normal consumers to use the mobile web a lot. What’s bizarre is that other mobile operators in the UK are still trailing behind madly. On O2 it’s £5 to buy 4 megs of data, which they expect to last you a whole month!

If you’re in the UK you may have seen this in The Guardian today, but if not - check out this this article by Charlie Brooker. A great takedown of the Samsung E900… As he puts it: “The whole thing is the visual equivalent of a moronic clip-art jumble sale poster designed in the dark by a myopic divorcee experiencing a freak biorhythmic high.”

Love his choice of words!

> Read the article

Check out the full size version of this sceen grab. Imagine you are planning on buying a new contract for your mobile phone. This deal looks good doesn’t it? 2000 minutes & 1000 SMS for only £25 a month, with a monthly not yearly contract - by UK standards that’s a truly amazing deal! So what’s the catch? In the small print it says these minutes can only be used at off peak times.

I don’t understand how anyone could see this as a good strategy. Sure, you may get a good sign up rate, but when the customers see their bills at the end of the month they are going to be seriously angry. I can only hope that this is a design mistake, not purposeful deceit.

If you check out the official iPhone site you will see that it declares:

“All the power and sophistication of the world’s most advanced operating system — OS X — is now available on a small, handheld device that gives you access to true desktop-class applications and software”

So unsurprisingly, many people have become pretty confused. You can imagine some people genuinely wondering if it will run the full versions of Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, or any of the other massive desktop apps they use. (Of course it wont).

So why didn’t Apple give the mobile version of their OS a slightly different name, like “Mobile OS X”? This way, instead of confusing people, they’d put across the message that it’s “Same, same but different“.

Imagine how wonderful it would be if mobile operators wrote these new years resolutions and promised to keep them. (It’s a complete fantasy of course, but there’s no harm in dreaming)

Stop making our customers choose their tariffs in advance for the next 18 months.
There’s a risk that customers might make the wrong decision and choose a tariff that is too high for them, and end up wasting money. Let’s stop taking advantage of our customers like this. In future, we will let our customers change tariff as and when they want. Even better, lets do it for them automatically depending on their level of phone usage each month. While we are at it, lets build smaller gaps between our tariff prices so that they always fit our customers’ needs perfectly.

Stop punishing our customers for going over their monthly quotas
The OFT recently ruled that UK banks can no longer give customers punitive charges when they go over their overdrafts. This is good – it’s just not right to punish your customers and profiteer out of their mistakes. In the new year, we are going to take the initiative and do the same for our customers – i.e. stop charging them silly money when they run over their quota for minutes, data, texts, or whatever.

Stop acting like Evil Genies
Evil Genies play with words so that what they promise seems to be one thing, but when delivered it is quite different. For example, sometimes we call things “unlimited” with a footnote in tiny writing that they are in fact limited, or sometimes when we display the monthly price of a package, we list the introductory price, which in fact only applies for 2 of the 18 months of the contract. We are going to stop doing this because it’s mean, and we want to be nice to our customers from now on.

Make quotas and charges very, very visible
From now on, customers will see their quotas displayed clearly on the home screen of their phones. This way, they can easily alter their usage so that they use their exact quota of minutes (etc), without wasting a drop. Also, we are going to display the data transfer prices / quotas very clearly within email and web browser applications, so users can easily monitor what they are spending. While abroad, these figures will change to accurately represent the prices.

Craig Barrack had a great article in the NMA last week explaining why Three aren’t scared of offering unlimited Skype and Instant Messenger … on their top end “X-Series” contracts, for now.

Conventional wisdom on the future of mobile operators has two important axioms. The first is that mobile voice-over-IP (VoIP) is a massive threat to the approximate 75% of revenue they earn from voice services. The second is that mobile instant messaging could cannibalise SMS revenues, which make up a large proportion of the remaining 25% of revenues attributed to data. So there has been great interest in Hutchison 3G’s release of X-Series this month.

… This could be the first seismic shift within the industry since the launch of 3G. […] At the forefront of the capabilities of X-Series are clients for Skype and Windows Live Messenger. Heavens above, that’s VoIP and IM in one handset - surely this can’t be 3 committing commercial seppuku?

I don’t think 3 created this offer without some careful arithmetic. Within higher value contracts, as X-Series is positioned, operators already offer minutes of cross-network calls in the hundreds. For those, they have to pay a termination fee with the network being called, slightly over 5p a minute. Calling web Skype users, there will be no such charge, so 3 will be better off if its customers spend their time calling Skype users rather than other mobile networks.

By offering Skype on a fairly high-value tariff, I think that 3 has negated the traditional worry, especially if this offer increases its monthly contract subscriber base. If Skype clients become more widespread on lower-end handsets so users can call each other without affecting their monthly call allocation, that may not be the case.

A similar case can be made for the inclusion of Windows Live Messenger. Text bundles are usually included within high-end contracts anyway, so I can’t see that 3 will lose significant income.

Read the full article on NMA.co.uk

Another thing also to bear in mind is that I suspect Three only offer you an internet connection if you are in an area that has 3G coverage. If you happen to be in a blackspot, then you wont get GPRS connection. Instead you are just refused an internet connection. Depending on where you live & work, this alone could put you off signing up.