Texperts CEO Sarah McVittie has been doing the rounds at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, and some great debate in the industry stemming from the event has surfaced in the blogosphere, particularly in relation to “mobile search” concepts.

“It’s the User Experience, Stupid” was a blue-ribbon panel of human behaviour and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. And the iPhone stumped ‘em. As David Benjamin reports in the EETimes,

In an ominous note for mobile operators, the iPhone respondents credited their happy experience not to AT&T, the channel through which iPhone services were delivered in the U.S, but to Apple, the device maker.

The panel [...] agreed that iPhone represents a model for mobile operators, but they reached little agreement on how to follow.

However, a really interesting metaphor for the mobile search experience emerged:

Panelist Mike Yonker, general manager of worldwide strategy and operations for Texas Instruments’ wireless terminals business unit, said that the way for the user to get the rich content now available on a mobile handset is through the “search” function. But this isn’t so easy. He compared the limitations of a mobile handset to a full personal computer screen.

Searching on a computer, he said, is like going to a store, where the customers sees every product displayed, and can make comparisons, touch the products, even try things on for size. Doing the same search on a mobile, he said, but like trying to shop in the same store but “through a drive-up window.” No matter how much stuff is in the store, you can only find out through the cashier at the drive-up window.

The dilemma, left unsolved by the panelists, was how to squeeze the user through that window, past the cashier, to sample all the things in the store, without guilt, while still feeling grateful to the cashier who seemed, all along, to be standing in the way.

Everyone agreed that, so far, only Apple has been able to turn this trick. For users, “the content is the core,” said Lipman of Power2B somewhat ruefully, “and we have to get out of their way.”

This is an interesting way of phrasing the problem, and a suitably polemic way of solving it. But it doesn’t address the relatively recent concept of human-assisted search, or “mobile find“, as Texperts likes to call it. Texperts has been aware of these issues for quite some time, and has first-hand experience on the front lines of the “window-shopping” style of searching. The reason is simple: people’s search behaviour when they’re on the go is much different from when they’re at home (as Yonker rightly points out), and their needs are different.

What Yonker doesn’t address, though, is that although the iPhone experience is great, it’s still more or less built on traditional searching behaviours. Third-party providers like (ahem) Texperts have stepped in to bridge that gap by providing bespoke answers to specific queries. This role has two main benefits: it allows customers to continue other tasks rather than waste time sifting through hits, and in most (but not necessarily in all) cases it vastly reduces search time.

Perhaps we can take Yonker’s metaphor a bit further? When you are out and about and need to know something (notice the word ‘need’, I’m not referring to some spare time waiting for a delayed flight) then you don’t want to browse at all. If you need a Jubilee clip for your car radiator, you don’t want to browse at all, you want to go straight to the item with as little time spent as possible in the shop. The same goes for information you ‘need’ when mobile. But isn’t that the service you get with the cashier at the window? No. We’re stretching this metaphor too far here, but the cashier in this instance has no idea what a Jubilee clip is let alone whether they stock one. Moreover, and even worse, rather than telling you up front that they can’t help, you stand at the window while, one-by-one, the cashier brings you hundreds of items from the store that bear some (often vague and bizarre) similarity to what you are looking for, but none will do the job. You tell the cashier to try again each time. At some point you are likely just to walk away.

So Texperts doesn’t act like a cashier and “get out of the way” of the customer - we’re like a personal shopper who goes in and does the dirty work. We interact with the customer who’s trusted us with the task. The Texpert personal shopper in each case is an enthusiast who really understands your needs. Hell, sometimes we’ll even come back after looking really hard and, assuming it’s not, let you know that your item simply isn’t out there. All of which saves you the trouble of discovering that yourself. It’s a neat comparison that distinguishes the concept of “mobile find” from “mobile search,” in other words…

The iPhone is great - many denizens of Texperts Towers own one - but although it slices, dices, and basically folds your laundry (it’s only a matter of time!), it still won’t find things for you. From our standpoint, though, the iPhone is a powerful tool that makes delivering richer content to customers an exciting and more viable prospect. We’re already delivering map content in partnership with Multimap and other exciting projects are in the pipeline too.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 by Thomas Roberts and is filed under Buzz. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.