We were given the opportunity to do a small ethnographic study last fall, looking at the uptake of rich media mobile devices (a “smartphone” to most people…).

The study design, as originally conceived, was to look at the viability of replacing the standard UI on a phone - in this case the Nokia N95 - with a set of “widset” applications. We wanted to see if people could “live” in the mobile web, at least their life that involved mobile devices.

In Canada, if you want to do work like this you have to subsidize the use of data plans, because of the insane pricing (although it is getting better, I know). Last fall, however, we had no choice but to provide people with a $100 incentive to use their phone for internet applications. If we didn’t we knew that we wouldn’t get any results at all, since they just wouldn’t touch the mobile web for fear of bankrupting themselves.

We divided our participants into four groups: we had two groups with an assigned task and two groups with no assigned task. Two of the groups had a widset interface and two of the groups had the “normal” interface to the phone. So we had four “cells” in a two by two matrix:

The plan was to have the four groups come in, pick up a phone and have a short discussion (where they would learn the objectives of the study, the basic operations of the phone, and how to use the widsets if applicable). The groups with a “task” would also have some time to talk about their task, but they were expected to coordinate their activity using their mobile phones. They had a week with the phones, then brought them back and had another discussion/focus group and then we repeated the experiment.

Some preliminary observations:

A week isn’t enough time. People were just getting used to the phones at that point. I can commiserate. Unless you have spent a lot of time changing phones (as I do, and probably other mobscure readers do), then you might not appreciate how disruptive a new phone can be. These are not like rental cars, where you jump in and know what everything does - more or less - the minute you start it up. They are personal devices, subject to intense personalization, and take a while to configure the way you want them to. They are also complex (even the “widset” group had to navigate the Nokia interface which they may or may not have been familiar with). Speaking of ‘configure,” our second finding was related to the extent to which people will start configuring, even when you don’t want them to:

People hack the phones, no matter what you tell them. We asked the groups with the widset interface to leave it alone. They didn’t. Plain and simple. In fact, we noticed that people started customizing the phones almost immediately when we passed them out in the first focus group. Some “hacks” were minor - changing the ring tone etc - and some were completely understandable, like adding in your contacts. But some users went way beyond that, downloading music, installing custom applications, fiddling with the colours and icons. In a sense this is natural, given how personal a phone is and we know from previous research that a phone is one of the most personal gadgets around.

People didn’t use the widsets. Although we asked people to use them, people were on their own for a week and we didn’t have control over their actions. When they brought the phones back they clearly hadn’t used the widset interface, and told us so in the focus groups. I don’t know if the supplied widsets weren’t compelling enough, but clearly this is still early days for web applications on handsets. The iPhone seems to be making some progress in this regard, and Nokia’s Widset site (widsets.com) which had quiet for a while, announced a new round of beta testing starting May 6.

Tasks inspire creativity. We asked people to tell us what they did with their phones, how they used them in new ways, given the advanced capabilities and data subsidy. What we found was that the groups that we left on their own didn’t change their habits (much) despite urging them to try out the new features on the phones. Those people we gave a challenge to used the features extensively, including some of the more “Exotic” ones, like location awareness and video sharing. It seems that a task inspires creativity (necessity is the mother of invention?) and left on their own people slide back into old habits.

Interestingly, some of the participants blogged about their experience:

Rebecca (”Miss604″): http://www.miss604.com/2007/10/the-nokia-n95-taste-test.html

Richard (”sillygwailo”): http://justagwailo.com/2007/10/03/n95

Roland, another participant, posted two items: a “blink” (first day) reaction, and a sober second day post.

We’ll be following up this research with some “mobile natives” this coming summer, giving a smaller group of people, who are more familiar with the technology, a longer time to use multimedia mobile devices. I’ll report back here with the results.

…r