UX News Round-Up
6 Types of Mobile Internet Users
Broadband analyst group Point Topic reports six main types of mobile Internet users: Road warriors, gadget joys, MI lifers, mid-market moderates, entertain us and light & easy. Of these, the newest types to be identified are the mid-market moderates–late-adopters waiting for a compelling reason to use mobile Internet, “entertain us”–young people who use mobile Internet for entertainment, and “light and easy”–primarily older users whose main access to the internet is through mobile devices. The company reports 83% of mobile Internet users fall into these six categories.
Waiting for Interface
Don Norman waxes poetic on the ubiquity of waiting in a breezy new article for Interactions Magazine. Norman connects the dots between waiting and interface and interaction design, writing:
Problems arise at interface, any interface…any place where two entities interact is an interface [where waiting will unavoidably occur], and this is where confusions arise, where conflicting assumptions are born and nourished…[where] mismatched entities struggle to engage.
The article primarily explores instances of waiting and “buffers”–the spaces where waiting occurs when events occur asynchronously, where information and objects are held in stasis while one system waits for another. Norman deems these spaces “a designer’s heaven and the practitioner’s hell.”
Web 2.0 in the Corporate Environment
Although a complete, exacting understanding of “Web 2.0″ may still elude us, a new article on Boxes and Arrows examines why, however nebulous its definition may be, Web 2.0 may fail in the corporate enterprise environment. The article proceeds on four points.
First, Web 2.0 breaks down borders between services, which may present problems for departmentally funded software and IT groups, and the monetization of usage. Second, Web 2.0 utilizes the collective intelligence of its users. In the corporate environment, where competition may trump community, users may be reluctant to contribute their knowledge. (See Herrschaftswissen.)
Third, Web 2.0 cannot control the process of knowledge creation. Companies may not welcome the critical comments to new corporate policies and procedures that may appear on blogs, especially not when their removal would even further alienate employees and make the company look foolish. Worse, blogs and wikis make it ever easier go public with internal debates.
Fourth, Web 2.0 links knowledge and thereby does not protect intellectual property. Quality of service and operational stability are paramount with corporate applications; the “perpetual beta” of online software and the attendant full-time development resources of most Web 2.0 software companies may not be possible in the corporate environment. In addition, software “mash-ups” (think Google Maps and its myriad hacks and overlays) which require the reuse of data may cause trouble in a corporate environment where cost is driven by access to such information.
Conclusion?
Corporate behaviours and processes are not changed just by implementing a new IT service. Installing a blog in a formal and hierarchical corporate culture will not change the company in[sic] an open and informal community. Web 2.0 patterns will only work if the corporate…culture is…responsive to more collaboration and participation or if the implementation is accompanied by other measures to support cultural change.
Montparnas’ weekly news installment posts every Tuesday at lunchtime.
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