One problem that has prevented this technology from widespread adoption is the rate of errors. There are a number of factors that contribute to this, particularly noise, diction and accent. Background noise is a real problem in speech recognition systems to this day. Equally challenging is the issue of how a user speaks. Strong accents or indistinct diction has continually caused issues with recognition accuracy. Anyone who has used automated customer service lines will be only too aware of these problems.

One way in which speech recognition systems used to achieve higher rates of accuracy was through learning the user’s voice (Dragon Naturally Speaking for example) and thereby becoming better at understanding what a user was saying. However, not all systems have this opportunity, although Siri will.

There are two other issues that are likely to have affected how willing people are to use speech recognition systems; the interaction and the context. Tackling interaction first. In the past, systems that permit voice control have tended to shy away from natural language style interaction, as technically it’s very challenging. This results in users having to adopt a more machinelike style of interaction, such as “Search, restaurants, submit”. This feels unnatural and makes the sequence of interaction harder to remember. You also sound pretty odd talking like that in public.

This brings us onto the second issue, context. Just how comfortable are people talking to a machine in public? Speech recognition customer service lines are ok until you reach the “I’m sorry…” moment, at which point the repetition and frustration often result in a level of embarrassment. If the language you use is more natural, then tasks become more like a conversation, which in turn makes it more comfortable to use the system in a public place. Even so, I suspect it will be a while before people are comfortable picking up their phone and demanding it to give them information like they’re an extra in Star Trek.

However, if any company can convince people to change their behaviour it’s Apple.

If Siri does succeed and developers have the opportunity to take advantage of the functionality it offers, they should consider the following aspects of their users’ interaction:

• Appropriateness of task: is your task suitable for voice command use? Shorter spoken interactions are likely to be more successful (and satisfying).
• Context: where are your users likely to be when they interact with your product? This will influence the types of phrase they use and the brevity of those phrases.
• Privacy: what information will your users need to speak out loud? Will they be comfortable broadcasting this information? Are there points at which you’ll need to switch to a different type of input mechanism?
• Triggers: what is likely to cause a user to begin a specific command or information request? This will govern how the interaction should flow.
• Mental models: if you’re replicating a real world interaction, make sure that you do so accurately as any mismatches will be jarring and confuse users.
• Errors: ensure that recognition or interaction errors are handled gracefully so that the illusion of a conversation is not broken.

Voice control has, and has always had, a lot of promise. It will be interesting to see if Apple can help to embed this style of interaction into our daily lives.

Whilst a computer is a window onto the web and into your social connections, a mobile, be it an iPhone, iPad or Android smartphone, is your personal window. And unlike a computer it brings extra data and functionality with it. With a mobile, you can share where you are and what you’re doing, generally in a much richer way than a simple status update. This is all becoming fairly commonplace and the level of use of this type of functionality is growing inexorably. The question is, once you’ve gained access to your social network of choice through your smartphone, what is there to tempt you to do more than what effectively amount to multimedia or spatial updates?

This is the question put to business and organisations who seek to engage with users in the social mobile world. Some businesses have an easier time answering this question than others. Foursquare, for example, is a great example of a social mobile offering. Find, visit, share, rate, all a great fit for social mobile and one of the key factors behind its success (as well as the gamification). But your business isn’t Foursquare, so how do you work out where you fit in this space?

Josh Clark, a well-respected voice in the field of iPhone app design, talks about three mindsets mobile users tend to have:

• Microtasking, when a user is engaged in short periods of intensive activity
• Local, when a user seeks information about or to support them in their current context
• Bored, when the user is looking for distraction, novelty or entertainment

As Josh himself has recently pointed out, these mindsets map nicely onto Google’s categorisation of mobile information usage; repetitive, urgent and bored.

Now, social mobile can fill one or all of these categories. So we need to delve a little deeper to understand what aspects of social interaction match these mindsets.

When thinking about the different types of interaction possible through social media, I found this model by Isra Garcia particularly useful.

<Click to enlarge>

 From this model there are effectively four different types of interaction:

• Connecting to others
• Exposure, viewing information and activity within your network
• Sharing information with others
• Providing feedback on shared information or on a specific topic

There is also an associated interaction that can be facilitated or initiated through social media:

•  Communicating directly with others.

When combined with the mobile mindsets different types of social mobile interaction emerge. Using this, albeit simplistic abstraction, we can start to see how organisations can understand where their business and any potential mobile offering might fit.

<Click to enlarge>

 If we return to Foursquare we can see that it covers the following areas:

• Researching – what’s good in my area?
• Situational support – is there anything good near me right now.
• Reporting – I’ve found something great, or I want to review this too.
• Matchmaking – are any of my network available to join me?
• Reaching out – well, what could I do today?

Which is quite a large portion of the spectrum, particularly the local part. Interestingly if we look at the social networks themselves, we can see that Facebook covers the entire spectrum (depending upon which of their suite of services you use), whereas the professional network Linkedin, is rooted firmly in the microtasking area, with some small forays in local.

So, how is this useful? There are two aspects, understanding what situation you find a user in will directly influence how you can engage with them and what the likelihood of them wanting to engage with you is. This I will cover in a future article. The other is determining which aspects of a product or service could benefit from a social aspect. A couple of examples might help to illustrate this.

iPad video app:

I have an app that lets people insert their face over the lead character in short clips of popular films. It’s a great timewasting app, but after the initial rush of downloads, sales have stagnated. There are several aspects of social interaction we can target. Broadcasting and the flipside, consumption, would allow people to share their videos with others. If we add in reviewing, via commenting, then we cover off a neat conversion of a bored user into a microtasking (and therefore more engaged) user.

Customer reviews app:

I have a service that helps people to view and share reviews of cars. I only focused on letting people easily view the reviews database (the researching goal). This is great, but I’m missing two other goals that would help to harness the community. If I were to provide an easy route to information about “that car there” (situational support) then I add to the utility of my app/mobile site. If I were to offer the ability to review a car (reviewing/reporting) or even ask a question (conversation) then I would increase both the utility of and engagement with my app.

Or how about a real world example, Groupon. Groupon is an offers site, with the key to their success being the sharing and viral spread of deals. Currently the Groupon mobile offering lets people find offers near them and share them with their network. This is simple, straightforward and it works. However, there are a number of ways that this could be enhanced. What if the service were to recommend deals that my friends have looked at or taken up (consumption)? What about reviewing or rating deals (reporting)? For dinner deals in particular, how about the facility to invite other people in your network to take advantage of a deal (matchmaking). All of these could enhance the Groupon service. As I was putting this article together, Groupon and Foursquare announced that Groupon daily deals would now be available through Foursquare. This looks to be very much a win-win situation for both of these companies.

It’s important to stress that I don’t intend to advocate simply bolting social elements onto a mobile offering. The appropriateness and likely appeal of the social aspect should be carefully considered. For example it might be good to use a service to find reviews of local doctors, but you probably don’t want to connect to your doctor or share with others that you’re visiting them.

The question then becomes, how do we gauge appropriateness and appeal? A great first step is to look at what similar services are doing and the level of engagement they attain. This will provide some indication of what social features might be useful and whether people will actually use them. If you have an existing product that you’re looking to socially augment, then depending upon your budget you then have a couple of options for determining which social features would be best for your product. Surveys provide a cost effective way of building a picture of the types of features people might use. Focus groups and one to one interviews can then build upon this insight.

If you don’t have a product yet, then your silver bullet is ethnography, whereby actual user needs are collected in context over an extended period of time. This is a very powerful method for understanding a person’s interaction, not only with technology, but also their environment and the people in their lives.

As part of this process you also need to consider how social features in your mobile offering link up to the rest of your communications channels and services. If the social experience is constrained just to the mobile platform, this represents a missed opportunity to widen the reach of your service. This opens up another set of questions around consistency of experience and handling of transitions between channels.

All of the above can be considered in an ad-hoc manner, but I would strongly recommend creating a mobile strategy to guide the development of any mobile offering. When coupled with a full user centred design approach, you can ensure that your mobile service or product meets the needs of your users, delivers on your commercial priorities and offers a great user experience.

This article was originally published on MyCustomer.com

The Sunday Times published a Top 100 list of the best apps a couple of months ago,  which I’m still working my way through. There are many articles and blogs all over the web talking at length about some of these apps, best of  articles, not to mention the App store’s own featured rankings.

That’s the first big problem: the size of the market means it is quite hard to know what to buy or download, not what works or what is fun. It’s like the old saying, about spending your first year at university making loads of new friends and the rest of your time there trying to get rid of them! I find there is not enough good information out there to give you confidence in your purchase. The same applies to the ratings and comments within the app store, quite often there are too few for them to be reliable. While this has relatively little importance for free apps, it becomes more problematic when you consider the cumulative spend on paid apps which range from 59p to £5.99 or more. 

Navigating with one’s hands, tapping and swiping is becoming increasingly natural. So much so, that my 6 year old the other day tried to “click” with his finger on the family PC’s screen. Granted he’s had minimal experience with keyboards, and has much more experience with touch and gestural interfaces, from iPod touch to Nintendo Wii and DSi. Still, shades of things to come, I think.

One frustration however is the lack of consistency from app to app, beyond the general swipe and pinch gestures. Many of the text heavy apps react in quite different ways and have resorted to different modes of manipulating the blocks of text and images. Flipboard folds pages down the middle (almost so it looks like a three dimensional shape), Le Figaro (French newspaper) scrolls up and down as well as turns the pages, while the innovative PushPopPress has published Al Gore’s “Our choice” as a fantastic interactive book – with interactive graphics, video, and voice overs. In a similar spirit, Alice in Wonderland comes with interaction that hints at the future of books, I think. But the only consistent thing is the inconsistency. Tapping once or twice, where hidden menus might appear from, what some of the icons mean even – is anybody’s guess. This should take a while to sort out, and naturally companies like Foviance will contribute to the development of best practices for the user experience on tablets.

Photography on the iPad2 is stunning – the Reuters app, for example, showing an editor’s selection of the day’s news in photo – Flipboard is as great as Scobleizer said it was, allowing single point of access to your news sources and social media accounts. Too many apps are still not optimised for iPad and the rendering is fuzzy if you use the full screen space – like bad resolution on your computer screen when you over enlarge pictures. This should change as more developers upgrade their apps.

I’m not using my iPad as much as I hoped to – for one I still feel such a geek taking it out on the Tube! More to the point, it’s another device competing for my limited time: email and browsing tend to remain PC activities as the screen is bigger and the keyboard more comfortable, texts are sent from my iPhone (a wi-fi connection is not always handy, and watch those data charges on iPad 3G!)…I read a Kindle (more ergonomic to hold than the iPad) and paper books and magazines (but if there is an iPad version available, the subscription will not be renewed).

As a newspaper/magazine substitute it really comes into its own, but it’s an expensive substitution! Luckily there are other emerging uses, I have watched a film on it and found it surprisingly immersive. Literally holding the movie in your hands takes you into the picture much more than sitting in a huge dark room with strangers, and the screen is plenty big enough for this. Of course if you have to use headphones because others are present it becomes a little anti-social, just as listening to music can be.

There are also some excellent educational apps both for children and adults. From learning musical notation, playing the guitar, maths bingo, virtual visits to Ancient Rome and the fabulous photography available on the Nasa and the Hubble apps.

In fact I am seriously considering an iPad for the kids when they are a bit older rather than a first computer. I am also exploring using it instead of a paper notepad (saving the rainforest!). With writing apps – either with digital transformation or without – and a stylus, it’s becoming more of a viable option, and when you throw in productivity apps such as Instapaper and Dropbox you have the potential to completely change the way you work.

All in all then, I am thrilled with my purchase; it was well worth the money, the hassle of ordering, the wait and all. It’s a great device; one that you really feel is changing the game as you use it: and how exciting is that?

For those of you that watch South Park, a recent episode highlighted the public perception of end-user licensing and privacy statements. The character Kyle doesn’t bother to read the privacy agreement of an Apple iTunes update and has to suffer the consequences, which cannot be detailed here!

Apple has suffered a significant damage to its public reputation recently, due to the news that it has been tracking the location of it’s iPhone and iPad users.  Apple, along with Google, have been requested to participate in a US Senate panel on the issue of mobile tracking, with Apple adamantly stating that it does not track user’s locations, but uses the data collected to help speed up the use of location based services. As you can see from the map below (produced using the iPhone Tracker tool ), the wi-fi location and cell towers around your phone, can give an impression of your own location – you’d never guess that I use the east coast railway a lot!

<Click to enlarge>

Last year I wrote about the issues of advertising on mobile devices, a theme that I’ll be coming back to again shortly, along with the potential difficulties of mobile tracking. One of the issues related to the latency of the tracking and the corresponding issue of data accuracy. A recent article by ‘Localytics’ has highlighted this problem and it will be an ever more important issue as the use of mobile devices becomes more and more main stream. The common consensus (Wikimedia & Online Marketing Trends)  predicts that mobile devices will surpass desktops as the method of browsing the internet by 2014.

The Apple story is interesting as the issue of tracking on mobile devices, and indeed this specific issue relating to the user’s location, has been known about for well over a year. It only gained momentum in the popular press when the information was visualised!

This really shows the importance of visualising data. We all love a good story and need to be able to relate to the protagonists. Data is great, but insight is better!

Our own Neil Mason discusses the use of storytelling in his recent blog post. We are often confronted with the conflict of making data look ‘sexy’, think of glossy 3D pie charts, rather than meaningful. For me it is vital that a data visualisation tells a story. It should allow the user to experience a journey through the data to gain meaningful insight.

What is interesting, is that the depiction of data can often feel like an uphill struggle, everyone has an opinion on what a chart should look like. It is often only when you have played with a couple of different visualisations that the true meaning comes through. From a linguistic or memory perspective, this would be termed as ‘semantic’ meaning that a greater level had been achieved. As analysts, it is our job to help create this journey for our client.

This is not easy. It may take several iterations before the insights come through, but then again, it wouldn’t be a true story without a struggling hero now would it!

For more about Foviance’s Data Privacy Audit

My experience with Orange was, as usual, pretty terrible. Waiting on hold followed by repeatedly explaining my problems to various staff, all of whom stated strict instructions (that they had been given by Apple) which they had to complete before they could even consider giving me a replacement. Some of these were completely unfeasible. For example, they asked me to swap my SIM card with someone else with an iPhone4 for a whole weekend. Then, I had to swap my handset with someone for another full two days. How was I supposed to find someone that would be happy to live without their mobile phone for almost a week?! I was lucky and found a very kind and obliging friend but still think the request from Orange (or was it Apple?!) was ridiculous. Anyway, having completed the various tests, Orange finally passed me over to Apple who they said would deal with the replacement.

The dispatch of the new handset was efficiently arranged by Apple. Following a very simple telephone call with instructions on how to return my iPhone and how the replacement would be delivered, the shiny new iPhone arrived as promised, within 24 hours. A great delivery experience!

Although Apple get a gold star for this final end point with the delivery, I’m left feeling negative about both brands. If Apple really do give Orange such ridiculous guidelines to the mobile retailers then it’s partly their fault. However, Orange must have agreed to those guidelines when signing up to selling Apple goods and therefore need to improve the way that they deliver their customer service, so not to infuriate customers and by simply blaming Apple for setting the rules.

There’s no simple answer as to who is to blame. But, since it’s a co-brand experience, the experience delivered by either company, at all stages of the customer lifecycle, will impact customers’ perceptions of both brands regardless of which one they’re directly dealing with. This can be a positive thing for companies as it gives them multiple chances to shine. However, in the case of Apple and Orange it’s also very risky given that a brand can be tainted through association, even if it’s not directly involved in the negative customer contact. What is clear is that it’s essential for brands to agree upon a customer service strategy as part of their contract to sell each other’s goods, to ensure that any contact with either brand is positive and therefore only improves customers’ perception of both brands.

It didn’t occur to me until recently that a blind person would even contemplate using an iPhone. After all, it’s a touchscreen interface that requires interaction between a finger and an onscreen image and lacks any sort of tactile or sensory feedback.

If I turn my phone off, then close my eyes and try to turn it back on, I fail at the first hurdle (slide to unlock). Even though I’ve turned my phone on hundreds, possibly thousands of times, with my eyes closed I never seem to get my thumb in the right place to accurately swipe the slider.

So, how does a blind person turn an iPhone on, make calls, texts and much more, without receiving sensory feedback or being able to see what they are doing?
Well, this all became clear to me a couple of days ago when a client (thanks Dave!) forwarded me an article about a blind person’s first week with the iPhone. Austin Seraphin recounts his life-changing experience when he purchased and got to grips with his first iPhone. He explains how it is possible to use the iPhone without sight, using a combination Apple’s built-in screen reader ‘VoiceOver’ and a variety of finger taps (e.g., tap an item to hear it, double tap to activate it, swipe three fingers to scroll, double triple-finger tap to toggle speech). He found these controls quick to learn and goes on to describe how enjoyable, liberating and revolutionary the experience can be, depicting it as “the greatest thing to happen to blind people for a very long time.”

It is great to see that the mobile experience is getting more accessible and inclusive.

Figures corroborate this: predictions see app market turnover rocketing to a whopping $17.5 billion in 2012, against $6 billion this year. The number of app downloads should also reach new highs with an estimated $50 billion in 2012 against $7 billion this year. But interestingly, it seems that apps haven’t reached their full potential yet. What the stats also tell us is that gaming and social networking dominate the app market whereas retail apps trail at the rear of the wagon. However, despite mobile retail apps trailing slightly right now, they have a huge power to unleash.

It’s small wonder that retail apps are lagging behind. The whole app concept is fairly recent and most of us are not yet fully ready to embrace mobile shopping: security and payments on handheld devices remain a concern, we’re not yet so keen on purchasing on the go, and we want to feel we’re making informed mature decisions. In the end, why would we use a small device when we’ve got laptops and computers available most of the day? This trend, though, is about to change.

A recent study conducted by miBuys indicated that 85 percent of surveyed women used the mobile internet daily, and 95 percent of them browsed the mobile web at home when they could potentially access computers. Also, 67 percent were interested in receiving mobile vouchers or coupons, whilst 57 percent had already clicked on mobile advertising. Another study from Deloitte revealed that one-in-five consumers plan to mobile shop in the future, 25 percent of whom intend to make a purchase through their phone. The explosion of mobile commerce is therefore scheduled – now how can big e-commerce firms ensure they make the most of mobile apps?

The power of retail apps is two fold: not only do they boost online sales; they also leverage offline sales. In the former case, the added value of apps is clearer. Online revenue is not only limited to the download cost of the app but is also generated by in-app content. Apps can indeed be used as a portal to access product listings or ad hoc services, which can ultimately lead to online transactions. The Ocado app is an interesting success story. Available on multiple platforms including iPhone and Android, the free-to-download app yielded a turnover of more than £15 million in Q1 2010 (five percent of Ocado’s total sales), by enabling users to go food shopping on their phones. Another example is the Sky Sports Live Football app. The app gives football results in real time as games are being played, for free. But if they register within the app for an extra £4 a month service, users can get video clips of the goals on their phone.

The offline value of mobile apps is less obvious yet it is still there. Apps can boost offline sales by acting as a promotional medium. One way to exploit this opportunity is to create a catalogue app, just like Ikea recently did. The app allows users to browse the latest Ikea store catalogue. One of its main strengths is that the catalogue is offline and can therefore be accessed regardless of network signal. Another option is to create an app that sends periodical push alerts to users (e.g. about new clothes collections, promotional vouchers and so on). Desktop websites would then finish the job started by the apps and convert visitors into buyers. US venture company Shopkick is taking mobile retail to a new level by merging mobile and offline shopping. Its app, to be released at some point this summer, will work across a certain number of stores (including Macy’s and Best Buy for a start) and will provide augmented product information. While strolling down the aisles of brick-and-mortar stores, users will be able to use the cameras on their phones to scan items in order to get additional information (such as reviews).

So the power of retail apps is still to be realised. If well thought and well designed, this channel can become another consistent stream of online revenue. If you’re considering designing an app for your e-business, here are a few tips to ensure you make the most of it:

• Know you audience – What type of phones are your customers using? If they use smartphones, think ‘apps’. If they use more primitive phones, think ‘mobile friendly website’
• Track your traffic – Knowing the share of your visitors that access your site via their phones will help you plan your online strategy
• Establish you goal(s) – Do you want to use your app as a sales channel, showcase window or interactive in-store guide?
• Engage with your customers – Apps are different from the traditional web, demanding new marketing strategies
• Make payments easy – Should you decide to implement a checkout process in your app, make sure it is quick, user-friendly and secure. Think Google Checkout, PayPal or similar
• Most importantly, make sure your app is usable – Don’t skip user testing while arguing your app won’t generate enough revenue to justify user-centred research.

This post was written by Xavier Klingenfus

This article was written as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

So when I think about my world of marketing, brand and user experience, I often look at him and consider that he is somewhat absolved from the matter, almost that he is not capable of being understood as an individual or won over as a customer on the grounds of such squandering.

All this changed in the past week when I saw him placing his bets on his new iPhone. I have spent many years listening to him pass through the layers of telephone security necessary before he can place his next winner at Windsor, Ascot or Wolverhampton. So to see him with an iPhone was somewhat of a surprise – almost as if someone from the back-roads of Dudley shouldn’t be seen using such shiny new technology!

So far I have used plain English speaking, guessing that not all of you will understand ‘Yam Yam’, the language of the Black Country. But knowing there are only few bookmakers who have launched an iPhone application I asked him who he was betting with, and he told me. “Why is that?” I asked. I asked the question because I knew that for many years he’d used a different bookmaker who he’d always raved about and to whom he is very well known through its call centre. Both bookmakers already offer good iPhone applications.

I found his response somewhat interesting and thought that it really demonstrated how, if an organisation considers user experience as truly cross-channel, it can really begin to gain competitive advantage and win customers.

He said: “I’ve recently started a new job which keeps me out of the office or on the road half of the time. This means that after doing my homework on any given day’s races, I am ready to place my bets from around midday, where I’ll either be sitting in front of my PC or on the mobile in the car.” “OK”, I said, “but why are you not using your usual bookmaker that also has a good iPhone app?” Because, he said “ just recently I’ve started playing poker too, and this new bookmaker is the only company that will allow me to switch funds between sports and poker easily on the mobile. I can bet in the day on the horses on the PC or on the iPhone, use my winnings on poker at home in the evening and in the morning I will have the same funds accessible on my iPhone to bet on sports again. What’s more, if I win on either I can walk into the bookies and collect the cash over the counter and have it in my hand. I can’t do that with my old bookmaker.”

That last line really struck a chord, “a penny dropping” moment as I heard it described this week. Invariably the projects in which Foviance has traditionally been involved in tend to be in silos, and I believe this is commonplace amongst the majority of our gaming clients where the different businesses think and operate as such. What we are finding more and more however with people like Luke and other customers, is that they become loyal to a particular operator not just because they have the best sports book or the best casino, but because the experience of using the different betting methods and administrating their funds is seamless, particularly across multiple channels.

Being able to move money between different betting accounts, having single sign-in security, talking on the telephone about an individual’s account rather than just sports book or just casino, collecting money from the High Street – these are all important to any player or punter. Brands getting this right can make the difference between having loyal customers with healthy cross fertilisation across games, or a few customers using a single game now and again.

This article was writtern as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

Apple have taken a strong stance on the inclusion of analytics within apps to date. Steve Jobs was rather vocal following the outing of the iPad by Flurry Analytics earlier this year  and there was speculation that this impacted Apple’s view on all analytics tools for the iPhone. Apple restricted the use of embedded analytics tracking code in any App and also stated that that app tracking must be an opt-in system. This obviously has significant user experience issues, not to mention questions over how representative the data is. Apple will provide some data to developers and advertisers: developers can see how many downloads their app has had, along with revenue and some limited geographical usage; advertisers can see the aggregated anonymous geographic location install base via Apple’s new mobile advertising platform, iAd. The app tracking also allows developers to see how people are using their applications, which areas of the app are popular, which buttons are used most frequently, how often the app is launched, and so forth.

So how does this work and why is this limiting to the digital analytics industry? Well, most analytic tools embed a small section of code into the app that make a call to a data collection server hosted on the Internet – which obviously means it must be online. This raises various challenges with mobile devices, as they change location and more importantly will have varying levels of Internet access. This raises several questions, firstly if you have a particular work flow in your app, then you may have embedded tracking on each key stage of the process. If the phone then goes offline, then the tracking calls may not be completed in a timely fashion, or even at all. As such it would appear from the data that the user didn’t complete the process leading to very misleading results. Secondly, now that all of the UK carriers have introduced limits on how much data can be used, it raises an interesting question over how many aspects of the app should be tracked. Admittedly the size of the tracking requests is minimal (typically less than 5Kb per call), but none-the-less, repeated use of features with tracking included will push up the data usage on the device.

So, with the apparent antennae issues with the iPhone4, you have to wonder how reliable and representative any tracking data will be? If certain geographical areas have low signal strength, then it is far more likely that the tracking calls will be lost and as such it would skew the audience figure of your app to geographical areas with stronger signal strength.  

So how reliable and representative is data collected from mobile devices? Well, given the nature of the data collection it’s extremely difficult to validate – you cannot easily test your app in every location that your target audience are going to be using the app. What happens if they use your app extensively whilst on the tube without Internet access? As such a definitive answer on validity is probably unlikely. However, some data is definitely better than none. The issues with reception loss will likely average out over time as it will probably affect all tracking calls equally. Companies such as Flurry Analytics and AppClix are working on these problems and already have some techniques to deal with them. However, as signal strength will vary with location and device there is no universal answer and so we’ll be keen to see how this progresses.

The key, as with all analytics work, is to put the data in context and take account of any data collection issues that may affect our clients mobile activity. Data may be king, but insight is divine!

First of all, iPhone4 does not mean iPhone 4G! Apple has branded their phone in a way that suggests it has got 4th generation mobile broadband capabilities whereas it doesn’t. As far as I’m concerned, the upcoming HTC Evo is the only handset so far equipped with such a feature. But it doesn’t really matter anyway as here in the UK there are at the moment no 4G infrastructures.

Then comes the feature that should transform the way we communicate: video calling. Video calling effectively combines audio and video, and is indeed a step ahead of traditional phone usage. But this is no breakthrough. Six years ago, I was already using a phone (manufactured by Sharp at the time) that allowed me to talk and watch my interlocutor at the same time. But the video calling concept never really took off and fell into oblivion until now. However the main issue that resides in the iPhone4’s new feature is that it only works through the WiFi. In other words users need to be connected to a WiFi network to place video calls. And this goes without saying that the receiver must also possess a phone capable of interpreting and displaying the video signal.

This brings me to my third point: the iPhone4 WiFi capabilities. Apple’s handheld devices are not particularly renowned for embedding powerful WiFi aerials, be it the iPhones series or the iPad. The iPhone4 surely doesn’t escape the rule. Proof is Steve Jobs’ Keynote speech last April: his demo of the iPhone4 was plagued by slow WiFi connection issues.

And last but not least, many iPhone4 customers reported signal reception issues, depending on how they were holding the device. This is certainly bad press for the device, especially as there are no quick fixes for the problem. In response, Apple told its customers “not to hold the device the wrong way”. This was a bit uncalled-for and shows that Apple should definitely start thinking about doing some sort of user research.

In sum, the iPhone4 is definitely far from being the perfect next generation mobile device. But don’t get me wrong; the new iPhone is a nice piece of electronics and my intention was not to discard it. Yet it is still not as good as you think.

This post was originally posted by Xavier Klingenfus