CTIA 2008
“Addressing Usability in the Wake of the iPhone”. This was the title of a session I attended at CTIA a couple weeks ago. Based on the title, it sounded promising and I was excited to hear what the panelists had to say. Unfortunately, it was a major letdown and showed me that too many people still don’t understand what user experience and usability are really about.
The panelists included senior management of some intriguing newcomers as well as long-established companies. But the entire 90 minutes was spent talking about the features that they would provide in their products. There was lots of talk along the lines of, “We have this new, great technology that users definitely want and it’s important to provide a great user experience.” Then they would describe in detail the feature set without further discussion about how to bring the great user experience to life.
This showed me that focus in the industry is still very much on feature lists with minimal understanding of how to create great experiences that involve those features. Yes, it would be great if I could perform x feature on my phone, but only if the threshold of usage were low enough that I would actually use it. Unfortunately, this message was completely lacking during the panel. This wouldn’t have been so thoroughly disappointing except for the fact that the title of the session was “Addressing Usability”!
Overall, what I saw at CTIA was disappointing from a UX perspective. There is some great industrial design happening and definitely some wonderful technological features being developed, but in my mind there’s still only one major player who has demonstrated a commitment to excellence in mobile UX. (That would be Apple, in case you’re still wondering).