Quick trip to Zürich yesterday for Mobile Monday where I was invited to participate as a workshop moderator. The keynote speaker was Clive Grinyer who recently moved to Cisco as a customer experience director (after a position at Orange/France Telecom). His presentation was called "I've never used that: adoption and accessibility in mobile technology" and it addressed the disconnect between technology, and what users actually want and need. Here are my quick notes:

"I hear a lot this "i've never used that" and I worry about it, especially after 5 years working at FT

mobility is everywhere, cheap, and cool how can we help clients using it? what i love about mobility is that customer who are driving usages when it works for them: voice, sms text... but people reject it when it's wrong: overselling of WAP as the mobile internet, low (3%) uptake of 3G video calling, slow uptake of mobile music, complex user interfaces, menus and terminology. 90% of users access only 10% of functionalities. Customers differ widely in their use of mobile, from teenagers, old users, etc.

after 5 years of mobile internet, 18% of US and european accessed the internet once a month after 1 month 98% of users did the same! they must have done something good! and now there's lots of internet phones, and normal people buy them (fully screen touch interface 3g and wifi enabled devices specifically designed for the internet) now we even have usable applications that make money, which is a first

iphones, clones change game this is purely because of usability and design

services finally work, since 2003, consumers have rated LBS a their favorite technology feature but usage was zero until nokia, google and apple make it work and a gathering of new tech is about to happen: NFC, new LBS

Grinyer's law: "it takes 5 years before a new mobile tech becomes usable enough that people will actually use it" it can work but it takes more time to be adopted

something's wrong, how to improve?

open system makes it easier to make applications but not be integrated and designed around the user; co-creation tells you what people think they want but they not what they don't know they want!; wisdom of crowds is nice but what if great ideas remain inaccessible?

we have to design our future: mobile experiences have to be better coordinated; we have to move to leaderships position and not jut experts; we have to make our colleagues aware they designing the experience with EVERY decision

creating a vision of how things will be at the beginning (what about writing the user guide at the beginning?)

find out what's really going on, what do people do? you know what is going on when you go to the toilet of life!

make it simple, co-create with users and prototypes, close user-testing and this should be part of design, not a different unit

understand the future: use probes such as whirlpool's washing machine (plants that grows in sort of washing machine) to try things, get feedbacks, have a dialogue with the future

make it for everyone, people-centric

put in love, even if you have usability. e-books generally have no love in them, they are horrible pieces of technology.

hold your vision, management process where people give their opinions can lead to a total mess

Across all industries, usability unlocks adoption and finds great leaders (jonathan ive, bill buxton): we should not stay at usability departments, we need to make others know that it's just a nice to have"