SXSW Panel: Life After The iPhone
Maestracci (Groove Mobile) / Jenson (Mobile UI Manager, Google) / Kaushansky (Tellme, Microsoft) / Ryan / Outlaw (Avenue A | Razorfish)lifeafteriphone.ning.com
Kaushansky: Saying “mobile” doesn’t cut it anymore. Is the person walking? Driving? Is it noisy?
Outlaw: Sees iPhone as the beginning of an age of disruptive mobility. Traditional user experience deliverables are rapidly becoming extinct. Lack of standards in mobile will require hands-on experimentation.
Q: What do you love and not love about iPhone?
Maestracci: Multitouch was a breakthough in usability. But simple tasks like making calls, SMS, are somewhat challenging.
Jenson: Audacity of design… No menus or scroll-bars. But you can’t do the web in your pocket… But Apple keeps pushing that. You don’t want to read the NYT on these things.
Kaushansky: Impressed by visual voicemail. But coming from the voice world, why does it take five clicks to make a phone call? Why can’t I just say “call mom?”
Outlaw: A historic benchmark in mobile user experience. Myth was cell phones needed to be complicated to use. Apple broke that. Wonder if having hardware and software inseparable is going to be along term problem… Looking back, Windows won the desktop because you could extend it.
Jenson: Enabling much of the desktop. But what’s best on mobile? iPhone may reinvent itself as a new Blackberry. But because its so popular you may be able to fund stupid stuff…
Q: Who else is taking design seriously in mobile?
Maestracci: Sony Erricson is trying to push the envelope in a traditional way.