Designing the Mobile User Experience

I've added reading notes on Barbara Ballard's Designing the Mobile User Experience. It's a fairly good read, and takes a sensible approach to designing for the mobile device and user that's worth considering, in spite of the fact that the content of the book will become dated as technology and user behaviors progress.

The thrust of her argument merits consideration: that mobile is "different," that is, the way in which people use mobile devices is significantly different from the way in which they use desktop computers, which may explain why mobile has struggled to gain acceptance for over a decade now (the first phase of mobile mania started in 1999, when it was believed that people would pay for information services on primitive phones that could handle two 16-charqacter lines of text).

The main problem is that the design approach to mobile has been to miniaturize desktop applications and Web services, failing to consider that the mobile user uses their device while in motion, using one hand, in an environment of distractions, and for quick reference in the context of location. With that in mind, the reason most mobile applications have been terrible failures is clear: they are ported haphazardly from one channel to another without any though of the needs of the user in a very different channel.

The differences considered, most applications meant for the desktop are simply not suited to be carried over to the mobile platform, whereas the unique needs of the mobile user, given the context of use, suggest additional opportunities for applications that would be of little use to the desktop.

In all, the mobile channel requires a different approach - and until it is considered as a medium unto itself, rather than a miniaturized version of the personal computer, there is likely to be little success in exploiting the channel.

Reconciling Profit and Savings

Keynes reckons that in the aggregation of all production and consumption in a market can be viewed in terms of the following syllogism:

1. Income = Consumption + Investment
2. Savings = Income - Consumption
3. Savings = (Consumption + Investment) - Consumption
4. Savings = Investment

I have two objections. First, that the first equation seems to imply that a producer can increase his income by increasing his consumption or investment, which is plainly wrong. Income is derived by subtracting both consumption and investment from revenue. Second, that the income and consumption of the consumer are the same as the income and consumption of the producer, when they are in fact two different things.

Hence:

1. Producer Profit = Revenue - Producer Consumption - Capital Investment
2. Consumer Savings = Consumer Income - Consumer Consumption

There seems to be no connection between the two, until you consider that in the aggregation of all production and consumption, the producers' revenue is equal to the consumers' consumption (the consumers having purchased everything they consumes from producers), and that the income of the consumer is equal to the labor costs of the producer (the act of production based upon labor and materials, but the materials being provided by labor of other producers).

I also have the sense that capital investment is wrongly identified as something separate from cost. Investment in a business is a cash outflow that is ultimately a cost of production. The differentiation of a machine that will be consumed by the act of production, slowly and over the course of a decade, from other materials that will be consumed immediately in the creation of the current product is a matter of accounting in order to pay taxes on an annual basis (to spread the long-term costs over a longer period of time). It is essentially a cost of production and, going by the reasoning of the last paragraph, it too must be considered a labor cost (the cost of building a machine being the labor cost to mine ore, refine metal, forge parts, etc.)

To revisit the premises:

1. Producer Profit = Consumer Consumption - Labor Cost
2. Consumer Savings = Labor Cost - Consumer Consumption

Just looking at the equations, this would seem to set up a system of perpetual degradation, where the laborers consume as much as they produce, and at the same cost, but there is nothing to cover the non-labor cost, which must be covered either out of consumer savings or producer income, until one or the other (or both) is depleted entirely.

To return to syllogisms, this boils down as follows:

1. Producer Profit = Consumer Consumption - Labor Cost
2. Consumer Savings = Labor Cost - Consumer Consumption
3. Producer Profit = (Labor Cost - Consumer Savings) - Labor Cost
4. Producer Profit = - Consumer Savings

This ultimately leads to the notion that there is a negative relationship (rather than a positive one, as Keynes concludes) between producer profit and consumer savings, which makes sense in the notion of exchange: the consumer can only save less by paying less for goods (decreasing producer profit) and the producer can only increase profit by charging more for goods (decreasing consumer savings).

However, my sense is that this overlooks the nature of production - in effect, something is produced by the act of production, that is of greater value than the inputs consumed by its production. It's simple enough to conceive that when producer and consumer are one person (a single individual who consumes what he produces), the "savings" or "profit" are any amount of production above the needs of consumption. So it is not necessarily a zero-sum equation. But when the tasks of production and consumption are split among two parties, it creates the sense that something is lost or destroyed, rather than created, by virtue of the act of production. This cannot be correct.

In the end, I think I'm only confusing myself further - and it's probably best to stumble forward and revisit this notion at a later time and figure out where I went wrong. If there's been any value to this meditation, it may be in understanding one of the fundamental flaws of Keynes's general theory.

Economic Ripple Effect

I've been reading on economics lately, and I'm stumbling across traces of a theory that doesn't seem to have been fully examined (or perhaps, I simply haven't read quite enough to find where it has been): that the interdependencies among industries and markets have a specific and aggregate ripple effect: that supply and demand for one good impact the supply and demand for specific other goods, and that each good has a potential impact on market demand for all goods.

The specific ripple effect is fairly simple to conceive, as it is generally evident on the large scale and has a significant impact on the demand of specific goods that are component materials of specific other goods.

It's no great leap of logic to understand that an immediate increase or decrease in the consumer demand for bread in a given market initially impacts the baker, whose reaction is to increase or decrease his production - thereby increasing or decreasing his demands for component materials for his own product. In that way, an increased demand for bread yields an increased demand for wheat.

The more general impact on demand for all goods in a market is derivative of the increased or reduced need for a specific component of production: labor. Just as the baker needs less what to make less bread, so does he need fewer workers to make the bread. However, the decrease in demand for labor has a more widespread effect on the market, in that the value given in exchange for labor (wages) is itself exchanged for a wide array of goods needed by the laborers.

This is clearly evident in the example of the "mill town" where the closing of a cotton mill is devastating not only to the farmers who grow cotton, but to the laborers who worked in the mill, whose income is eliminated and, as a result, all local merchants suffer a significant loss in business.

My sense is that this ripple effect is evident, to a lesser degree, in the broader market of goods, where a change in demand for a given good creates economic ripples throughout related industries and specific local economies. A 10% decrease in the demand for cloth leads to a 10% decrease in the demand for cotton and a 10% decrease in the demand for labor (more or less - the precise ratio of labor to materials varies).

Where demand of one good is decreased as a result of substitution of another good, the "general" ripples likely cancel one another out - labor is not eliminated, but merely transferred from one industry to another. Hence in the mill-town example, a decreased demand for cotton cloth as a result of substitution of wool would lead to a decreased demand for cotton as an agricultural product, an increase in the demand for raw wool, and no significant effect on the demand for labor (except as there are inequities of productivity in the separate industries).

I'm likely venturing into deeper waters at this point, and will end this note here.

Ethical Marketing 2

In an earlier post, I suggested that marketers lose all semblance of ethics when they attempt to offer a product to customer who can derive no benefit from having it - a consequences that can occur when there is a desire to increase sales beyond the point where all people who could benefit from owning a product already have it, and marketing seeks to "expand" into customer segments who have no need, but to whom the company wishes to sell nonetheless.

A comment came in that takes a slightly different approach to the notion, which also bears consideration: that the company makes a bad product. In effect, the product is not effective in addressing the needs it is intended to serve, but is nonetheless sold as an effective means of addressing those needs. This seems entirely plausible, and perhaps even more widespread, than the situation I originally described - and may in part be subjective as it depends on the perception of whether the product addresses the need in a way that is "good enough" to satisfy the customer.

This also seems a potential pitfall for cost leadership strategies: to compete on price, a manufacturer must compromise on quality - and the point at which the balance of cost-versus-quality is acceptable to the majority of the market is again a subjective matter. Doubtless, some customers will find a given ratio to be acceptable, others will not.

As such, my sense is that this may not be a matter of ethics so much as a matter of estimation. While I don't entirely dismiss the notion that there exist companies that seek to profit by pumping out cheap and shoddy merchandise, I think it more likely that there was an intent to provide some level of quality at a given price point, and can accept the notion that it was an earnest estimation on the part of the company to satisfy a given market segment's willingness to compromise on quality for the sake of price.

An ethical pitfall exists, in the potential to misrepresent the quality of the product to make it appealing to a customer who would not have purchased it if the quality had been represented accurately - though it would be difficult to substantiate the claim of an intentional act of deception.

So ultimately, I can accept this suggestion, though my sense is that the ethical shortcomings of marketers are less pronounced, and less distinct, in its regard.

Infrastructure: Positive and Negative

A pair of contrasting examples on the topic of infrastructure have my mind in motion. This is likely to be more of a ramble than usual, but perhaps it's going somewhere:

The first example is of logistics, specifically package delivery systems. The example was given, in the context of developing sites for an international audience, of locations where package delivery is not reliable or even available. In the US, we are accustomed to relatively fast and reliable delivery via the postal system and private carriers (FedEx, UPS, etc.), but in developing and underdeveloped nations, they lack such facilities, and as such e-commerce is a difficult proposition. In that way, the logistics infrastructure, the old fashioned business of trucks and men to carry things about, is essential to electronic commerce.

A few red herrings:

• Package delivery is said to have evolved from a local service to more of a national one. Companies would deliver their own goods at first, then evolved to hire private couriers to transport goods in the local market, then courier services formed a large and international network. It's an interesting parallel to the Internet.
• Infrastructure also includes the notion of free riders. To the shipper, the price of delivering an envelope to the office next door is the same as delivering the same envelope to a location in a remote area of Montana. The cost, per unit, to the shipping company is much greater in the latter case (you may have to have a man drive a vehicle a few hundred miles to deliver one envelope to one person). So in this way, people in remote locations pay less for logistical support than ones in urban areas.

The second example is of landline networks, specifically telephone service. The example in this instance is the high rate of adoption of mobile telephones in developing nations which stands in stark contrast to the low adoption rate of mobile in more economically mature nations. The difference is chiefly in the existence of a telecommunications infrastructure. In the US, the wired network is virtually ubiquitous, highly reliable, and quite cost-efficient, so land-line service is a given; whereas in third-world nations, where there is no wired network, the cost of establishing one would be significant, and it's cheaper and more efficient to simply go wireless. The point is that, in this instance, infrastructure inhibits rather than supports innovation.

And a few more red herrings:

• Mobile adoption is low in the US, but in other relatively developed areas such as Europe and Japan, mobile has been more readily adopted. In terms of infrastructure, the reason is the same: while these other nations are fairly well industrialized, they lacked a reliable and efficient wired network infrastructure. Given the geography, it simply is not feasible to implement a land-line network on the island of Japan. And as to Europe, I haven't heard a reasonable explanation, but their land-line telephone service remains famously abominable in terms of high cost and low reliability.
• It would also seem counterintuitive that mobile service is lacking in remote locations of the US, as this would seem to be a natural solution to the difficulty of geography, but I suspect that the reason for this is largely profitability: third-world nations are rather small and densely populated, so the number of people who can afford mobile service within the radius of a transceiver likely make it worthwhile to implement one, whereas the problem with the vast expanses of thinly-populated territory in the US is lack of the same ratio of subscribers to transceivers.