Adventures in mobile

This month I attended ‘Adventures in mobile’ when the Brand Perfect Tour landed in London.

Aral Balkan opened proceedings with an enthusiastic presentation on ‘Making the new everyday things’.

As a designer and a developer and a true advocate of UX he went as far as saying UX is now a commodity with brand success and failure rooted heavily in the digital channel and the experiences we (the industry) are creating.

UX now creates an emotional response and, to be the best, the experience not only has to be functional, but has to ‘feel’ amazing. As an experience design agency we’re certainly with Aral on this.

Following Aral were a series of sessions that were grounded in successful case studies; Tim Hussain from Sky, Stephen Pinches and Dan Skinner from FT.com and James Christian from Net-a-Porter. From some of the lunchtime conversations and the noises around the room these success case studies are rare.

The day continued with Alan Tam and Frank Lampan from Monotypethe fuelling the debate on whether to go native (with apps) or if the implementation of HTML5 makes mobile web the only real future platform. Before John Oswald concluded the formal presentations talking about brand digital DNA and what the new wave of interfaces means for brands, if they’re still lucky to have an interface and not be resigned to data producers or handlers.

Finally, we were all tasked with building an experience for the institute of contemporary art, in 45 minutes. There were some good ideas flowing demonstrating the thought that is now required to build an ‘experience’, not just an app.

The underlying message I took away is that mobile is currently, where the internet was 10 years ago. Few businesses and organisations are taking it seriously as a channel. With that in mind there’s a good chance history could repeat itself. Cited examples in the sessions that provide good motivation for ‘the board’ about those who went bankrupt, or those who nearly went bankrupt, because they ignored the web as an ecommerce channel. The same is now true of mobile.

The strategies Net-a-porter, Sky and FT.com have, and continue to develop, are examples to all businesses of where they should be thinking of investing if they want to stay in the game and not be put out of business by a more agile, fast mover who is currently investing heavily in mobile.

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