Building an effective mobile phone portfolio with UME
Last night I had an interesting discussion with Aaron on the topic of ‘Usability Magnitude Estimation’ where we discussed the various capabilities of this very scientific and powerful tool that elicits a user’s perception of a product. Mick and Aaron have successfully applied this methodology on various software applications, devices and even the BART public transit system in the Bay Area.
Coming from Motorola and having seen the challenges of the mobile device industry from close quarters, I’m writing down my perspective on applying UME to the building of an effective portfolio.
To give some background on UME: Usability Magnitude Estimation is a methodology used by us to measure the value of the user’s perception of expected and actual user experience. This is a powerful tool that can be effectively used to improve many product capabilities and hence company portfolios.
A telecom service provider portfolio mainly consists of products (cell phones) and services. Let us consider the products aspect of the portfolio and apply UME:
A portfolio is mainly divided based on segmentation and price point. A cell phone has physical and digital attributes that contribute to the overall experience delivered. (physical color, finish, keypad usability, density, one handed opening for clams, digital power up/down screen, individual applications, tasks within individual applications, especially high ARPU tasks, graphical elements etc.)