One Reason North America is so far behind in Mobile?

At Web Directions North ‘09, Rachel Hinman from Adaptive Path presented an inspiring session on the Mobile User Experience (further cementing my adoration for everything the Adaptive Path folks touch).

One comment that she made (slide 84, below) was that on the web we can annotate expectations. In accessibility, we’re explicitly told not to rely solely on color to denote something, so we add labels, icons, and explanational text. We have the real estate to do so. Working on mobile is obviously different, and we’ve seen some great developments in the field of gestural interfaces that offer alternative means to interact with the platform and the content (think about shaking or changing the orientation of your iphone).

As soon as the presentation was over, I couldn’t wait to ask Rachel if she thought the increase in these gestural interfaces was a matter of cause or effect: had they been developed because there was less opportunity to guide the user through an experience, and therefore it needed to be something they could explore more organically? She actually threw out a quote we’d heard earlier in another session on gestural interfaces:

The best designs are those that ‘dissolve into behaviour’
Naoto Fukasawa)

Hinman pointed out that keyboards and mice are intrusive: we need to learn to use them and gestural interfaces are simply more natural. This keyed off something for me in terms of languages and linguistics: in English, our written and oral systems are closely related. To use a keyboard we need to learn the physical way to use it, but the language capabilities are generally assumed to be present. Contrast this to Asia. A Washington Post article published in 2007 stated that illiteracy in China is still a significant problem, where up to 30% of adults in a particular community were unable to read and write.

So if a linguistic system is challenging for people to master, does it not make sense that other solutions will be primed for discovery?

After the session I asked Hinman if she thought this was a plausible reason for the dramatic difference in mobile phone usage and adoption, and she gave a more practical rationale: South Korea* was desolate a few years ago, which is the ideal environment for a strong technical infrastructure to be established.

Still, I would like to suppose that there is a more linguistic and cultural reason for the explosion of interactive and engaging technology coming from Asia. Just as small children are keen to pick up simple sign language before they can communicate verbally, we all have an innate need to communicate with others. I love to think that technology is serving this need in an engaging, entertaining way.

*The Asian market is years ahead of North America in terms of mobile phone features and usage, with South Korea leading the pack with a reported 90.7% penetration rate for mobile subscribers (as of May 2008).

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