May 2009, Manifesto #7: The delicate art of balancing commercial imperative and user experience

• Priya Prakash, Creative Director, Consumer Experience, Nokia (Profile)

• Are great user experiences and the commercial imperative to make a profit from mobile services fundamentally incompatible? Can paying for a service actually enhance the users' perception of the experience?
• Is the funnel concept the most appropriate model for generating mobile application revenues, drawing in large numbers of users with free features and convincing incrementally smaller groups to pay for premium features?
• Will the tradition of distraction-based advertising ever work in the mobile environment, where users are more focused on particular missions?
• Which revenue models provide the best experience for the customer?

• Analysing 'Comes with music' - Nokia's big day, part I
• Is it time Blyk was re-classified?
• Moving from mobile capabilities to mobile compulsion
• The operator and manufacturer identity crisis

• 90.00%: The overwhelming majority of users interviewed by mobile social network itsmy.com visited the site first whenever they've used the mobile web. 75% of these users also wanted to see a link to their operator's homepage from itsmy.com, allowing them to easily top-up their credit. | (Source: itsmy.com)
• $5bn: Wagers made through mobile devices will rise to $5 billion in 2009 according to a report by Juniper Research. | (Source: Juniper Research)
• $5.4bn: Global revenues from mobile gaming reached $5.4 billion in 2008, up 20% from 2007. Growth was slow in Western Europe and North America, but increased rapidly in China, India and Africa. | (Source: Juniper Research)
• 7.00%: Juniper Research believes the annual growth rate of the mobile entertainment market will decline to 7% during 2009 and 2010 in a 'worst case' scenario of economic slowdown. However, its most optimistic forecast predicts annual growth of 19%, with global revenues reaching $36 billion in 2010. | (Source: Juniper Research)
• 32.40%: Almost a third of US iPhone owners have downloaded a game, compared with 3.8% of the wider population downloading games during 2008. | (Source: Rethink Wireless)
• 50m: Verizon Wireless customers downloaded 50m music and video clips in Q4 2008. | (Source: Verizon)
• 108.00%: Complaints to PhonePayPlus (PPP), the UK premium services watchdog, more than doubled from 2007 to 2008. 8000 complaints were registered in a 12 month period, prompting PPP to introduce tougher measures to improve the quality of premium services. | (Source: Mobile Entertainment)
• 61.00%: 61% of UK and US users have stopped using services such as email, internet browsing, instant messaging and MMS because they couldn't solve the usability problems they encountered, according to a Coleman Parkes study of 4000 users on behalf of Mformation. | (Source: Coleman Parkes / Mformation)
• 340.00%: Electronic Arts, which makes games for iPhone platform, saw a 340% increase in sales over the 2008/9 holiday period, buoyed by a seasonal uptick in purchasing by Apple customers and a sales promotion where the company cut prices for its products by 50%. | (Source: MocoNews)
• 20 mins: Subscribers to Qualcomm's MediaFlo mobile TV services in US are spending an average of 20 minutes per day watching content on their handset, equal to the number of minutes they spend making voice calls. Qualcomm is rolling out MediaFlo in 100 markets throughout the US during 2009, covering 200m potential users. | (Source: Qualcomm)

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