Analyst Angle: Mobile device management and the user experience

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly feature, Analyst Angle. We’ve collected a group of the industry’s leading analysts to give their outlook on the hot topics in the wireless industry.
Why is the mobile user experience important?
For many mobile service providers in developed markets, what is termed the “customer experience” or “user experience” is currently an area of strategic focus. In short, this means that players in the most mature and competitive markets have recognized that their ability to differentiate on the basis of products and services is limited. If they do not wish to engage in a race to the bottom by competing on price, then their best hope of standing out from the competition is on the strength of the overall experience they offer customers.
But “the user experience” is not just the mobile industry’s catchphrase of the moment. Rather, it is an acknowledgment of where the focal point of the industry needs to be going forward if it is to drive renewed growth. To date, that focus has been on creating and launching compelling new mobile services, but now it needs to shift to the users themselves and, more particularly, the way in which they experience those services.
Saturation in mature markets has limited the opportunities for growth from existing services, creating an environment in which service providers have felt an imperative both to grow ARPU from and to prevent the loss of existing users by means of new products and services. We have accordingly seen an explosion in innovation over the past five years, with each new service launch coming hot on the heels of the last.
While services such as mobile voice and SMS messaging clearly filled a latent need among consumers to communicate at any time and in any place, subsequent introductions such as WAP browsing, MMS, mobile gaming and, most recently, mobile TV have (so far) largely failed to deliver on expectations.
It is becoming increasingly clear that many prosaic, but fundamental, causes underlie the lack of success of many modern mobile products and services. These factors are typically lumped together as contributing to a poor overall mobile user experience.
Both mobile voice services and SMS are clear examples of how good user experiences – enhanced by cross-network roaming and interoperability, among other things – can transform sensible ideas into services that, for many users, have become indispensable.
What makes for a good mobile user experience?
In essence, users need to find what they want, when they want it, with minimal complexity and to a satisfactory quality. With this in mind, mobile products and services should be:
–accessible: easy to find, easy to set up, easy to use
–timely: relevant and convenient according to the context at the time of use
–personalized: appropriate to the user, their device(s) and their connection
–available: providing an appropriate quality of service, and secure.
Increasingly, they should also be:
–portable/transferable, across devices and domains
–interactive
–blended/immersive
–seamless
–graphically rich.
Key (software) technology enablers for MUE
Some of the most fundamental technology enablers of a good mobile user experience are to be found in the network and device domains, such as high-speed radio access networks, service-enabling platforms in the core network, and device hardware capabilities.
But implementation cycles for these technologies are long. More importantly, decisions relating to them are largely out of the hands of those people who are responsible for actually developing the services, whether they be service providers or third parties. The technological enablers within the easy reach of service developers are software-related.
We believe there are at least five (software) solution domains that are key to the mobile user experience. All of these technologies are accessible to service developers within mobile service providers or third-party content providers:
1, Device platforms and application environments
2, Service discovery tools
3, Content lifecycle management
4, User experience optimisation, including mobile service metrics and monitoring
5, Device management.
Device management as a key enabler of a good user experience
Device management technologies enable service providers to anticipate, fix and actively prevent the device problems that impact usability and service usage. This includes enabling devices to adapt their functionality after they have shipped from the factory. Some key MDM technologies include configuration, FOTA, security, software management, diagnostics, backup and restore. They exist in order that users’ devices and services perform as expected, while minimising the need for manual intervention – surely the minimum we would expect of a good user experience.
But device management can bring much wider benefits to the service provider who is prepared to use it in a more strategic manner across the business. We outline just two of these below.
A holistic approach to the user experience lifecycle
Each of the software enablers described above cannot address the ‘user experience deficit’ alone.
Consideration of the user experience needs to span the entire lifecycle of a service, through design to delivery and management. Although numerous individual technologies or products may help to improve the user experience, it will be their successful combination that will make the biggest contribution. Making this into a sustainable positive effect requires the establishment of good end-to-end processes governing the whole lifecycle. This is therefore a good time for service providers to start thinking in terms of a mobile user experience lifecycle.
In fact, the traditional design-deliver-manage model is itself starting to change as the boundaries between stages become more fluid. In particular, new device management technologies such as firmware over-the-air and software management are blurring the line between service design and management, since devices can be provisioned with new platform capabilities and applications can be continually refreshed remotely.
“Experience gap” demands device-side data
Another area where device management can play a crucial role in improving the user experience is in the provision of data to support business intelligence activities.
Operators are targeting many areas of their operations and technology infrastructure in search of “customer experience” improvements. One of these is the use of business intelligence, in all its forms, to inform their understanding of what customers are actually experiencing. The hope is to use this intelligence to make targeted improvements.
Mobile operators face two particular challenges in doing this. First, the physical qualities of a radio network make it inherently more difficult to manage actual quality of service (QoS) as it is experienced by subscribers. Second, mobile terminals have evolved into computing devices offering increasing amounts of functionality that is wholly independent of the network. The operator’s poor visibility into this local device realm makes it increasingly incapable of understanding the subtle customer clues that might indicate a revenue threat or opportunity.
Together these two problems create an “experience gap,” which operators need to overcome if they are to make effective decisions about ways to improve the user experience.
Analytical applications that make use of or rely on data collected on mobile handsets are, by and large, a recent phenomenon in the mobile telecoms arena. However, they have already gained considerable interest from operators, handset OEMs and software vendors alike. All of these applications offer to bridge the divide between what a handset user actually experiences and what the service provider thinks they are experiencing.
The data which might serve as a useful proxy
to an end user’s subjective experience includes:
–data on what services and applications the user is consuming, including local ones
–status and performance data for device, network, services and applications
–the user’s behaviour in interacting with all of these.
The combination of these data points can, in theory, enable a service provider to answer complex questions, such as:
–is a usability problem reducing consumption of network services and therefore endangering revenues?
–is the user consuming non-network services that might indicate an opportunity for up-selling (for example, offering membership of a gaming community service to a user that side-loads games)?
Device management can act as an important source of such data, which can be extracted from a service provider’s platforms for analysis, interpretation and decision-making. Broad device management solutions can comprise elements such as automatic device detection, device profile repositories, and MDM client software on the handset, which together can provide rich datasets covering many aspects of device performance at an individual and aggregate level. Diagnostics applications are a particularly useful source of such data.
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The figure below illustrates how device management enables not just service providers, but their partners, to ensure that devices are fully equipped to support revenue-generating services at every stage of their lifecycle. To achieve the full benefits, service providers will need to make their device management platforms accessible in some form to partners.

Questions or comments about this column? Please e-mail Jessica at Jessica.Figueras@ovum.com or Tony at tony.cripps@ovum.com or RCR Wireless News at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.