The mobile industry may like to assume users are passive consumers– willing to settle for few-sizes-fits-all applications – but, in reality, users are demanding more choice and more control over their mobile experiences. mobilePeople doesn’t simply respond to customer needs; it seeks to shape them by drawing from the ideas and innovations of its customers.

Spurred by the consumer-centric culture of the Internet – with its emphasis on interactivity, speed, individuality and openness – the consumer’s influence on value creation has never been greater. In the mobile space the focus has shifted from creating products and services to delivering personal mobility experiences.

It’s a revolution in value creation that business professors C.K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy outline in their compelling book, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers. In it the authors argue that consumers are no longer just product purchasers – they have become partners in creating customized experiences that add meaning and pleasure to their daily lives.

Put another way, companies that co-create with their customers will not only develop more fulfilling, user-focussed offers; they will produce powerful user-centered innovation that is the source of lasting competitive advantage.

To this end mobilePeople regularly taps into the innovation resources of its lead users and incorporates their input into the development of future mobile search solutions. The company intuitively understands that offering superior mobile experiences requires new sources of innovation and creativity — and demands a deep understanding of customer needs.

The company’s revolutionary approach to personalized mobile search has its roots in the work of its User Lab. Established in 2005 the usability research facility engages end users throughout the design process to evaluate the desirability of new ideas and possible solutions.

The approach puts the user at the center of all the company does, notes Trine Plambech, mobilePeople’s Senior Designer, User Experience. "We focus on more than usability; we also examine how people feel when they navigate through our application. Mobile search is a personal quest on a personal device, therefore, the emotional reaction of users to the solution is as important, if not more so, as their opinion of its functionality and features."

Open innovation

To gain a better understanding of how users rate both mobilePeople typically begins the usability analysis by inviting a small focus group of users to the User Lab to test mobile applications and provide feedback. “It is extremely important for us to see how easy it is for an average user to grasp the functionality.” Plambech, together with her colleague Lisa Sommer, mobilePeople’s Director of User Experience, then observe and expertly document how users interact with the solution.

The results, combined with a more in-depth analysis of the usability and functionality "as seen from an innovation expert angle," are collected in a detailed report to the service provider customer, Plambech explains. "In this report we synthesize user experiences and expert observations, and make recommendations about how we can improve the service in future updates or releases."

"Markets are not passive; they are becoming more like forums where users actively define what they want in services and solutions," Sommer observes. "Our view is the underlying development system must respond to the user’s experience and not the other way around."

Moreover, the site enables the company to engage in close dialogue with users and capture their intelligence and ideas. "It’s an important touch point between the company and the customer, and it also users to show use in real-time whether we have created a good mobile search experience," Sommer says. That way the company can make adjustments to work in progress and not risk delivering a solution that has missed the mark in any way. "Users inject their views into the solution creation process so we can consistently deliver an experience users will value in the end."

High-Tech, high-touch

While mobilePeople clearly invests effort in its usability testing and service prototype, it is perhaps its practice of identifying and harnessing its highly-motivated, cutting-edge lead users that sets it apart from the crowd.

Indeed, the benefits of what the industry calls lead-user innovation, is well documented. Eric von Hippel, head of the Technological Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and author of Democratizing Innovation, a book that tracks the impact of user-driven innovation across a range of industries, is a strong proponent of this growing phenomenon.

“Advances in technologies enable lead users to innovate and develop exactly what they want. Fortunately, what lead users want is precisely what the rest of the market will demand,” von Hippel observes. The result is a virtuous cycle in which empowered users tell companies what they want and companies listen. “Harnessing users who have a high incentive to innovate can yield breakthrough and profitable – products and services."

Understanding the seismic shift to a participatory society, mobilePeople conducts Future Fridays, regular sessions at company headquarters that bring together lead users and usability experts to discuss and debate the requirements of an optimal mobile search experience.

Users are also paid a fee for their participation, but money is not the main draw. "There is a certain cool-factor associated with participating in our innovation process and users are eager to play an important role," Plambech says. To reinforce their pivotal position in the co-creation of mobile search experiences mobilePeople calls these users mobile innovators, and rewards them with the knowledge that they are members of an elite community that can shape services for the world.

The Future Friday workshops allow mobilePeople to learn about the end-users’ passions, interests, problems and requirements, and the role mobile search plays in their daily lives. A recent workshop, for example, focussed on mobile communities and sharing content as well as search results between members. In another workshop, which examined interaction with maps and mobile local search, mobilePeople followed users as they tried to find their way through streets as they navigated the area using maps and their mobile phones.

Getting personal

At mobilePeople usability is about much more than the ease-of use with which users can access applications and tools to achieve an outcome; usability is about the "simplicity and clarity of end-user interaction." To this end usability testing and thinking must factor in all aspects of the mobile search experience, including the relevance of results, their presentation and their contribution to users’ daily routines. "That’s why we talk about liquid search. The entire search experience is a fluid activity and one action must flow into the other," Plambech explains.

A prime example of this is the mobile local search application mobile people developed on behalf of its customer Yell.com, a leading search engine providing local information services and directions to an estimated 15.7 million regular mobile Internet users in the U.K. Its two new mobile services, a dual application and browser-based approach, enable users to search Yell.com’s directory and interact with break-through features including an intelligent “regular request” list, an auto-suggestion function, zoomable maps and turn-by-turn directions, and a click-to-call button that allows users to find and contact a business in two to three clicks. Users can also save search results to their phone contacts or share it with their peers.

"We got positive feedback on the service throughout our usability testing, but we also got a few key suggestions from users that allowed us to improve the experience at an early stage in the process," Sommer recalled. Initially, mobilePeople had designed the application to display all the results on one page to deliver a comprehensive search experience within a few clicks. While it was important to avoid increasing the number of clicks, it was critical to provide users a clear and uncluttered overview of the search results.

Based on user input mobilePeople divided and organized the results in a way that was less overwhelming and much more user-friendly. "The users benefited from a service that had a much better flow and we benefited from being able to make adjustments that mattered."

Moving forward, the optimal user experience – and one mobilePeople is working to deliver – is a mobile search experience in which the activity of searching disappears.

Search engines tend to deliver too much of a good thing in the mobile space, overwhelming users with too many results when they would much rather have the right results tailored to their individual needs and based on factors such as profile, preferences and past purchase behavior as well as location and time of day.

Put another way, users won’t accept long lists of URLs – but they will demand actionable and personalized results based on their personal profiles. To be genuinely useful, mobile search results will also have to factor context into the equation.

With this in mind, mobilePeople has sharpened its focus on developing mobile search experiences that serve up content to users based on their actions, passions and where they are. "Our usability research tells us users expect their mobile search experiences to be personal," Plambech says. "Search is not just the way users navigate the mobile Web; it is becoming how they manage and organize their daily routines and the search experiences we create at mobilePeople have to reflect this shift."

In Sommer’s opinion, mobile search must ultimately act as an electronic butler that can deliver its master – the user – what they want before they ask for it.

Moreover, the technology should sense what the user might appreciate and make intelligent suggestions that fit the user’s lifestyle and life stage. "The transparency of information discussed and shared during our usability testing sessions and innovation workshops has created a basis of trust between the customers and our company," Sommer explains. With this insight mobilePeople can create and perfect a search experience that, like a butler, has users’ interests at heart.