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Mobile desktop search: using discovery to increase ARPU

Product Type: Market Research Report
Published by: Ovum Plc
Published: May 2007
Product Code: R464-553
Description
Thanks to the announcement of the Apple iPhone in January 2006, user interface (UI) design has been pushed up the priority list for mobile phones and looks set to be a hot topic for the next year or two. It may even become a true source of differentiation in the market for a while.

Mobile phone user interfaces have been stable for a long time, with little more than tweaks being introduced over the last 4-5 years. There is strong uniformity across mobile phone vendors on the approach to organising functions and content within the UI and, as a result, most phones are superficially similar to use.

Basically this is a good thing because most people can now pick up a new phone and be confident that they can carry out at least the basic tasks without reading the manual.

However, during those 4-5 years, smartphones have become very smart and even mid-range phones have more functions in them than most non-technical people can cope with.

At the same time, phones have also seen rapid expansion of their memory, so that they can hold gigabytes of content.

Nonetheless, usage of advanced data services and content on mobile phones remains disappointing, with operators’ data revenues advancing fairly slowly even as they roll out good 3G networks. Side-loading of music, for example, is growing much faster.

We believe that the design philosophy of existing mobile phone UIs is now seriously getting in the way of finding what you want on a mobile phone.

The time has come to make local search a core capability of mobile phones to help users discover both the functionality of the phone and the content that they store on it. For a great many users in the PC world, desktop search has become a more natural mode of interaction than the Windows file structure.

We also believe that implementing local search will push up average revenue per user (ARPU) for mobile network operators and will further provide interesting opportunities for mobile advertising.

This report is based on our own extensive experience as users, as well as supply side research. It explores why we need desktop search on mobile phones and what the impact is likely to be.
Table of Contents
Ovum view
Many phone functions go unused - the UI is part of the reason
Advanced content and services exist
Handsets have improved
But advanced service and content use still disappoints
The handset UI is an important factor
Mobile UIs mix phone and PC navigation
Telephony UI is one key design influence
Hierarchical menus are the other key influence
New functions require new UI thinking
Search as a key navigational tool
Search is philosophically different from folders
Search should be easily accessible to the user
Some examples in the PC world
Benefits of search
Disadvantages of search
Examples of local mobile search
Hierarchies and search fail to scale on mobile
Hybrid approach between hierarchies and search
Filtering by context - a variety of useful approaches
Issues that we will face in using search within mobile phones
How to visualise the results easily on a small screen
How to maintain metadata when moving content between applications and devices
Power management
Impact on mobile networks
Other implications of using search within mobile phones
Table of figures
Figure 1 Vodafone: data as a percentage of service revenues
Figure 2 The hierarchical folder structure
Figure 3 Hierarchical folder structure on the mobile UI
Figure 4 Too many functions for most people to cope with
Figure 5 Spectrum of approaches for organising information
Figure 6 Scenarios the UI could be configured to cope with
Figure 7 Search software products
Figure 8 Approaches to scaling
Figure 9 Amazon search
Figure 10 Pandora.com
Figure 11 Search scope from a mobile phone
Figure 12 Different visualisation options for searches on ‘David Bowie’
Ordering and More Information
Price and Delivery Options


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