Musings of a Marketing Maven

Mobile Insider’s Steve Smith confessed today to his “Google seduction” — a whole new level of experience that Google delivers to iPhone users via Google’s mobile-optimized services.

First off, Google for iPhone excels at speed and efficiency, and the app shows how much this matters in pulling a user in.

It Takes More Than Raw Network Speed

In my opinion the overall usability of the browsing experience makes all the difference in the world when it comes to mobile device adoption for online browsing. My prior experience with speed sans usability was not compelling.

Arguably, my Treo 700p, running at EV-DO speeds on Verizon’s network, should have offered a faster browsing experience than Apple’s iPhone on AT&T’s slow-paced EDGE network.

The “Whole Ecosystem” Has to be Optimized

But the reality is, the speed that the user actually experiences has a great deal to do with how the whole browsing environment has been optimized for the particular mobile device.

Optimization has to occur within the client-side device (in this case, the iPhone), the mobile-optimized browser (Apple’s Safari), the web pages (Google’s), and the web application architecture. If there’s a glitch anywhere in that ecosystem, the user’s experience will be compromised.

In the Treo+Verizon case, there is hardly any optimization at any point in the ecosystem. I eventually gave up trying to get real-time traffic updates for Seattle, because I’d be well past the traffic jam before my Treo had even displayed the local traffic site. (The local site, run by a state government agency, doesn’t attempt to optimize for WAP interfaces. Therefore the Treo is generally unable render the traffic web page in any useful form.)

In contrast the iPhone affords a totally different mobile browsing and searching experience, for traffic reports and weather — and now Google services. Many web sites work very well on the iPhone — without any extra effort on the part of the website owner.

I think Apple’s reliance upon an optimized version of Safari plus the Web 2.0 architecture — over time — will prove to be a winning strategy, as others in the mobile services ecosystem race to catch to the standard of excellence that Google and Apple have demonstrated with the iPhone. This will set a whole new level of user expectations.

As the Mobile Insider concludes:

Now obviously, an iPhone Web app works at an unfair advantage when compared to most handset interfaces. The touch screen, screen real estate, and simple mechanics of the Web 2.0 … interface make it easier to design speed and simplicity into this format than the more challenging handset.

…But the fact of the matter is that Google’s iPhone app reeled me in.