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.

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