The DOOH Audience Is mobile so it’s really important that as DOOH practitioners, we understand our audience’s mobile behavior before we get seduced into investing/designing in sexy mobile technologies. But with our ADD generation, often limited to 140 characters, the mobile UX is frequently an afterthought.
Apple, and before them Nokia, really understand (or understood in the case of Nokia) what mobility meant BEFORE designing mobile solutions.
When we humans are mobile, our experience is often focused on an activity that, if interrupted, stops our mobility in its tracks. We could be walking, driving, playing, shopping etc and if interrupted, that interruption better be for a good reason.
A mobile app (ignoring how it’s discovered) should ideally complement a dominant mobile activity. But if it has to interrupt mobile behavior, it has to offer a compelling enough reason for the user to break away from that activity.
As a designer of a mobile experience, if you don’t think about how, when and why an interrupt-driven message will and can be received, you will almost certainly fail.
Is your user standing in line, pushing a shopping cart, carrying a bag, driving, drinking, watching a concert? How much dwell time do they have to notice, act, react, interact? In many cases, the answer is 15-60 SECONDS (see this post on how UX maps to different types of locations and engagement models).
Now work out if your shiny new smartphone app, NFC app, QR code or text messaging CTA are worthy of interrupting your audience. Now sanity-check that your execution includes giving the user enough time AND benefit (e.g. “The 3Fs” Fun, Fame and Fortune, also covered in the above linked post) to engage.
I hope this interruption to your daily reading was worth while. If it was, please Tweet about it. It is wasn’t, I guess I’ve proven a point - because if it’s not even worth your while to click on a simple Twitter icon, how sobering is it to think about engaging your users?
