Our Wireless Media Lab team is undertaking focus groups and design ideation sessions this week in London on the subject of Enhanced Mobile Messaging.  Listening to the discussion last night, what I found especially interesting was to hear the heavy messengers we had recruited explain why they use messaging applications such as WhatsApp, BBM and even basic SMS.

It seems that increasingly, messaging is not just about communicating information.  The participants all said that the ability to communicate via sending pictures, links and voice attachments is becoming more and more important to them.  Beyond this, they frequently told us that their messaging apps are an important way to keep up with what friends are doing and even a way to handle boredom by reviewing what others have sent or posted.  To them, the lines between one-to-one and one-to-many messaging are becoming increasingly blurred.

When we asked these users to come up with new ideas for messaging services, many of their concepts expressed some key themes:

• the desire for more control over presence and status
• the ability to message via voice and switch between voice/text
• the desire for intelligence and context awareness (especially related to location), and
• the importance of small group communications (e.g. on the basis of shared interests with particular friends)

However, despite all of the advanced communications tools and capabilities that these consumers have at their fingertips, when asked which messaging service they would keep if they could choose only one, every person said SMS.  Why? Because it is the only truly ubiquitous mobile messaging protocol – i.e. capable of reaching everyone.

Our report on the motivations, needs and behaviors of mobile messaging users will be available to Wireless Media Lab clients in due course.

- Kevin Nolan

Update: 3 October 2011 - The full report, Mobile Messaging: Consumer Behaviors around Text Messaging and Over-The-Top Messaging Applications, is now available for WML clients or to purchase.  Paul Brown

Our Wireless Media Lab team has just updated its consumer research stats on mobile internet usage.  We've found that the proportion of mobile device owners who use their phone to access the internet regularly has quadrupled in the US, and tripled in Western Europe over the past four years.  28% of US mobile device users, and 22% of those in W. Europe, now access the internet on their phone at least once per week.

However, the vast majority of mobile internet sessions continue to last less than 10 minutes on average - far shorter than the average time spent browsing on a computing device with a larger screen. This suggests that mobile web browsing remains predominantly a 'snacking' or 'time critical' behavior, whereas the PC/laptop is used for more leisurely or media-intensive usage scenarios.

For smartphone owners, person-to-person messaging, social networking and web searching are becoming predominantly associated with mobile activities, while other groups of behavior (e.g. media and entertainment related activities and more casual news and information gathering) are less likely to be undertaken using the mobile device.  For this reason, we recommend that mobile interface designers prioritize mobile experiences such as search, social networking, messaging and time-sensitive feeds of information on topics that match the interests of the individual user (e.g. sports, weather updates etc.).

Additionally, with the increasing penetration of tablets, it is clear that tomorrow's most useful experiences will be optimized across multiple screens, delivering and prioritizing the right type of information to the right screen at the right time to anticipate user needs.

Client reading - Mobile Internet and PC Browsing Behaviors Diverge

Kevin Nolan