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Content providers: Do you know what your users are doing right now?

By Nisheeth Mohan

As the mobile market matures, user satisfaction and user loyalty will determine the winners and the losers.

As content providers continue to enter the market, the ability of "uniqueness" to attract and hold user attention, even when the interface is rough, will continue to decline.

User feedback -- before release and after deployment -- is a critical component to product success.

In the fast-moving mobile industry, you want to stay in touch with your users -- see what they are seeing and what they are feeling.

However, that only gets you so far.

What do the users actually experience when they access your content?

If you are selling something on your site -- how easy is it for them to find and buy it?

Marketing lore is filled with stories of products that met the criteria of the product specification, but fell flat when released.

The Edsel automobile released in the '50s; Cyberdog, Apple's answer to Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator; and New Coke.

Mobile is going mainstream: mobile sites and mobile applications are being accessed regularly by millions of end users throughout the world.

According to the CTIA -- t he Wireless Association, the wireless industry's data revenue for the first half of 2008 was $14.8 billion.

How do you ensure that your mobile content will be among the winners?

It's not a secret to you that mobile platforms create a whole different set of challenges for content providers -- and end users.

The variety of mobile devices, with their smaller screen form factor require a different approach than the creation of Web content to be displayed on much more standard (and larger) desktop and laptop computer screens.

Luckily, advances in mobile test and measurement products are making it easier to do iterative testing both in the lab and across the mobile ecosystem.

Desktop programs that support emulation of all types of wireless devices make it easy to see how mobile content will look and act when it is deployed.

User surveys can provide feedback, but they take time, require massive compilation efforts, and are subject to the well-known tendency of respondents to unconsciously modify their real experiences upon reflection (much the same way as eyewitnesses can be less than reliable giving testimony during a trial).

A much better way to understand how users experience mobile content is to track what they actually do when performing a task.

Only in this way can you understand whether users follow the same pathways that you intended to access content , how many clicks they need to do task, and whether they feel satisfied with the results.

Customer experience and user assessment research has been available to Web content providers for years.

There are tools available that allow you to see exactly how visitors to a Web site, from target markets around the world, perform tasks and to collect their responses to survey questions as they are experiencing the sites.

The first large-scale, task-based mobile Web usability study, using iPhone customers interacting with mobile Web sites, was conducted this summer.

This study was a landmark -- for the first time it was possible to get information not only on how mobile users used the sites, but also why they took the actions they did, their overall satisfaction and what could be done to improve the experience.

Our industry is maturing, and so are our research tools.

This is an exciting time to be in mobile.

Nisheeth Mohan is product manager for mobile solutions and technology for Keynote, Systems, Inc., the global leader in on-demand mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions for continuously improving the online experience. Reach him at