My Mobile Day by Mark Curtis, CEO of Flirtomatic

I’ve been an avid follower of Flirtomatic for a long time. It’s one of the best examples of a tightly integrated mobile and web service I’ve seen. It’s extremely popular with the youth audience, particularly in the UK. If you haven’t tried it, I strongly recommend taking a look at it, particularly at the sign-up and registration process which is very, very well thought out.

Mark Curtis is CEO of Flirtomatic. Not only is he a friendly and approachable chap, he’s intimately familiar with the mobile platform. So I wondered what his average mobile day would be like. He was kind enough to keep a note of his mobile usage across the 31st of January — so here we go, over to Mark.

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OK so lots of this is going to be complete fiction because I’m terrified (a bit) of looking like a delinquent low level mobile technology retard rather than the power user I should be (like Ben Smith for example who is clearly arc-welded to his device).

So I did not use my phone to wake up – I already have an alarm with much bigger numbers and an easy to hit snooze button.

After getting up with some reluctance I did some exercise. I still didn’t need the phone but did use the digital readout on the bike and a DVD (excellent unpleasant winter exercises for cyclists) on my iMac.

Only touched my phone on the way out of the house when I picked it up and checked for messages from my chairman who lives two hours ahead and has a habit of sending requests for information very early in the morning. Nothing today.

I used to use the phone as a watch but Santa brought me a Suunto Vector so now I check the barometer as I stand at the number 3 bus stop which tells me that it should be raining, and it is! Also check that I am only 15 metres above sea level, and guess what, I am! Not sure when I’ll get tired of that game.

At work I make lots of calls. Not really sure there’s anything interesting about that.

Note that operator contacts appear to be using Spinvox and wonder if ‘Flirtomatic” gets rendered into text accurately. Decide to use lots of hard words in the future like ‘concatenation” in an attempt to confuse the system.

I still get annoyed that predictive text in my phone has ‘Arsenal” but not ‘Chelsea”.

Spend a lot of time looking at our service on my Samsung G600. Really. Flirtomatic is cross-platform so it’s much easier to reference the service on the web when we are at our desks. It took a while before we got the discipline of looking on a handset routinely when discussing features, functionality and design overall. And of course in meetings if we need to peer at the service to chew over ideas it’s much easier to show the wap site on a projector off a laptop – simply because then we can all see it. Clustering round a handset just does not work, unless you want to get intimate….

We are currently working on an iPhone implementation for Flirtomatic so we have been playing a lot. No question, the browsing experience is terrific but we’re convinced that simple ergonomics dictate most web sites will need to have specific iPhone implementations in order to maximise usage. Why? Because links tend to be clustered too closely together and if your fingers are fatter than an elf’s pinky you’ll struggle to hit them accurately, unless you expand the page to a high level of magnification.

However I used the maps facility last weekend to locate a children’s play centre in south London and took the device with me in case I got lost (I don’t have Sat Nav).

Although the use case is eye-catching, I suspect the number of times I’ll actually need it in one year will be few. There’s a lot of complete tosh written about location based services which is based on compelling sounding use cases (‘Hey! Carlos lands in a strange city and needs to buy a pair of boots before booking a nice restaurant recommended by locals….”). These usually star fictional road warriors with more money than sense and poor organisational skills.

I could pretend that I bluetoothed new songs onto my phone yesterday, but I did that ages ago. Writing this is making me realise I’m bored with the current selection but equally not yet motivated enough to do anything about it.

What I did do was check out the user experience of another mobile service – I won’t say who – by downloading it into my phone. I was shocked – not for the first time – by how poor the user flow and communication was in this critical discovery phase. We’ve addressed this issue of provisioning again and again and I still don’t think we have it perfected. But I’m damn glad we abandoned the application download route in 2005.

If I told you I’d used wap to check football scores the savvy reader would know that this was an untruth, because there was no football on Thursday. But I do use this frequently at weekends: apart from Flirtomatic it is probably my prime browsing usage. Browsing of course is the wrong term: it’s highly targeted and specific.

Other uses which did not figure… Train times (quite frequently – the Orange portal service is very good), some e-mail checking (but I’m rarely far from a PC), photos from time to time. The latter are usually triggered by family or compelling place or landscape.

Overall I’m in no doubt at all that as phones become more iPhone like – and they will – I’ll use the mobile internet much much more. When I’ve had my hands on the iPhone (Bill the developer needs it a lot of the time) that’s been the case. Often to solve spontaneous on-the-spot queries such as what kind of reviews has this or that new album or film had….

It’s all about habit. Old ones are hard to break, new ones must be easy to learn. Our usage rates convince me the mobile internet has a glittering future. Now services and experience need to catch up.

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Thank you Mark!

(If you’re a mobile industry executive — or a mobile fanatic — drop me a note if you’d like to do feature in a My Mobile Day case study).