sfrench | 10:19 am Jan 30, 2012

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Best Practice: Implementing an Integrated User Experience to Maximize Service Usage

In the past I’ve written about best practices for digital content services. In this post I want to expound upon the concept of Integrated User Experience (IUX), which supports the following best practices.

1. Educate your customer – increase user awareness
2. Capture your customer – remove purchasing barriers
3. Drive ongoing service usage – facilitate service usage
4. Focus on user experience – intuitively functions as advertised

What is Integrated User Experience (IUX)?

Integrated User Experience (IUX) is the integration of services/applications with native features of the device – e.g. handset camera, photo gallery, address book. The IUX experience is particularly powerful with mobile handsets and tablets. Below are some example IUX use cases:

Startup Menu – This is one of the most critical components of IUX. When a user starts up the phone, especially for the first time (setup wizard), they should see a screen asking them if they would like their device content (contacts, files and messages) backed-up to the cloud. There are many reasons why a user would want to do this – in case of lost, stolen or damaged phone, the ability to access the content from other devices and for when they change devices some day.

When one of our customers introduced the option to backup content into the startup wizard flow, they saw a greater than 80% acceptance rate. This exceptional acceptance rate is largely due to asking the right question at the right time – and with no strings attached (utilizing a freemium model).

Media Galleries (Photo, video & music) – In a non-IUX device, the device photo gallery simply displays photos saved locally to the device. In the IUX model, this same native gallery contains photos located in the associated cloud digital vault. Clicking on the photo simply opens up the image – just like when viewing a locally stored photo. Similarly with music and videos, a user can either download the media to their device for listening or watching online or offline, or just stream the content from the cloud.

To facilitate getting local photos, videos and music from the mobile device into the cloud, users can configure automatic backup of device content, and specify backup connection types – WiFi, mobile or either.

Device Camera – Integration with the handset camera to support one-click or zero-click sharing of photos with select friends, family, social networks and/or online Digital Vault. When a user snaps a photo they either get a pop-up menu (one-click) asking who/where they would like to send/share the photo, or the photo is automatically sent/synced (zero-click) to pre-determined locations (e.g., online digital vault). To make this work best, during the setup wizard an option would be offered to automatically backup/share (zero click) newly taken photos with specific destinations/contacts.

Address Book – Address book integration allows the user to share content directly from their address book. They simply view a contact in their address book, select the share option, choose a photo, video, music or other, and finally select the file(s) to share.

How to Implement IUX?

NewBay provides an open software platform for operators and device makers to deliver cloud-based services for storing, sharing, accessing and organizing digital content from any device. Our operator customers who want to offer IUX-enabled digital content services work closely with NewBay and their OEM device maker partners to develop a set of digital content service requirements. Each OEM joins the NewBay Developer Program, which provides platform access via APIs and a software development kit (SDK) for third-parties to create innovative user experiences. Each OEM then develops the UX per operator specifications – leveraging the NewBay software platform, APIs and SDK.

IUX Case Study

A NewBay customer recently introduced an IUX experience to their smartphone lineup and the increase in subscriber registration rates has skyrocketed. In the chart below, the typical subscriber registration rate for services in which the subscriber has to go to an app store to download the app is about 5%. Pre-embedding the app on the device typically results in a 20-30% registration rate, while implementing an IUX model can result in registration rates as high as 80-90%.

IUX IS a Best Practice

IUX-enabled devices and associated use cases support the following best practices. In fact, one could say that IUX IS a best practice itself. For OEM device makers, mobile operators and third-party service/app providers, implementing an IUX strategy can overcome many of the barriers to success – discovery, registration, usage/engagement, customer satisfaction and loyalty.