What we’ve learned from mobile

Ann Mei Chang, Mobile Engineering Director at Google explains how mobile is helping the search giant achieve its goal of democratising access to information.

Back in 2001 Google wrote down the “ten things we’d found to be true”. Here in Google’s London office, we spend a lot of time focusing on another of those truths: “You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer”. London is home to Google’s largest group of mobile engineers. We think mobile phones are important, and we’re working toward making it easier for people everywhere use their mobiles to get the information they need.

The opportunity is clearly immense: there are three times as many mobiles as internet-connected PCs in the world today, and more than 80 per cent of the world’s population lives within reach of a mobile network. That means that in the future many people’s primary experience of the internet will be through their phones. As our goal is to democratise access to information, how can we bring the full power of the web to mobile phones?

All our mobile efforts here at Google are designed at creating the best experience possible for people on their mobiles. We build mobile-friendly Google products, a process that gives us practical insights into the opportunities and limits of the mobile internet as it exists today.

One of the things we’ve learned is that location matters. Someone using a mobile to search for ‘pizza’ probably wants locally-relevant information, so we give them location results with distance, phone numbers, rating. We introduced a new version of mobile search in Europe earlier this year which remembers your location from visit to visit. So after yesterday’s search for ‘starbucks m1’, today’s ‘weather’ query will automatically give you the forecast for Manchester.

Location is becoming mainstream, too with cell-ID and WiFi hotspot location initiatives making it possible to infer where a device is regardless of whether it has GPS. This is already changing the way people use mapping programs on their mobiles. Going forward, these developments will make it easier to build mobile applications that with that make use of location.

Another lesson – though not a new one for us – is that fast is better than slow. It’s true on the desktop, and it’s even more important on mobile devices, where data transmission speeds still have a major effect on user experience. We know that every time we make one of our mobile products faster, usage increases: every second and every keystroke matters on a tiny keypad.

In our effort to speed up the mobile internet experience for people, we try to eliminate delays, or make them happen at points when users won’t notice them. That means making it as quick and easy for people to get to a product as possible: the instant availability of a Google search box on many smartphones is a good example. It also means that in the case of high-end mobile browsers like the one on the iPhone, we can pre-fetch information in the background. That way, a page can load as soon as someone clicks on a link.

The iPhone has actually taught us a third lesson about mobile: people want to use the the whole web on their mobiles. It helped make that happen by combining compelling hardware, a flat-rate data plan, a fully functional web browser that works at whatever website you want to visit, and innovative controls that maximise the usefulness of a screen that can fit in your pocket.

There’s still so much untapped potential in these amazing devices that we carry with us every day, and we’re excited about that. Our list of ‘things we’ve found to be true’ keeps growing, stimulated by new technological advances and interesting consumer trends. So expect more new stuff from us going forward.

Published: 01 Jul 2009

Tags: Customer insight, Mobile, Technical systems