Mobile phone, apps and service design could be better, we agree. But how?

How can developers and engineers do their jobs properly when often they learn about user requirements from reports? What can a piece of paper really communicate about people’s passions, requirements, uses?

I’m Julia Shalet and I run the Traveling Teen Panel for The Digital Youth Project.

We spend a lot of time in the mobile industry discussing technology and the politics around it, often leaving the user insights to the market research department at best, and at worst to post launch! In September I premiered my Traveling Teen Panel at a grassroots mobile developer conference called OTA (Over The Air) in London at Imperial College. I bring the Panel to you! And its a young set with attitudes that they know how to express.

The Traveling Teen Panel is my new brain-child and I would be happy to talk to any of you about it. It’s my way of bringing user understanding to the different groups involed in mobile product and services development. It is entertaining, flexible and insightful.

Here is a way to let engineers and developers, along with markets and strategists, listen to, see and share experiences with their most demanding customer base. User understanding is not just for the research department.

Bringing other disciplines to the user insights party enables, for example, developers to design the product to take account of insights that they have seen for themselves, increasing speed to market with relevant offerings whilst reducing the many internal debates about what the user wants.

Teens were asked to create a slide of what matters to them. This is From Rachel, aged 17

Here are some insights from the teenagers at the OTA  session,  attended by a cross functional group with a skew toward the developer community:

• Today’s teens are technically savvy – we are getting used to seeing toddlers that can work a mouse before they can even string a sentence together! They have zero tolerance for a poor experience and will switch off and move on to the next new innovation in a heartbeat.

• They are not just buying (or free-riding) into fun. They want practical every day apps like bus times and train times.

• They are also financially savvy – in some teenage research sessions I carried out over a year ago, they told me how they had made blackberry their device of choice because of the free instant messaging.

• They are the ultimate free-riders. As much as I believe that if a product is good it is worth paying for, it is going to be difficult to charge this group as they are used to enjoying so much technology for free.

I’m going to share more of this research with you next week. Do leave questions in the comments and if I have answers from my research so far, I will respond in next week’s post.