We all have our fair share of conference calls and Web-centric meetings and it’s been a while since we had a nice, clean fight between two Web services.

Our experience so far is giving the upper hand to GoToMeeting. Here’s why: It very usable. The interface is cleaner and has more clear direction, the switching of hosts and call control is much faster and the voice quality has so far been much better than we experienced with WebEx.

In the coming months, we’ll periodically have to report back but so far, we’re liking the company selection.

Speed: It can make you look like a rock star or a rock star’s discarded gig wear.

Mobile UX: It can make you a helpful, innovative leading-edge company or it can make you look like someone’s old Windows 3.1 application.

From a banking application to a quick Twitter session with your friends, I believe that speed and ease of use are the ultimate drivers for mobile applications. Web and application developers have been going through a growth path that includes the typical questions:

• What’s a mobile application?
• Who would ever trust such a thing as a mobile application?
• How fast can I get one for my business?

Years ago, the question surrounding the viability of mobile, image-less browsing was relegated to R&D and people with a great deal of time on their hands. These days, it’s becoming more and more a requirement in our proposals and presentations. Have you seen an increase? Do the requests make sense?

Trust Me

Trust is a key factor in many of the decisions our customers make as to whether or not they belong in the mobile community. My personal advice to any company who has a service or application that can be used in quick sessions (less than a three-minute transaction) is to go for it. Build the application using the latest and greatest security you can employ and create your mobile application as soon as possible.

Trust comes with time. Established in x year. Since xxxx. Time is a great way to generate trust to your audience. It isn’t going to carry you very far, but it’s a start and it’s something you won’t have if you don’t move now.

Again, Again!

Once you’ve gone through a comprehensive design for the mobile version of your offering, it’s critical to keep the ball bouncing. By standing still and keeping your early iterations in production, you’ll lose the edge.

Paying attention to new browser versions, the ability to incorporate time-saving development environments and keeping your application or service fresh is going to keep the customer alert and keep you on the right path.

Remember the Past

It’s a significant effort to produce the right UX for a mobile environment. It takes a deep understanding of your product, your staff and the design process for human factors and behavior.

Additionally, it takes time. Most often, we notice that failing mobile ux is a product of not taking enough time to sort out the business requirements. It’s not effective to take what you have and “re purpose” it. The mobile version should have the same care and feeding that was established with the big sister or big brother product.

In most situations, you’ll run into some nasty speed bumps such as

• language versions / regional codes
• brand elements
• functional buttons / iconography
• vanity

That last bullet is pretty important. Vanity can kill a mobile application. If the logo is too big, the first impression might be that the provider cares much more about themselves than they do about me. If it’s too small, or ignored altogether, the customer may feel that the provider isn’t being transparent.

Corporate vanity has a strong place in the mobile world: marketing materials, about pages and tasteful watermarks.

Conceive and Create

Use your product knowledge and your creative staff to work together. It’s an effort that can not be successfully carried out by one or the other. Both departments (or vendors) need to work in harmony to effectively produce your mobile application or service.

Talent is a gift.

I see my son’s illustration or my friend’s design work or a beautiful font choice and I wonder what it is that makes the talent click into place.

My love for usable, user-centric design spawns from a deep understanding in Customer Service. That’s right, customer service.

In a conversation with a good friend of mine today I had the opportunity to relate a story surrounding the feeling of desperation one can have when placed overseas on a project without the tools or communication lines one needs to perform simple administrative functions (i.e. payroll services and expense report management). It can be said that a student traveling overseas, thousands of miles away from home, can feel the same sense of internal desperation.

Our employees, our customers and our friends need the support of a solid and well-planned user experience. This includes making sure that the Information Architecture is planned for almost any audience scenario, and NOT that of the department from which it comes.

Case in point: Department leadership at a large company is faced with the task of presenting a large volume of information and administrative tools online to assist in the remote life events of a field employee.

The employee goes on their trip (or logs in remotely from home) and is immediately challenged with finding what they need without the support of their employer. Imagine being up at a regular business hour, say, 09:00 AM where YOU are and the company for which you work is still bundled up in their sheets and blankets. Your task is to download a form for your tax records, but the company put it in an obscure location, never to be seen again. Oh, and don’t bother searching for it. The company forgot to put in the proper meta data to help you get it.

Paying attention to an audience’s needs is what user-centric design is all about. Sure, it’s great if you’re pleased to show off a fancy new trick to your design or have a killer layout, but don’t let your IA kill the experience and leave your employees in the dust.

It’s a weekend. Go enjoy it.

It’s funny when we get into a debate with a client about their own audience. We often find out in these situations how much both sides don’t know about the customer.

In these cases, we lean on both the statistical data and the experience we’ve collected and take a shot at running tests to see how close we can get. We usually get pretty darned close.

But what happens if the client isn’t willing to disclose certain information or the audience is not allowed to see the new interface design until it goes out to beta?

Design to the user.

It’s at the point where I say this in my sleep. I design user experience. It’s based on the user and their experience. End of story. I don’t design applications or Web sites or software UI to meet the specifications of a machine or a database. That’s left to the capable hands of the back-end development team.

What I expect them to return to me is the data the USER needs in order to make the EXPERIENCE as painless as possible.

Our lives are filled with applications that spit out millions of data points and while a user’s interaction is much more savvy on the Web than it was ten years ago, it’s not so savvy as to correctly guess at what they’re supposed to do without some sort of roadmap.

It’s still ok to hold hands and it’s still ok to give them a map.

Keep the user experience useful.

Has the way of the call to action really gone the way of the great snuffleupagus?

I had a meeting today to review design comprehensives for an online magazine. During said meeting, the client sponsor said that Marketing Sherpa has done a study that stated by using the words “click here” in one of their newsletters, they raised the click-through rate by over 20%.

Our newsletter, which really, if you haven’t read by now you are just missing sooooo much, is very much predicated on the new-age philosophy of removing any “click here” language. I don’t say it’s right, it’s just how we do it. And, also, I realize that my first statement revolves around a newsletter and the click here method surfaces in any user interaction experience these days.

We’ve tried running some very basic A/B tests during client engagements before, and I have to say, we’ve met minimal or no impact between incorporating the links into well-written text versus actually separating out the call to action and instructing the reader to “click here”.

I could turn to my left and right on most days in most any public place and get varying responses, but I’d love to know why this type of language still works. Not in the sense that I don’t understand the usability of it, it’s rather a question of when will we mature to the point where it is as unnecessary as telling someone else their name in an introduction “You are Jane. I am Keith.”

It’s quite possible that if we don’t start using some sort of standards in our copywriting we’ll just keep repeating the same dilemma and the same expensive usability studies to tell us something we can’t exhaust any further.