The Power of Experience
In the last months, I have been writing several posts around things happening in the personal communication space. I have enjoyed lots of comments — both positive and disagreeing, both very welcome — , and when I went into some of the details I realized that the overarching theme around some of the posts had been lost. Which is fine, these posts were quite long — sorry 😅 — , and I was probably being too subtle, so I wanted to take the opportunity to do a brief recap here.
What have been this posts about?
- One was about how CallKit now provided apps providers the ability to make calling experience that was better than native.
- Another one discussed the opportunity of WhatsApp in Enterprise Messaging, and highlighted how being able to provide different experiences to different kind of customers (regular users vs. businesses) was a big opportunity.
- Also, how controling the customer experience brings you the flexibility to combine different technologies bringing the best combination to your product. And they don’t really need to care what happens “under the hood”.
- Lastly, I talked about the WhatsApp “backdoor”. I considered that it was not a bug but a design decision based on simplifying experience for users, but — more importantly — that regardless of the approach in the end WhatsApp controls what is displayed to the user, so the fact that we believe they are using the e2e encryption they say they do is fundamentally a trust issue. If you don’t trust them you should not use the app, regardless of this specific (low impact) vulnerability.
So what is the theme? That the control of the user experience becomes critical in providing, evolving and customizing mobile services.
It may feel obvious to more app-centric people, but in the telecommunication industry world there seems to be a reverence for “native” standardized experiences, feeling a bit of nostalgia around that time in which the dialer was the way to contact your mother, your friend, your bank, your doctor or your pizza place. But the flexibility of apps, and the power they bring to those who own them (and I mention WhatsApp by name in those articles, but you can extend that to any other app), beats one-size fits all approaches.
So whenever an initiative pops up that drives collaboration across several players, I suggest you take a look and see who of them controls the end user experience, because with that comes the power.
