The slow uptake of MMS has been well documented. While it’s been somewhat successful as a content delivery platform, picture messaging as an application has been much less so. A new analyst report says people get turned off by poor image quality and poor usability, which is completely unsurprising. What’s a bit more interesting, though, is that they note about 60 percent of cameraphone owners intended to share pictures through messaging services before they bought their phone — but only 28 percent of them actually do so after using their device.
In other words, half the people that want to share photos before they get a cameraphone end up not doing so once they’ve tried it. That seems a pretty damning indictment of the usability of current services and devices. Certainly devices can be a pain to use, particularly in the way of getting the correct settings established for data connections, but I’m confident this area’s improving. But I’ve got little hope that services are getting any better or easier to use.
Operators need to re-examine the entire user experience of picture messaging and photo sharing, from cost to set-up to message creation to delivery. Clearly the idea of sending one-to-one messages has failed to resonate with users, at least a current pricing levels. Moblogs and posting to services like Flickr seems more popular — but often operator implementations of these services leave a lot to be desired.
So what can operators do to improve the picture messaging and photo sharing experience?
Any thoughts?
(graphic by vork, from moblog UK)
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