LIFT is on. Yesterday, I took part in this workshop that stimulated discussions around the reasons that brought different technologies to fail. As the topic was very interesting to many LIFT attendees the room was quite full and we had to break into groups. I coordinated and worked with people interested in reasons of failures of mobile applications. We came out with a list of nine points that summarize well our discussion:

1. Applications should be self-contained. No need to access data remotely as traffic is often charged separately and people do not want to pay extra money;
2. Lack of market model. E. g., Mobile blogging did not really address a real user need;
3. Lack of advertisement;
4. Lack of awareness / lack of certainty. For instance applications might show an inconsistence mechanism of use or either they did not offer appropriate feedback. People could feel uncertain that the application will accomplish their communication intentions;
5. Lack of culture. Either there is not a culture around a new service or the service might offer something which exist in other forms in other contexts;
6. Ergonomic barriers. Usability issues like extremely complicate installation procedures or interaction mechanisms;
7. Pricing/cost model. The user might feel uncomfortable if s/he is not sure of how much s/he is going to pay for using the system or the service;
8. Tradeoff between responding to needs and creating new needs. I actually think that we should design following the first principle but most of the time is the other way around and this lead developers to design for false needs;
9. Lack of standards. One of the biggest barrier for mobile development is the lack of standards. Devices offer inconsistent features and APIs and multi-device programming is extremely costly, and buggy…

During the general discussion we stated that most of the failures of “intelligent applications” lie on the fact that their definition of what is an intelligent behavior is flawed. Essentially, people are not rational and therefore unpredictable. Also for many of these products there is no effort to take the user’s point of view and adapt to changes.