YouthNet blog
An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet
All | Events | Youth | Technology | Volunteering | YouthNet | Charity World
Friday Jul 06, 2007
Where's your mobile?
Ask an average person in the street how exciting some research into where we keep our mobile phones is, and chances are you'll be met with a fairly sarcastic response.
If this keeps you awake at night, you can now sleep easy thanks to some great research brought to my attention in the Doors of Perception e-newsletter last week. Called "Where's the Mobile?", the research by Jan Chipchase explores where people carry their mobiles, and why, and I think it's pretty fascinating.
Some of the findings back up what you might expect, for example:
- "60% of men sampled carried their mobile phone in their trouser pockets, and of these most carried them in front right trouser pockets - positioned to be reachable by their dominant (right) hand."
- "61% of women sampled carried their mobile phone in a bag usually a hand bag."
In addition, "30% of pocket carriers and 50% of bag carriers sometimes or always miss incoming mobile phone communication."
In other words, going on this research, women miss more calls than men.
The research goes on to look at where people carry their keys and wallet (which, together with a mobile phone, make up what Jan calls the "mobile essentials"), and highlights some really interesting variations in this according to geographical location.
So what's the point of this? Well, for starters, if you're trying to communicate with mobile phone users, it might pay to think about how you deliver your message. For example, if the majority of women are likely to miss calls to their mobiles, have any companies or charities tried targeting them with SMS rather than voice calls?
Here at YouthNet we're also really interested in how people use their mobiles, especially since we launched phase II of TheSite.org on mobile (www.thesite.org on your mobile or www.thesite.org/mobile/home on your PC).
These issues that sit across cultural (in this case the clothes we wear and how they affect where we keep our mobiles) and technological (the specification of our mobile handsets and the speed and capacity of the mobile networks) spheres will become increasingly important for anyone looking to communicate with their target audiences on a meaningful basis.
Posted by Sam Thomas ( 9:39 AM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
Posted by Henry Kruz on August 22, 2007 at 06:54 AM GMT+00:00 #