That’s the verdict of a study released by mPortico, a mobile media company that has recently examined how many clicks users must endure to find, purchase and download mobile content across a mix of eight on-portal and off-portal destinations.

The good news: the industry has made some progress since I conducted benchmarking research, together with Informa Telecoms & Media, to show just how much money mobile operators and content companies leave on the table. (We concluded that burying their offers deep in confusing – often times counter-intuitive – hierarchical menus, positioned too many clicks from the portal home page is costing them a bundle. More accurate, improved discovery techniques would increase mobile operator revenues by around $10 billion cumulatively in Europe and just over $4 billion in North America by 2010. More in this white paper.)

To recap, we found users typically have to click through 10-40 screens to download some of the most popular ringtones or games. This is unacceptable – particularly since the mobile industry agrees the optimal mobile search experience must deliver content within 2-3 clicks.

On a sweep of five major off-deck portals, mPortico found that the whole process required an average of 12 clicks and 4 minutes. The four leading mobile operator portals performed slightly better: they required an average of 10 clicks and 2.5 minutes.

Why the huge number of clicks? (To put this in perspective, keep in mind this is double (!) the limit set down in a study by Sweden’s Mobile Matrix and U.S. content platform provider Qpass, which concluded that mobile portals must bring content to users within 6 clicks. mPortico tells us logins and inputting credit card info account for some of the clicks.)

From the results: “Handango, GameLoft, Hands on Mobile, and Jamster all require users to register before accessing mobile content. Only Handango and Gameloft use credit card billing. These two steps combined can add up to 22 clicks and 6 minutes to the already cumbersome process.”

Other highlights:

• Operators “get it”: Finding and buying content on operator portals was “for the most part simpler and faster than the off-deck portals.” AT&T performed the best, needing only 8 clicks to complete the process, followed by T-Mobile and Verizon. Sprint placed last with 15 clicks. T-Mobile’s process was the fastest, taking only 2 minutes. Verizon followed with 2 minutes and 15 seconds, with AT&T and Sprint 3 minutes each.

• The biggest challenge is browsing. While this study chose the first available content item without any excess clicking, “searching content is one of the most time-consuming and often frustrating parts of the process.”

• Ready availability of free trial and demo versions of content give off-deck portals an advantage over carriers’ portals in user experience.

• While there are signs of improvement, operators and content companies have no reason to break out the champagne. The average amount of time and clicks to search, purchase, and download mobile content from both on-deck and off-deck portals is, on average, 11 clicks and over 3 minutes.

I wonder a bit about the click distance – especially if I compare with a benchmark report on mobile portal accessibility published by Strategy Analytics. The research, which evaluated the portal experience offered by several U.S. mobile operators, found that the best in class mobile portal still required an incredible (!) 17 clicks to buy a game. The total number of clicks required to buy music ranged from 18 to 39.

Methodology aside, mPortico research provides us with another notable set of stats that makes a strong case for tools and technology – such as on-device portals and more personalized mobile search. Users won’t buy what they cannot find and they will lose patience altogether if the industry fails to make finding and buying content a no-brainer.
(Thanks Noah Karesh for bringing the study to my attention and I hope you will connect with me when you have more of the same!)

This entry was posted on Monday, October 15th, 2007 at 11:15 am and is filed under Content Discovery, Mobile Content, Mobile Search, On-Device Portals, Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.