I recently met with the guys from nextBLAST, and agreed to take a look at their service. They seem to have a good notion about reforming mobile data usage through useful products and features, but have missed usability entirely. This lack of usability will kill their product.
It's tough to tell what you can do with this service. I had this problem when viewing their display at an industry event, as well as when looking at web site. I knew I could "mobilize" my blog, and that's great (see it at http://lsd.wwmdd.nextblast.com) and I could do RSS reading. Since I've been trying to figure out my ideal mobile RSS experience, this is what I tried to do.
I signed up for an account, and skimmed the hugely long terms and conditions. Some of the items in it are strange. It looks like, among other things, they put terms for all possible situations into one big T&C statement.
I successfully signed up, and still didn't know what the product was. I decided to click the "New User" link on the home page (they should have known I was a new user and simply walked me through the key pieces of information). I told them about my country and carrier, but they didn't have my phone model listed. I find it interesting that they can't detect my phone model using the user agent - they are creating extra work for themselves and the user.
When I told them about the missing model, as requested, the Contact page did not return me to the main menu upon successful complection - instead there was my entry looking like I hadn't done anything to it. A second look at the page revealed a subtle confirmation message, so I didn't submit the comment twice. I imagine other users did.
When I did return to the main screen, the alert telling me to add my account number was still there! I finally fixed that and started poking around. I was able to add several pre-existing news feeds to my account. I found one that I'm monitoring, and also created a new feed.
There were some very nice features, such as providing different presentations for mobile and desktop views. Like many of the features of the service, this one won't be used because it is too hard. Specifically, the service allows the feed to be filtered by keywords and by tags for both the desktop and the mobile view. This is terrific, but I have no specific recollection of what keywords or tags are used in a specific feed. A simple preview would make the feature more usable; a list of recently used tags and common unique keywords would be better still.
After all that, I'd also like to block specific tags or keywords rather than be inclusive. This allows me to discover new interests rather than being trapped in something I specified long enough ago that I don't even remember that I limited my experience.
There are a lot of nice features in this service, but so many of them are unusable because of usability. Fundamentally, the company needs to get an investment of around $200k to revamp their site. It looks like it will be a great service once people can figure out what it is.
I'll probably post a bit more as I get through the learning curve for the service. I know that they have all sorts of wonderful features I haven't seen yet.