Felix Menden, VP Product & Engineering:

You have just bought an iPhone and have no idea what to use it for? We suggest: Turn your iPhone into a networking engine. Just direct iPhone to iphone.xing.com and run your favorite business network with a fingertip. This Friday we will launch a dedicated mobile version of XING for the iPhone. It will contain the areas Start, Members, Messages, and Address Book in an iPhone-like fashion.

By making mobile internet easy to use, the iPhone creates a milestone on the road to convergence. XING is commited to its innovative DNA and has spent a lot of time lately tackling the iPhone topic. Actually, why does XING bother doing a dedicated version for the iPhone? Is the current XING mobile version not enough?

The answer is quite simple: A finger is not a mouse pointer.

This is why the current design of XING mobile works on an iPhone but does not optimally serve the user’s needs. Almost every website surfed with the iPhone is not prepared for it. That means a lot of scrolling, zooming, and accidentally hitting the wrong link. One gets used to it and it is definitely fun. But then compare it to a regular browser: the discovery is that on an iPhone the most time is wasted by navigating around on a single page instead of navigating between pages. Compare this user experience to the experience of a native iPhone application and you know what the situation is: Websites are optimized for the use with a regular browser and mouse pointer. Moreover, the current mobile portals are optimized for cursor-keys, cell phone keyboards, or blackberry balls - Not for touchscreens.

That is why the user interface of an iPhone is a new journey and an exciting task for a usability engineer. At XING we have taken this step by adapting to this novel user-interface and thus exploring a probable trend in human-computer interaction. The new interface gives an iPhone addict real value. Try it out!