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Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, September 17, 2000:
Summary:
The current generation of mobile Internet products and services has miserable usability (as shown at the DEMOmobile 2000 conference). New devices like Blackberry, Modo, and a prototype Microsoft telephone do better.
The DEMOmobile 2000 conference in early September clearly showed that mobile Internet is still not ready for real use. Almost all of the demos were complete flops when viewed with a skeptical usability-trained eye. Sure, the presenter was capable of laboriously walking through the necessary steps, but an average user having to perform a real task would not be so lucky.
For example, one of the demos concerned use of a WAP phone to order supplies for a construction project. It does make sense for a foreman to use a mobile device in the field, though it might be better to use a bigger, more supportive device in the car or in the shack. But then the demo proceeded to let the "purchasing manager" pull up the order on another cellphone to approve it. Come on, wouldn't the purchasing manager sit at a comfortable computer in the office with other necessary records within easy reach?
Worst of all, the demo only proceeded because neither the "foreman" nor the "purchasing manager" had any problems or issues with the order. They just clicked the "buy this" button. In real life, there are always exceptions. One of the first things you learn about task analysis is that no case follows the average rules to the letter. Any amount of real-world complexity and the demo would have failed.
Several services were shown in both WAP and Palm Pilot versions: every time, it was clear that the deck-of-cards form factor (of the Palm) offered immensely superior usability relative to anything based on a telephone. The bigger screen allows for the display of enough information to be useful. But even more important, the direct interaction with user interface widgets by touching/moving a pen to the screen provides a much more natural feel than the indirect "scroll-a-wheel" interface on the phones. As we found in a recent field study in London, WAP almost always has low usability.
New and better devices are coming. Informal discussions with conference attendees showed that Blackberry is taking off as the best and most loved product for mobile connectivity. A huge number of people had Blackberries (of course, most attendees at an expensive conference like Demo can afford $60 per month to read their email when out of the office - can average users? not so sure).
Rather than making a miniature PC (as implied by the name), the design goal for Pocket PC was to create a mobile companion to Outlook. A great strategy since I believe that most users will continue to have a base station in the form of a full-screen device in their home or office. It is Microsoft's job to make sure that this full-screen base continues to run Outlook as its primary software. It is everybody else's job to create a better communications central, but so far I am not holding my breath for anything to replace Outlook.
The prototype Microsoft telephone had the best quality screen I have seen yet on a telephone, but still wasted more than a third of its physical surface on a numeric keypad. Let's just get rid of the keys and spend every available square millimeter on pixels.
Most of the telephone numbers you call come from one of these sources:
Modo device displaying the main menu ring.
Modo is operated by a single hand:
One-handed operation is great for a mobile device. You often need to use your second hand for carrying your briefcase, holding on to a strap on the bus, or some other purpose that makes two-handed use less convenient than it is in an office setting.
Modo has a very scaled-back user interface. It is a true information appliance that only does a single thing: providing entertainment and "going out" listings for the city you are in. There is no configuration. If you bring your Modo on a trip to a new city, it automatically downloads the information about the new city from the transmissions it is receiving from the local network.
There is also no payment or registration interface. The device costs a flat fee of $99 up front; the ongoing information service is free. The hope is to fund the ongoing service out of advertising revenues. Interesting business model which I don't think will work:
I previously coined the term microcontent to refer to Web design elements like headlines and page titles. Modo highlights the need for even more fine-grained content usability, which I will have to call nanocontent. On mobile devices, copyfitting has to be done down to the character to ensure, for example, that the most information-carrying part of a headline is represented in the first 18 characters on certain WAP phones. Or to ensure that lines break in ways that maximizes the readability of the content.