Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Sunday, January 14, 2007
Measuring the seemingly unmeasurable
As in the measuring the user experience of mobile phones. I have a more application and service focused angle below, that also relates to the design of mobile phones.
The article starts out by saying that it's very complex to measure and long term achieve good usability, as it involves so many things, but that's an arguable statement. There are ways and methods to measure usability for other types of products, and why should mobile phones be considered so much different?
The key here is to focus the usability testing on what the user sees and affects and adapt the device, application or service based on that. Also, it's important to involve usability experts already at the design stage, and of course also later. I doubt that happens very often in the mobile field, as e.g. the mechanical design of phones seems to be more controlled by hardware designers and tradition than looking at contemporary uses of phones and design based on that.
Of course, as an application developer you don't have any say about the design of the phone, so the more the application developer can control the look and behavior of the UI through software, the better. That's why the "clean slate" approach of Apple iPhone seems so refreshing. Pity though it doesn't suppport any popular application platform.
Examples of things to contemplate:
* most music/media-adapted phones still don't have dedicated controls for that
* most phones are still using the same old crappy 0-9*# design that only works well for phone calls (again, see iPhone for a different approach)
* displays are still in portrait format, despite photos and videos being in landscape format
* messaging is done better with an alphanumeric keypad
* the future of mobile applications is downloading, not embedding. The industry needs to take the consequences of that and do more to make the UI adapted for such applications: easier to download applications, easier to find and launch them, more UI functionality/flexibility, etc.
The article starts out by saying that it's very complex to measure and long term achieve good usability, as it involves so many things, but that's an arguable statement. There are ways and methods to measure usability for other types of products, and why should mobile phones be considered so much different?
The key here is to focus the usability testing on what the user sees and affects and adapt the device, application or service based on that. Also, it's important to involve usability experts already at the design stage, and of course also later. I doubt that happens very often in the mobile field, as e.g. the mechanical design of phones seems to be more controlled by hardware designers and tradition than looking at contemporary uses of phones and design based on that.
Of course, as an application developer you don't have any say about the design of the phone, so the more the application developer can control the look and behavior of the UI through software, the better. That's why the "clean slate" approach of Apple iPhone seems so refreshing. Pity though it doesn't suppport any popular application platform.
Examples of things to contemplate:
* most music/media-adapted phones still don't have dedicated controls for that
* most phones are still using the same old crappy 0-9*# design that only works well for phone calls (again, see iPhone for a different approach)
* displays are still in portrait format, despite photos and videos being in landscape format
* messaging is done better with an alphanumeric keypad
* the future of mobile applications is downloading, not embedding. The industry needs to take the consequences of that and do more to make the UI adapted for such applications: easier to download applications, easier to find and launch them, more UI functionality/flexibility, etc.
