:: More usability issues ::
I apologise that I am currently only blogging about 1 post per week. This is because I am distracted by book-writing. However, the process gives me plenty to think and blog about. Just to let my regular readers know that I am planning to launch an email letter soon via the email list on this blog. This will contain links to lengthy articles that are better produced as a PDF, so they can be printed if necessary. I am nearly finished on the inaugural letter, which is going to be about leaving messages pinned on virtual notice boards.
For today's posting I wanted to return to usability issues, as I am now convinced that handset manufacturers do not conduct formal usability tests. Either that or they are just completely fixated with certain interface ideas (trends), which in my opinion don't work that well and significantly impede wireless service enjoyment.
I should state that formal usability testing, by my understanding, involves getting uninitiated and independent users to try tasks on the device and getting some kind of scores and also observations of their usage. It is subjecting the product to unabashed usage and abuse, in order to elicit opinion. It is not going through a designer's UI checklist in clinical lab conditions. Our usability friend Jakob Nielsen's website is a good starting point.
Today I was writing in my book about the problems of entering site addresses into mobile-device browsers with limited data entry modes. The worse case is a device that insists on the user entering the entire URL, including the "http://" bit. I don't see why some of the desktop shortcuts haven't made it onto mobile devices yet, like typing just "trains" to infer http://www.trains.com or http://wap.trains.com. There are so many other usability enhancements to this problem, like selective text-prediction so that "www" and ".com" are auto-completed in any case, but not the actual domain name.
By the way, the use of a "wap" sub-domain is a pointless distraction. All sites should stick to conventions as much as possible and use "www", so shortcuts can be understood. A simple redirect to the WAP pages can easily be accommodated at the main homepage on a site, so no need for typing special sub-domains.
The other bind is the amazing complexity that many browsers impose on managing favourites, or bookmarks. On many phones it takes many key presses just to get to the favourites, the very idea that these are supposed to be shortcuts seems lost on the browser designers. The worse case is the Accompli A008 from Motorola, which insists that you have to exit the browser altogether and go to a sub-menu from “Settings” and then enter the favourite by hand (not by “add to favourites” or even the possibility of cut-and-paste).
But for my money, it should be possible to view the favourites as a start-up page in the browser itself, that’s where the phone permits setting the homepage, it having been factory set to point to the operator portal.
It seems such a pity that with the ever-increasing pace of development with new browser technologies, content types and other advances, the basics of usability get glossed over. This is perhaps one of the problems of having so many devices to contend with – there is no focused effort on a consistent and acceptable user experience.
12:18:27 PM 
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