Cellphone and PDA usability screening is critical to your business. Actually mobile and handheld wonderful testing could possibly be even more important than computer-based user friendliness testing. The key reasons for this kind of are:
— The number of persons accessing the web from mobile phone and hand held devices is definitely increasing in a massive charge – in 2008 together there’ll always be an estimated 58 million PDAs sold worldwide.
— People generally have way less experience of utilizing their mobile to continue online than they do of using their pc. This means that computer-based users may be assumed to get a higher level of existing expertise than mobile and handheld users.
— The platform through which users get your site is usually far less foreseen when using cell phones. Computer-based site visitors generally simply differ from the other person in their web browser and operating-system (i. e. most people will make use of a screen, mouse and keyboard), whereas the different types of mobile phones and PDAs change can dramatically.
Which in turn mobile phones and PDAs do you need to consider?
Cell phones and PDAs can differ in one another drastically, and this definitely will radically improve how persons experience and use websites. Some of the ways in which handheld gadgets can differ incorporate:
– Screen-size (small versus large)
– Screen layout (portrait vs . landscape)
– Input device (stylus, worldliteracy.org numeric pad, dial-wheel, QWERTY keypad)
Because the mobile phone / PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT that someone is employing will have such a serious effect on their very own experience of your websites, you should try to test with as much mobile phones and PDAs as it can be.
Of course , examining with every mobile phone and PDA is not possible. Here are some ideas to help narrow down the number of units you’ll need to evaluation with:
– Your cell site visitors might belong to a specific audience. Specific audiences normally prefer particular types of phones (e. g. phone with big screens that will support over the internet access or small-screen units that aren’t).
– You will discover ‘phone families’ that offer the same user encounter (and is not going to need to be examined individually).
– You may only want to test while using most well-liked mobile phones in Europe or maybe the most well-liked models that are to be used to gain access to your site (you actually can check your site stats to find out this information).
Who do you want to test with?
The people you need to conduct the mobile phone wonderful testing consultations with will, of course , depend on your particular organization and its market. Some things to bear in mind include:
— How much experience they should currently have of employing their mobile phones gain access to services. This is particularly significant as the market for accessing on the web services through mobile phones keeps growing and the percent of ‘complete novices’ (i. e. people using the technology for the first time) will be way higher than to get computer users of the website.
— Which cellular phone or PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT they have. We would usually suggest that people employ their own cellphone in a appointment, so the test can concentrate on your website and necessarily on the way the hand-held device performs.
Just where should cell usability testing sessions be conducted?
Mobile phone devices and PDAs are used inside the real world thus usability diagnostic tests of handheld devices should certainly therefore not simply take place in a usability laboratory.
Where, the moment and how a mobile phone is employed is critical into a person’s experience of the site they are really accessing. One of the following situations could effect this encounter and therefore things to consider of the web site’s usability:
– Lighting
— Background noise
– Interruptions
– Concurrent tasks (i. e. nearly anything the person is doing at the same time)
– Physical movement
As such, we’d recommend, if you can, that any kind of mobile phone and PDA simplicity testing is usually conducted in a lab and also in the ‘outside world’.
How you prepare and work mobile phone wonderful sessions depends on your business and its readership, but the many popular strategies of mobile usability testing contain:
– Lab-based (using a camera to record the session)
– Diary-studies (asking people to maintain a diary of how they may have used their particular mobile phone and any problems they encounter)
– Traditional prototypes (running usability testing on a paper based version for the site, using mobile phone screen-sized pieces of paper)