Mobile phone and PDA usability testing is critical on your business. In fact , mobile and handheld user friendliness testing could be even more important than computer-based user friendliness testing. The primary reasons for this are:
– The number of persons accessing the net from mobile and portable devices is increasing at a massive rostrumlegal.com level – in 2008 together there’ll end up being an estimated fifty eight million PDAs sold across the world.
— People generally have much less experience of employing their mobile going online than they do of using their computer. This means that computer-based users could be assumed to have a higher level of existing expertise than mobile and handheld users.
– The platform by which users gain access to your site is definitely far less foreseeable when using mobiles. Computer-based guests generally only differ from one another in their web browser and main system (i. electronic. most people will use a screen, mouse button and keyboard), whereas the several types of mobile phones and PDAs fluctuate can dramatically.
Which mobile phones and PDAs must you consider?
Mobile phones and PDAs can differ in one another dramatically, and this might radically switch how people experience and use websites. Some of the ways handheld devices can differ include:
– Screen size (small vs . large)
– Screen layout (portrait vs . landscape)
– Input device (stylus, numeric pad, dial-wheel, QWERTY keypad)
Because the mobile phone / PDA that an individual is using will have these kinds of a outstanding effect on all their experience of your site, you should try to evaluate with as much mobile phones and PDAs as is feasible.
Of course , evaluating with every mobile phone and PDA is unachievable. Here are some tips to help reduce the number of devices you’ll need to test out with:
– Your cellular site visitors may well belong to a particular audience. Particular audiences usually tend to prefer particular types of phones (e. g. cell phones with big screens that will support via the internet access or small-screen types that aren’t).
– You will discover ‘phone families’ that offer a very similar user knowledge (and will never need to be examined individually).
– You may want to00 test with all the most well-liked mobile phones in Europe or the most popular models that are being used to get your site (you actually can check your site statistics to find out this information).
Who do you want to test with?
The people you wish to conduct your mobile phone user friendliness testing treatments with will certainly, of course , be based upon your particular business and its projected audience. Some things to bear in mind include:
– How much experience they should own of employing their mobile phones to gain access to services. This is particularly significant as the market designed for accessing internet services through mobile phones is growing and the percent of ‘complete novices’ (i. e. persons using the technology for the first time) will be a long way higher than meant for computer users of your website.
— Which cellphone or PDA they have. We might usually suggest that people employ their own cellphone in a treatment, so the test can concentrate on your website and never on the way the handheld device functions.
Exactly where should portable usability screening sessions always be conducted?
Cellphones and PDAs are used inside the real world consequently usability evaluating of portable devices should certainly therefore not simply take place in a usability lab.
Where, when and how a mobile phone is used is critical into a person’s experience of the site they may be accessing. Some of the following instances could effect this knowledge and therefore things to consider of the web site’s usability:
– Lighting
— Background noises
– Interruptions
– Concurrent tasks (i. e. nearly anything the person is doing at the same time)
– Physical movement
As such, we would recommend, if possible, that any kind of mobile phone and PDA usability testing is conducted both in a laboratory and also in the ‘outside world’.
How you approach and manage mobile phone user friendliness sessions will be based on your organization and its audience, but the the majority of popular strategies to mobile user friendliness testing contain:
– Lab-based (using a camera to record the session)
– Diary-studies (asking people to continue to keep a diary of how they may have used all their mobile phone and any problems they encounter)
– Newspaper prototypes (running usability evaluating on a paper based version within the site, employing mobile phone screen-sized pieces of paper)