Usability 'guru' Jakob Nielsen has come up with his latest report. This one is on mobile web usability, an experience he terms "miserable."
Nielsen (the man - different from the company) set users in six countries (UK, US, Australia, Singapore, Netherlands and Romania) a series of tasks to do with successfully finding information from a series of websites. For example, for m.lufthansa.com, "your friend is scheduled to arrive in London around 12pm...find out if her flight is on time." The PC success rate was 80% while the mobile success rate was only 59%.
Actually this statistic looks worse when you separate out touch phones like iPods, which had a 75% success rate, and so called feature phones (most cellphones on the market these days), which had a 38% rate of success. Also when accessing sites specifically designed for the mobile, the stat was only 64%. For mobile sites to lose a third of their mobile visitors, isn't great.
Meanwhile, in a London testing session, Nielsen found that carrying out various mobile tasks actually takes longer now than it did in 2000. However, he puts that down to WAP in 2000 being a walled garden, whereas now people actually make use of the web properly with search engines et al.
Mobile usability issues
Apparently according to Nielsen, mobile usability issues boil down to four factors: 1) small screens, 2) awkward input, 3) download delays and 4) mis-designed websites.
He says that "unless websites are redesigned for the special circumstances of mobile use, the mobile Web will remain a mirage." Maybe so, but I'd wonder whether the situation will naturally correct itself as the % usage of smartphones and touch screen phones increases and that of normal phones goes down.
- Study: Mobile web a throwback to the '90s (textually.org)
- Rediscovering Jakob Nielsen (37signals.com)
- Should Passwords Be Masked in Online Forms? (blogstorm.co.uk)
- Nielsen on BBC's snappy web headlines (guardian.co.uk)
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