Mobile phone and PDA usability assessment is critical to your business. Actually mobile and handheld functionality testing could possibly be even more important than computer-based wonderful testing. The primary reasons for this kind of are:

– The number of persons accessing the world wide web from mobile phone and portable devices is certainly increasing by a massive fee – in 2008 the only person there’ll end up being an estimated 49.50 million PDAs sold globally.

— People generally have way less experience of using their mobile to search online than they do of using their computer system. This means that computer-based users could be assumed to get a higher level of existing expertise than mobile and handheld users.

— The platform by which users get your site is normally far less estimated when using cellphones. Computer-based readers generally simply differ from each other in their web browser and operating system (i. at the. most people will use a screen, mouse button and keyboard), whereas different types of mobile phones and PDAs are different can substantially.

Which mobile phones and PDAs do you need to consider?

Mobile phones and PDAs can differ in one another drastically, and this will radically switch how persons experience and use websites. Some of the ways in which handheld gadgets can differ incorporate:

– Screen-size (small versus large)

– Display screen layout (portrait vs . landscape)

– Input device (stylus, www.global-partner.eu numeric keypad, dial-wheel, QWERTY keypad)

Because the mobile phone / PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT that someone is using will have this sort of a unique effect on their particular experience of your site, you should try to evaluate with as many mobile phones and PDAs as is feasible.

Of course , examining with every cellphone and PDA is extremely hard. Here are some suggestions to help narrow down the number of units you’ll need to evaluation with:

— Your mobile site visitors could belong to a specialized audience. Certain audiences tend to prefer particular types of phones (e. g. telephones with big screens that will support via the internet access or small-screen units that aren’t).
– You will find ‘phone families’ that offer the same user encounter (and is not going to need to be analyzed individually).
— You may only want to test with all the most well-liked mobile phones in Europe or maybe the most popular models that are to be used to access your site (you can look at your site statistics to find out this kind of information).

Who do you want to test with?

The people you intend to conduct your mobile phone user friendliness testing treatments with might, of course , depend on your particular business and its target market. Some things to make note of include:

– How much experience they should own of using their mobile phones to get into services. That is particularly significant as the market just for accessing on line services through mobile phones keeps growing and the percent of ‘complete novices’ (i. e. persons using the technology for the first time) will be far higher than with regards to computer users of the website.
– Which cellular phone or PERSONAL DIGITAL ASSISTANT they have. We might usually suggest that people use their own cellphone in a practice session, so the evaluation can focus on your website instead of on the way the hand-held device performs.

Just where should portable usability screening sessions be conducted?

Cellphones and PDAs are used inside the real world hence usability screening of handheld devices should certainly therefore not only take place in a usability lab.

Where, when and how a mobile phone can be used is critical to a person’s experience of the site they may be accessing. Some of the following instances could influence this experience and therefore considerations of the web site’s usability:

– Lighting
— Background noise
– Disruptions
– Contingency tasks (i. e. anything the person is doing at the same time)
– Physical movement

As such, we would recommend, if at all possible, that any mobile phone and PDA simplicity testing can be conducted in a clinical and also in the ‘outside world’.

How you package and run mobile phone usability sessions depends on your business and its target audience, but the most popular methods of mobile usability testing include:

– Lab-based (using a camera to record the session)
– Diary-studies (asking people to preserve a diary of how they have used the mobile phone and any challenges they encounter)
– Paper prototypes (running usability assessment on a paper based version for the site, using mobile phone screen-sized pieces of paper)