Sep 14 - WAP Field Study Findings 2000 - Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox

WAP Field Study Findings

Summary:
Following a UK field study, 70% of users decided not to continue using WAP. Currently, its services are poorly designed, have insufficient task analysis, and abuse existing non-mobile design guidelines. WAP's killer app is killing time; m-commerce's prospects are dim for the next several years.

WAP Doesn't Work

Of course, we didn't just collect opinions. We ran timed task-performance studies as well, since observations are the best source of data. We asked users to accomplish simple tasks with their WAP phones, both at the beginning of the week and at the end.
Here are some of the findings:
Time in Minutes
Read world headlines >> 1.3 >> 1.1
Check local weather forecast >> 2.7 >> 1.9
Read TV program listing >> 2.6 >> 1.6

As the table shows, our basic conclusion is that WAP usability fails miserably; accomplishing even the simplest of tasks takes much too long to provide any user satisfaction. It simply should not take two minutes to find the current weather forecast or what will be showing on BBC1 at 8 p.m.
I asked a group of Internet experts how long they thought these tasks should take (before showing them our data), and most estimated a task time of less than 30 seconds.

Déjà Vu: 1994 All Over Again

Our findings from this WAP usability study in late 2000 bear a striking resemblance to several Web usability studies we conducted in 1994 (the age of Mosaic). It's truly déjà vu: Many of our conclusions are the same as those we reached at the dawn of the Web. Hopefully, mobility's evolution will follow that of the Web: When things got better in subsequent years (especially
around 1997), many more users got onto the Web and commercial use exploded.

The usability of current WAP services is severely reduced because of a misguided use of design principles from traditional Web design. This situation is exactly equivalent to Web design problems in 1994, when many sites contained "brochureware" that followed design principles that worked great in print (say, big images) but didn't work in an interactive medium.
For example, we came across a WAP design from Excite that used four screens to present two screens' worth of material. They even had a splash screen. Such lavish design may work on the Web if users have a big-screen PC, but on a small-screen device, designers must boil each service down to its essence and show much less information.

Our users often faced unclear labels and menu choices written in special language invented by the WAP designer. ...Users want no-brainer design that uses standard terms for standard features. The need for simple language is even stronger in WAP design, because there is no room to explain non-standard terminology with roll-over effects, icons, or captions.

Several WAP services that we tested were unnecessarily hard to use because of a mismatch between their information architecture and the users' tasks.

Very precise task analysis will be necessary for WAP services to succeed. Unfortunately, task analysis is a black art as far as most people are concerned and it is the least appreciated part of usability engineering.
The traditional Web also suffers from poor task analysis, with many sites structured according to how company management thinks rather than how users typically approach their tasks. Although poor task support is a serious usability problem for a big-screen website, it is a usability catastrophe for a small-screen WAP service.

One WAP usability finding that we have not seen on the Web was a lack of clear differentiation between services.
With WAP, the service's expressive power is severely reduced because of the need to squeeze everything into extremely short menus and present all content in ultra-short condensed versions. Service providers must cultivate a new appreciation for language and hire copywriters who can develop a distinct voice in a minimum word count. This will be the real way to distinguish WAP services.

Mobile Killer App: Killing Time

Promising mobile Internet services follow a bi-modal distribution with two dramatically contrasting approaches that both work well with users:
1 Highly goal-driven services aimed at providing fast answers to specific problems. Examples include: "My flight was canceled; get me a new airline reservation" and "What's the weather?"
2 Entertainment-focused services whose sole purpose is killing time. Examples include gossip, games, and sports services. Gossip is particularly suited for WAP because the content can be very brief and still be satisfying.

Mobile services must target users with immediate, context-directed content.
General services like shopping are less likely to succeed in the mobile environment. Indeed, in the list of services bookmarked by users, shopping hardly figures at all; sports and entertainment are the two big categories.
Killing time is a perfect application for mobile devices because they are readily available when users are waiting around for something to happen.

Source:
WAP Field Study Findings (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)
Copyright © 2001 by Jakob Nielsen. ISSN 1548-5552
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001210.html