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Research / Reports :Mobile Usability
Usability in Mobile Applications is really an important factor and a challenge in today’s scenario where there are several applications getting designed for Intranets as well as for end-users. Most of them don’t serve completely as intended to the end-user’s needs, being not designed from the mobile usability perspective.
Research / Reports on Mobile Usability
Few days back, I was reading some article related to Mobile Usability on Jakob Nielsen’s website . I found it quite interesting and so trying to put in some facts which I think should be useful for us to understand the scenario.
To understand usability factors that makes mobile sites easy or an unpleasant experience, Jakob Nielsen had combined 3 different usability testing methods, namely: 1) Diary Study 2) User Testing 3) Cross-platform review.
Mobile devices’ users face several usability obstacles to overcome with, like Small Screens, Difficult / non-easy ways of input, bandwidth / download time issues and worst of all, badly designed website.
Surprisingly, as per the Jakob Nielsen’s tests which were designed to test participants using those sites which were specifically designed for mobile devices, their “average success rate” was 64% which is quite higher than the 53% success rate recorded for the “full sites”. And, as Jakob thinks, this is a enough powerful reason to start developing mobile optimized websites.
This “mobile usability” has several interesting facts unconvered. You can read the complete article here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html
Some Resources:
Mobile Web – Navigation Design
Mobile Web Applications – Design factors
Mobile Web Application Development Strategies
Mobile web has emerged as another area of interest for designers and developers. Mobile web has its own advantages and limitations, from both developers and end-users perspective. Mobile Web platform has empowered organizations as well as end-users to access information / applications on the move and achieve ‘mobile productivity’.
In this series of posts about “mobile web application development strategies’, we will discuss about ‘advantages of mobile web platform, strategizing for mobile web, initiating a mobile web project’ and much more will be added as and when possible.
To begin with, we will understand how mobile web is promising.
Advantages of Mobile Web platform:
Anywhere-Anytime information access:
Unlike conventional desktop-based computing, mobile web has surpassed the limitation of immobility. With mobile devices, users can access information anywhere, anytime when they are in the cell phone connectivity coverage area or using a WI-FI hotspot.
Wireless Internet Connectivity:
Users are now having access to internet on their mobile devices or accesses internet through their mobile devices.
Leveraging Application / Device capabilities:
Services / Applications now can take the advantage of in-built capabilities of mobile devices, like clicking on a phone number can help users to call the respective number with no hassles involved.
Geography-based Content Delivery:
Location-based technologies are enabling the end-users to receive the content based on the location. Such localized content delivery mechanism is helping users to get the desired content with minimal efforts, which leads to a better user experience and benefits to the respective service provider as well.
Strategizing for mobile web:
When an organization decides to design a website or an application targeted at mobile web users, they need to consider several factors like:
- Why should we make / create a mobile web application?
- Does the content delivered on mobile devices make sense for the TG? Is it really adding value to their usage?
- What kind of content can be made available online? Do we deliver useful content?
- We have a very powerful flash-based website. Should we create a similar application User Interface (UI) for mobile devices as well? Will it work across multiple device profiles?
Precisely, before we start working on a mobile web application, we must be aware of all aspects like advantages and limitations the mobile web platform has and also about how to leverage this platform for an organizations’ and end-users’ advantage. We must be clear about ‘whether creating a mobile web application can really add value’ to the respective website as well for the end-users / TG.
As this is a series of posts, we will continue with “Initiating a mobile web project” in the continuing post.
Navigation Design Guidelines – Best Practices
When a user visits a website, the very first thing he tries to find is a way to access a website or an application – that’s “navigation”. If the navigation is not designed properly, precisely a non-intuitive navigation, it is obviously going to make user’s life difficult. If we are making website users to think how to use the respective site, it clearly indicates that some core things are missing.
A great navigation is intuitive, easy-to-understand, and easy-to-use and ideally, should not need some plug-in to be downloaded to use navigation. For example, a site navigation is designed using Flash and no alternative way of navigation is not provided, can you imagine how miserable an experience a user can have who doesn’t have flash installed on this machine?
So, we must design sites to good navigation to make the website or an application successful in terms of end-users’ experience while using our website / application.
Below given are some of the points which can help us design a better navigation that helps users to use your site:
1. Navigation Placement:
Make sure that the navigation is placed at an easily visible location, so that the users don’t have to “guess” or “search” for it.
2. Place important things on high:
Keep the important things on the top area of the page, preferably in the first half of the page. Such significant information should get displayed first to the user.
3. Banner Blindness:
As Wikipedia describes it – “Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information.
Make sure that you don’t put any content above the ad banners as users are tend to ignore all the content that’s displayed above ad banners. Make sure especially that navigation is not placed above such banners, as ‘navigation’ is very important & should not be ‘lost’. [Read more about "Banner Blindness"]
4. Avoid being unconventional:
Designing website navigation in an ‘unconventional’ way to make the site stand out from the crowd is NOT a good method of navigation design. It becomes difficult for the users who are now quite used to the general web design practices of designs, navigation & such other generic functionality.
5. Ideally, an easy way to come back to homepage, like a HOME link should be always there:
Homepage being core of any website, a back-link to the homepage should always be there. Also, it is very much possible that user might have landed up on your website through some search engine or have come directly to your sub-page / inner page, a “home” link always helps them to come back to the homepage of your website.
6. Keep the navigational elements consistent across the website:
Make sure that all the links & navigational elements are kept consistently on the same place as there have been anywhere else, in terms of links, styles, etc. User can find them easily anywhere in the site.
7. Design it to ‘load fast’:
Do all your design & development by considering a user having low-speed internet connections. Make sure that your all your site’s HTML, CSS, Flash components (if any) loads faster, so that users do not leave the site quickly even before it loads as they may not be ready to wait or may switch to your competitor’s site.
8. Quality as against to Quantity:
Internet users like minimum options & clicks to get the desired information. Create sub-sections & sub-categories to help the user to “navigate easily & locate the required content easily & quickly”.
9. Browser-Compatibility:
There is multi-browser application scenario. Do compatibility tests for your website before it goes live on major browsers like “MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator, and Opera” & check if the look & feel as well functionality of JavaScript used in the site is working well.
10. ONLY essential stuff in the navigation:
Non-core Information like “Privacy Policy, Terms of use, even Contact Us (in most cases)” should not be in the main navigation & can be placed in the “bottom menus” zone.
Also read:
Navigation Design for Mobile Web – Best Practices
Do provide your suggestions / insights that can imprve the way we design navigation.
What is Banner Blindness?
Banners are common form of advertising on web, especially on portals like news sites. Paradox is, even though users do notice the presence of banners on the web page, they tend to ignore it quickly. Almost everything that looks like a banner on the web page is about to get ignored due to the “banner blindness”.
As Wikipedia describes it – “Banner blindness is a phenomenon in web usability where visitors on a website ignore banner-like information.” As Jakob Nielsen mentions, “Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it’s actually an ad.”
The term “banner blindness” was coined by Benway and Lane (1998). It was a result of website usability tests where major test participants, consciously or unconsciously, ignored information that was presented in banner or looked like a banner.
This eye-tracking study by Jakob Nielsen has confirmed that most of the time, the banner blindness is real. Users are now ‘immune’ to these ethical and now-ethical ways of advertising on the web and tend to ignore those ads or something that looks like an advertisement and rather keep looking relevant information in the form of links, etc, while ignoring large animated or colorful elements like graphics.
Also, users generally read the whole content; rather they do scan the content. If the content is interesting for the user, then he might choose to read it in-depth. But, in all such cases, he still may prefer not to see those noticeable banners.
Source: Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings
(Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, August 20, 2007)
Heatmaps from eyetracking studies:
The areas where users looked the most are colored red; the yellow areas indicate fewer views, followed by the least-viewed blue areas. Gray areas didn’t attract any fixations. Green boxes were drawn on top of the images after the study to highlight the advertisements.
© 2007 by Jakob Nielsen.
References / Resources:
Benway, J. P., Lane, D. M.,
Banner Blindness: Web Searchers Often Miss ‘Obvious’ Links
1998, Internet Technical Group, Rice University
Norman, D. A., Commentary:
Banner Blindness, Human Cognition and Web Design
1999, Internet Technical Group
Pagendarm, M., Schaumburg, H.,
Why Are Users Banner-Blind? The Impact of Navigation Style on the Perception of Web Banners,
2001, Journal of Digital Information
Why Are Users Banner-Blind?
Journal of Digital Information (July 31, 2001)
Just How ‘Blind’ Are We to Advertising Banners on the Web?
Usability News (Summer 2000)
Please submit resources / insights for Banner Blindness here, if you have any.
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