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