A study has found that WAP usability is currently failing miserably, and will continue to fail in 2001. The true potential for the mobile Internet is expected to gain momentum by 2003.
Entitled "WAP Usability -- Deja Vu: 1994 All Over Again" the study found that WAP usability is currently failing miserably, and will continue to fail in 2001. The true potential for the mobile Internet is expected to gain momentum by 2003.
The 90-page study is available for download from the Nielsen Norman Group web site at www.NNgroup.com/reports/wap
"In my opinion, WAP stands for Wrong Approach to Portability. Companies shouldn't waste money fielding WAP services that nobody will use while WAP usability remains so poor," said Jakob Nielsen, one of the company's four principals.
"Instead, they should sit out the current generation of WAP while planning their mobile Internet strategy."
The title of the report alludes to the fact that the study's findings are strikingly similar to usability studies conducted by Nielsen in 1994 at the dawn of the Web. He predicts that the evolution of Internet mobility will follow along the same analogy: When things got easier to use on the Web, more users adopted it, and commercial use exploded.
The Nielsen Norman Group WAP study was conducted in London due to the advanced state of the mobile phone market in the United Kingdom. Twenty users were given WAP phones to use on their own while keeping a diary. Traditional usability tests were conducted at the beginning and end of the one-week field work.
Significant findings in the fall 2000 WAP usability report:
-- 70% of the users answered no when asked whether they would like to have a WAP phone within one year;
-- 20% of the users indicated they would like to get WAP within three years;
-- even the simplest tasks take much too much time to provide any satisfaction to users;
-- even after spending a week using a WAP phone, user performance remained appallingly low;
-- current WAP services have severely reduced usability because of misguided use of design principles from other forms of media, particularly Web design.
Nielsen Norman Group is a user-experience think tank and consulting firm that advises companies on how to enter the age of the customer and achieve success through the design of human-centered products and services.
Each of the four principals of the Nielsen Norman Group -- Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman, Bruce "Tog" Tognazinni and Brenda Laurel -- are world-renowned experts in usability and user interface design.
Besides authoring books and evangelizing to large audiences about user experience, they conduct high-level usability reviews of websites, Internet services, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy-to-use. The Nielsen Norman Group is based in Silicon Valley, California.
