Mobile & handheld usability testing – why it is important

In: Keywords

22 Mar 2011


Mobile phone and PDA usability testing is essential to your business. In fact, might be mobile and hand held usability testing be more important than usability testing on a computer. The main reasons are:

- The number of people accessing the Internet from mobile devices and handheld devices is growing at a massive – in 2008 alone, there are about 58 million PDAs sold worldwide (source: eTForecast).
- People usually have much less experience, to use their laptops to go online than they do with their computer. This means that users can be expected from computers to a higher level of expertise available as mobile and handheld users will have.
- The access platform, the users to your website is much less predictable than with mobile phones. Visitors to the site (ie, most people use a monitor, mouse and keyboard) on the basis of information technology in general from each other in their browser and operating system are different, while other types of mobile phones and PDAs are very different.

What are mobile phones and PDAs apply?

Cell phones and PDAs can vary dramatically, radically change how people experience and use websites. Some of the ways in which can vary handheld devices include:

- Screen size (small / large)
- Screen layout (portrait or landscape)
- Input device (pen, keyboard, dial-wheel, QWERTY keyboard)

Since the cell phone / PDA that someone has a profound effect on their experience using your site, you should try to test with more phones and PDAs as possible.

Of course, testing with all cell phones and PDAs is impossible. Here are some ideas to reduce the number of devices you need to be tested with:

- Visitors to your mobile site can belong to a specific target group. Some viewers tend to certain types of phones (eg phones with big screens, the on-line access to models from the small screen, not facilitate) prefer.
- Families Phone “is a user experience very similar (and need not be tested individually).
- You can use the most popular mobile phones in Europe or the most popular models to your website (you can make your site statistics to find this information) to test access.

Who do you want to test?

The people you want your mobile phone usability testing sessions with the will, who of course depend on your particular company and its audience. Some things to keep in mind:

- What experience do they have to get through their mobile phones to access services. This is particularly important that the market is growing for access to online services on mobile phones, and the percentage of “Scrubs” (ie people with the technology for the first time) will be much higher than computer users at your site.
- Which mobile phone or PDA they have. We generally recommend that people use their own mobile phone in a meeting, so that tests can focus on your site and not on the way the hand-held device.

Where should mobile usability testing sessions are conducted?

Cell phones and PDAs are in the real world so usability testing to use hand-held devices do not take place in a usability lab.

Where, when and how a mobile phone is used, is essential for the experience of a single site, you can access. One of the following circumstances may affect this experience and therefore considerations of user-friendliness:

- Lighting
- Background noise
- Distractions
- Parallelism (ie, everything that the person is at the same time)
- Physical activity

As such, we recommend if possible that all mobile phones and PDA usability testing conducted in both laboratory and in the “outside world”.

How will you plan and manage the use of mobile phone sessions on your company and its audience, but among the most popular methods of mobile usability testing:

- Lab-based (using a camera to record the session)
- (A diary asking people how they used to keep their mobile phones and the problems encountered by them) diary studies
- Paper prototypes (running usability tests on a printed version of the site, with pieces of mobile phone screen, paper)

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