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Grand old man of web usability studies, Jacob Nielsen has done a fairly large usability study of mobile web use in general with 48 participants in the US and UK.
The study finds that using the web on a mobile phone ranges from a world of pain (feature phones) to barely acceptable (touch phones). Unsurprisingly, he found that sites designed specifically for use on a mobile phone performed substantially better than "full sites".
Nielsen also compared with a study from year 2000. The same tasks took longer to do today, than they did back in 2000 on a WAP phone. He suggests that the main reason is that back then, the mobile web was a walled garden, limited but relatively simple, while today the web is open on mobiles but people need to go to to a search engine and fumble with awkward text input and slow loading times to search for an answer.
Large screens and direct manipulation has a huge impact on usability:
Unsurprisingly, the bigger the screen, the better the user experience when accessing websites. Average success rates were:
| Feature phones | 38% |
| Smartphones | 55% |
| Touch phones | 75% |
With these numbers, the consumer advice is easy: buy a touch phone if using websites is important to you.
The advice for Internet managers is harder. Considering the horrible usability of feature phones, should you even support them? Alternatively, should you focus on smartphone and touch phone users who are more likely to use your site extensively?
Recommended. You can read the post over at Jacob Nielsen's Alertbox at useit.com.
Good post, and timely.
We've just posted a blog entry/paper which features some of the Nielsen findings, which we use to argue for a more dedicated mobile web experience, rather than just re-purposing or expecting current websites to function and perform well on mobile devices.
Check it out, it's quite an interesting read: http://tr.im/uTCe
Posted by: Wapple | August 03, 2009 at 14:10
Thanks for sharing this interesting post.I much recommended large screen.
-Ava
Posted by: Cellular Philippine Phone | July 30, 2009 at 09:24