Maximizing user experience of the Mobile Internet (page 1 of 2)

Now a user can always stay connected without blocking incoming calls, and s/he normally does not pay for the waiting time but only for the received content.

There are about 0.5 million Mobile Internet pages (WAP and I-mode) at the moment, and about 3 billion Web pages on the Internet. For some people, the relative size of the Mobile Internet means that finding specific information is easier than from the full Web, but many others would still want to have mobile access to the full Web in its entirety.

Through research, Nokia is investigating how to merge the best of both worlds. Already now, test users have been positively surprised that viewing full Web pages on a small screen is not as bad an experience as they expected.

Three systems - One user experience

A fundamental principle in achieving our goal is that users are interested in the content, and all other parts of the system should be invisible. When a person is accessing WAP or Web pages through a mobile phone, the device, the browser, and the site need to work fluently together to provide a usable experience.

Improved WAP browsing
Over the years, Nokia Research Center has conducted tens of usability studies on different kinds of WAP sites to find out the best practices for building Mobile Internet sites. Based on these studies, we then provide guidelines for site developers at Forum Nokia. The latest recommendations are documented in WAP Service Developer's Guide for Nokia Series 40 Phones with XHTML Browser [1].

The move from WAP 1.x sites written in WML (Wireless Markup Language) to WAP 2.0 sites written in XHTML Mobile Profile (eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) makes it possible for the user to view the same site both on a mobile device and on a PC. The biggest impact of WAP 2.0 on usability is the fact that XHTML MP pages are downloaded one by one, not as a deck of cards (as in WAP 1.x). Because requesting the next XHTML MP page takes longer time than requesting the next card in the already-downloaded deck, it is important not to copy very short cards to XHTML pages as such. Longer pages are more usable in WAP 2.0 [2].

Navigating

We are often asked about the optimal number of links on a navigational page. The old usability rule has been 7 (+/- 2) items in a menu, but it seems this is not the best rule with links on a WAP page. In most cases, it is better to have 12 links on a page and a site hierarchy of 3 levels than 7 links on a page and 4 hierarchical levels. Actually up to 30 links can be shown on a page, provided that they are tightly bound together and they can be listed in a logical order. An example would be a list of cities in alphabetical order. If there are more than 30 items on the list, do not just split the items onto several pages and expect the user to download pages one after each other, but offer the user smarter navigation methods or a field to type the value.

Finding content

While navigational link pages cannot be too long, informative pages should provide enough information. We have tested a page that was 20 screenfuls long, and the participants were pleased to get enough information after making the effort to navigate to the page.

When trying to find the desired information on the site, more than half of the users utilized a keyword search when it was provided easily [3]. This is surprising, considering the effort required to enter text with a standard ITU-T keypad. So it is important to provide a search function also on Mobile Internet sites.