FYI: DON'T BUY AN iPHONE

Below are some interesting comments from Jakob Nielsen's email on 9
July 2007. Nielsen is an internationally known useability
professional. See his Web site at http://www.useit.com/.

Sarah

>DON'T BUY AN iPHONE
>
>Buried toward the end of the New York Times review of Apple's new mobile
>phone are the following damning statistics. Time to download homepages of
>some websites:
>
> * NY Times: 55 seconds
> * Amazon: 100 seconds
> * Yahoo: two minutes (!)
>
>The iPhone reviewer also experienced several dropped phone calls.
>
>(Readers outside the United States: you may remember the concept of
>"dropped calls" from the mobile services you used in the late 1980s.
>Sadly, they are still a fact of life on the lower-quality networks in the
>U.S. And the iPhone's network is reportedly the lowest-quality of them
>all.)
>
>Advice for consumers:
>
>Don't buy an iPhone - or any Internet phone - that doesn't run on a much
>better network. It doesn't matter how good the on-screen user interface
>is. What's important is the *total* user experience which is ruined by
>minute-plus response times and dropped calls. The best mobile browser is
>useless when pages arrive at a snail's pace.
>
>Advice for businesses:
>
>It's still not time to launch a mobile Internet strategy in the U.S. Wait
>until we catch up with Europe and Asia in mobile connectivity.
>
>(Disclosure: we did work with one client on making their service mobile,
>but that was a special case where mobile access made immense sense. Thus
>it was correct for this company to pioneer a mobile design and to do the
>extra work to make sure it was as usable as possible within the current
>technology limitations.)
>
>Eventually, it will be time to add mobile components to websites and
>intranets, even in the United States. By then, you'll need a separate
>design for mobile devices.
>
>The iPhone has 20% of the pixels on a small computer monitor. Yes, this is
>twice the pixel count of the previous generation of smartphones, but still
>too little to support the interface-rich design style that dominates
>current websites.
>
>When I analyzed leading companies' homepages, I found that only 20% of the
>screen real estate was allocated to content of interest to users:
>
> > http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030210.html
>
>Interestingly, 20% is exactly the amount that will fit on an iPhone. So a
>different design that stripped away all the overhead would deliver the
>same info for mobile as for the desktop.
>
>The impact of the network on the iPhone's total user experience is a good
>example of a general lesson: usability is a chain that's no stronger than
>its weakest link. Take e-commerce: navigation, search, product photos,
>product descriptions, the shopping cart, checkout, and site credibility
>all need great design. If any one of these fails, then no sale.
>
>My colleague Tog likes the iPhone, but he is commenting on its on-screen
>UI, which I like as well, so we are not really in disagreement. See:
>
> > http://www.asktog.com/columns/072iPhoneFirstTouch.html
>
>Remember:
>
>user experience = UI + everything else touching the user

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Received on Tue Jul 10 2007 - 13:05:04 PDT