Ready or not, here I come - 01/2001

The Nielsen Norman Group recently gave a scattering of users in London a WAP phone and asked them to use it for a week and record their impressions in a diary.

The greatest problem experienced by the participants was an inability to connect because of network failures, phones crashing, or services being down.

Misguided design principles that borrow from previous media, especially the Web, are reminiscent of the brochureware state of the Web in the mid-90s. Design principles that work great in print do not work as well in interactive media. Unclear labels, menu choices and mismatches between the information architecture and the users tasks - annoyed participants: for example, users having to scroll four pages to see what time a program aired, instead of TV listings organized by network. On several occasions users failed to scroll WAP screens to see the content and menu options.

The main conclusion of the Nielsen Norman Group study was that using WAP is comparable to using the Internet back in 1994. Simply put, not all the bugs are worked out yet. But, that didn't stop us from buying PCs in the mid-90s and apparently it won't stop us from buying wireless access devices in 2000-01. As a society, we like to have the new toys, we like to keep up with the Jones's and we like to be the first person we know with an inovation.

In the UK, one in every ten adults will receive a cell phone as a present at Christmas, putting the number of cell phones up another 4.7 million, according to a survey from NOP Research Group, which also found that 16 percent of those giving cell phones as gifts were likely to buy a WAP phone. NOP believes that even more WAP-enabled phones will be bought than anticipated, because many top-line phones have WAP as a standard feature. And the phones are headed to young people. Nearly 60 percent of those buying cell phones as gifts plan to buy one for someone under the age of 25.

One reason for the upswing in mobile device purchases may be due to the apparent improvement of user satisfaction. Telephia released a survey recently which found that wireless consumers across the US are much more contented with the data capabilities of mobile phones, PDAs and two way pagers than ever before.

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