Articles and talks

"And God invented Nokia"

A review of Handheld Usability
Scott Weiss (Usable Products Company)
John Wiley, pp292, £29.95

© Louise Ferguson 2002

No sooner have you arrived for the Christmas holidays at your in-laws' house, than along scurries a member of the household clutching their latest acquisition, a shiny new mobile phone of more diminutive proportions than the last. They can't pick up their voicemail. They can't put any contacts in the address book. The instruction booklet doesn't agree with the menu structure. There is a wailing and a gnashing of teeth. Surely you, as a usability expert, must be their saviour, able to apply your magical powers to determine how to operate the rogue device. Half an hour later, yet another handheld bites the dust. As a usability expert, you're not endowed with magical powers - you just know when to call a halt, when an interface passeth all understanding.

We've seen an explosion of handheld devices on the market in recent years, with some manufacturers being more guilty than others of imposing unusable interfaces on their public. On the downside, retail phone outlets rarely make it possible to try before you buy, while network operators have not favoured products with better UIs. On the upside, shorter product lifecycles than in the desktop world have given makers the opportunity to put right some of the major defects in their products quickly, although imitation - of Nokia - has once again proved the sincerest form of flattery. On balance, there is still some room for improvement.

With so much bad handheld UI design around and a dearth of practical advice on designing the mobile interface, this hardback volume from US usability practitioner Scott Weiss is certainly timely. It's a hands-on guide aiming to help designers think through practical issues involved in designing applications for handhelds, whether email pagers, mobile phones or PDAs.

Weiss makes no assumptions about the reader's technical knowledge. Before launching into the nitty-gritty of handheld information architecture, prototyping and testing, he ranges over matters such as device types and connectivity, approaching the technical aspects with authority and providing clear explanations that assist the non-technical reader in getting to grips with the issues. Terms are always clearly defined and the text is supplemented with many clear illustrations. This gives the reader a good idea of the constraints involved in handheld design, providing a firm basis for the analysis and guidance in the later chapters.

The book goes on to cover a wide range of information architecture issues from a handheld angle, such as 'select' versus 'type', the use of icons and audicons on handhelds, and types of interfaces for specialised applications. Inevitability in a book of this size, with so many aspects of the interface to cover, the treatment of major issues such as globalisation does not really go beyond the cursory.

Weiss argues convincingly in favour of the need for prototypes as a 'proof of product' and takes a practical approach, leading the reader through constructing and using paper prototypes of handheld products. The final chapter deals with practical steps involved in conducting a usability test, from writing a respondent screener (questionnaire) to using transcript data and prioritising design issues.

There's a wealth of useful information in the appendices, including a brief timeline of handheld history, a practical example of creating a paper prototype application, and an extensive treatment of a usability study conducted by Weiss's own company. The book is rounded off with a useful glossary, a brief bibliography - including a fair number of websites - and a well-constructed index.

Perhaps inevitably, to be able to offer sufficient useful advice to handheld designers in a book of this size, Weiss has had to restrict his coverage of form factors. Explicitly excluded are the larger held devices such as tablet PCs and palmtop devices, with the argument that "they look and work like desktop computers". I would beg to differ. Designers of A5 tablet PC hardware and applications, for example, face many of the same issues as Weiss describes, including limited screen real estate, absence of external keyboard, touch screen issues, on-screen keyboards, stylus input issues, handwriting recognition, exterior use, wireless connectivity, docking and battery life. But perhaps it's unreasonable to ask the author to address such a wide range of devices in a volume of this size.

Some readers may find Weiss's style dry, but by cutting the prose he's able to pack a lot in. While Handheld Usability cannot hope to comprehensively cover all the interaction and usability aspects of handheld devices, it certainly fulfils its objective of highlighting the particular challenges of designing for 'on the go' devices, and makes a good companion volume to some of the standard works on general interaction design.