{"id":142,"date":"2006-08-09T19:56:12","date_gmt":"2006-08-10T03:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wapreview.com\/?p=142"},"modified":"2006-08-10T04:57:00","modified_gmt":"2006-08-10T12:57:00","slug":"mobile-web-unusability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wapreview.com\/142\/","title":{"rendered":"Mobile Web (un)Usability"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\u00a0My fellow mobilist and host of this weeks Carnival of the Mobilists, Daniel Taylor at Mobile Enterprise Weblog<\/em> has posted an interesting piece on mobile web usability or lack there of. Daniel’s article, Who Designs This Stuff?<\/em><\/a> describes the difficulties and frustrations that he experienced trying to accomplish something on the mobile web that should have been easy – getting the arrival time of a airline flight.<\/p>\n

The problems Daniel experienced are typical of the frustration that many users experience when they first try to use the mobile web. The good news is that the causes of some of these difficulties are relatively easy to fix.<\/p>\n

I don’t know exactly what steps Daniel when through on his phone, only that they didn’t work and that it was a Delta Airlines flight. I’m going to guess that he went directly to the Delta’s main web URL. It’s reasonable to expect the so-called mobile “web” to work like the web on a PC. On the web, if you want to find the arrival time of a Delta Air Lines flight you either go directly to http:\/\/www.delta.com\/<\/a> or you Google “Delta Air Lines” and follow the first link that looks reasonable. Try that on almost any phone and you will get nowhere and not very fast either.<\/p>\n

I like Delta.com – on my PC browser. The site has a clean, simple appearance and the things that the typical user is most likely to want to do – like book a flight or check flight status are easy to find. On a mobile browser however, Delta.com is a nightmare if it loads at all. Even reaching the Flight Status form requires scrolling way down to the bottom of what is a very long screen on a phone. Then when go through the effort of entering the flight number and pressing the “Go” button either nothing happens or you get an error message. That’s because the flight status form doesn’t work unless your browser supports Javascript and very few mobile browsers currently do.<\/p>\n

Using Google doesn’t work any better. It starts out well, Google recognizes that you are using a mobile browser and displays a Mobile friendly search page. Search for “Delta Air” and the first hit Google returns takes you right to Delta.com. Google even runs the page through its transcoder which re-formats the page to supposedly be usable on the phone. The only problem is that it still doesn’t work. The transcoder breaks Delta.com up into multiple smaller pages that can be loaded by almost any phone browser. Flight status is on the third and final page. There is an cryptic message “Disabled Form” at the top of the first page. You ignore that and enter the flight number and press “Go”. The page reloads and you’re back where you started from – on page one of the three page transcoded representation of the Delta.com site. If you go back to the third page you find – nothing, no results, no error message, just the empty Flight Status form inviting you to fill it out all over again.<\/p>\n

So if you are a content provider like Delta what can you do to give the user the experience they expect and deserve and in the process improve you reputation as a modern mobile savvy business? Two rather simple things would help immensely.<\/p>\n