…which I found in the blog of a german journalist living in London, writing about what happens if you have a great zest for life and are disabled at the same time.
I don’t want to describe it there. Just watch it (it’s a short movie), it’s really worth it. And think about that next time you are designing a web site.
Lunchtime! Vegetables au gratin, not bad after all. In our factory canteen you can only pay cash. We’re nearly the last one. I know of a couple of lunchrooms who do accept only chip cards which you can charge on an automat. This may have some advancements (you don’t have to mess with loose change), but after all, it’s just one step more between me and my food, isn’t it?
Spending the afternoon might become a challenge. My boss cares for the first hour with an unexpected meeting. Meeting is just another word for the collective comparison of PDAs and laptops among my troglodyte colleagues (Me have bigger club. Me leader!). I earn some disbelieving looks and return them with a Yes-I-am-using-paper-and-a-pencil-because-I-have-everything-under-control-anyway expression. — Surprisingly, this works. Even that good that my boss assigns a task to me which was scheduled to someone else in the beginning. I would never have believed that one day ragged paper and an IKEA pencil could become insignia of superiority. Question is: What do they think I want to show that way? That I care for the really important things? That I have everything in mind?
I spend the rest of the day setting up an experiment which is mainly manual work and taking notes. My colleagues are wondering why I’m always coming around instead of using the telephone. This makes me wonder which one is more disturbing: The phone ringing or someone knocking on the door? As for me, the phone causes more stress because it gives you the impression of total urgency: If you don’t pick up the receiver immediately, it will stop ringing and you will miss something important. But once you have picked up, you must start the conversation. If someone comes around, I can tell him to wait for some thirty seconds without him running away again. What do you think?
Having finished breakfast, I need to pack my stuff. It feels somewhat strange not to pack in the usual stuff like the mobile phone and the MP3 player. (I even remove the LED lamp from my key ring.) On locking the door, it comes to me that once I was even planning to install some electronic house access system which would render the house key obsolete. But it turned out that there is no fall-back system in case of a power cut. Who invents such a bullshit?
In the bus to work I have to show my monthly ticket to the conductor. I have to admit the ticket has an integrated chip, but that one is used on a self-service station only, not for daily routines. I guess we can turn a blind eye to that. But I know that some other bus companies give out smart cards which you have to check on a sensor on entering the bus. Luckily, mine hasn’t started that sort of stuff. Anyway, I could buy a single ticket which is printed on paper (by a onboard computer, sadly), paying with loose change. Dodging the fare is not advisable today because the controllers use some sort of handheld computers where they would enter my data, requiring me to subscribe with a digital pen on a touchpad.
While entering my workplace, I realized that usually I would have to check in - using a smart card again. Good thing is, we are allowed to note down the time as an alternative, if the check-in does not work or we’re working abroad. Today I declare it as ‘not working’, period. And now things are getting tricky: What do you do all day long if you are usually working on a computer or in a lab with high-tech equipment? First thing I do is to tidy up my desk and file away piles of old papers. This keeps me busy for about an hour and a half and leaves me with a certain good feeling and a blank desk. But there are at least two hours left until lunch break. Perfect time for the reading of some papers about my next task. I printed them the day before since after all paper is friendlier to read and easier to highlight. You see, I’m cheating again: It’s not like I’m not using computers at all, It’s just that I planned carefully to avoid computers today, having prepared for that before.
All the time I’m happy the phone doesn’t ring, because it is - you may guess already - some high-integrated Voice-over-IP-based digital telephone system bling bling. I am certain my phone possesses more computing power than the machines which controlled the first space flight. Only for comparison: The first working prototype of a telephone was constructed in 1861, and one of the first ever transferred sentences was “Das Pferd frißt keinen Gurkensalat” (The horse doesn’t eat any cucumber salad). Which has about the same amount of meaning as what usually comes out of my phone receiver.
Since it is Lent now, our roman-catholic friends are doing without meat for 40 days. I am protestant and vegetarian anyway, so this does not really mean much to me. Anyway, some of them asked me if I would also forswear something for that time. I usually answered that I’m trying to pass the days without golfing. This is not a great relinquishment since I’m not golfing anyway, but it usually leaves them sufficiently impressed.
But all that made me think of one thing: Would it be possible to spend at least one day without computers, integrated circuits, digital devices and all that? Let’s think it through. I use the following rule: I may not use any semiconductor-operated device at all. Other electric devices will do ok, although I will try to avoid them. Also I will let others use digital devices for me. You may call that cheating, but I can only control myself, not others as well, and I cannot entirely shut down public life.
First, I would have to replace my radio controlled alarm clock by some good old mechanical device. And there’s the first drawback: I can impossibly sleep with a ticking clock around. Of course, I might wrap it in lots of fabric, but then its ringing will also be muffled. Not good. Also I would have to rewind it from time to time, but that’s a minor problem - at least if it doesn’t stop in the middle of the night, which according to Murphy’s Law it will do the nights before important meetings and stuff. But my digital clock once let me down also, because I failed to program not only the time but also the weekday. (Let’s call that a draw.)
Luckily my bathroom works on a somewhat hydraulic base, I even switched back to shaving foam some years ago since the electric razor broke and left me half-bearded one morning. But on the breakfast table I am unsure again about whether toasters and coffee machines are usually IC-controlled or not. On closer examination, the toaster has a simple bi-metal control, so I can use it safely. About the coffee machine, I still don’t know, so I decide to postpone the coffee to when I am at work. (The machine there is certainly not under digital control, and even if it would be: it’s usually my roommate who’s handling it because in earlier times I never got the amount of coffee powder right. But that’s another story.) Looking around in the kitchen, I notice that nearly all devices have at least an LCD display which means there are semiconductors at work. Well, except for the fridge which is that old it’s even strange it works on electricity and not on steam power. By its energy consumption and noise radiation, it wasn’t invented long after that. Usually this annoys me but this morning I even feel something like gratitude. Good old fridge.
Note to self: Replace it.
A while ago I wrote some posts about the user interfaces of ticket machines in Germany (article 1, article 2). Meanwhile I am told that they have been improved considerably: the ‘Fast purchase’ route is now considerably faster, requiring a minimum of only 4 or 5 clicks to buy a standard ticket (compare that to 16 clicks previously!). The way they have done that is to skip the whole timetable thing; instead you only select whether or not you want to take the fast trains (which has an effect on the price). That’s a very good start, since it optimises the common case: people who routinely buy the same ticket and know exactly what they need. And for those with unusual requirements, there’s still the long route with its multitude of different options to choose from.
Despite these changes, plenty of usability challenges remain. For example, my friend told me that he didn’t realise when using the machine when he had reached the payment screen: he could have just inserted his card, but instead found himself looking around for the “next” button to press. There was just some small and non-obvious bit of text on screen explaining that you were now ready to pay.
In fact the usability problems of German train ticket machines are still so pronounced that the national rail company (DB) is now offering courses to teach people how to use them. (See the scanned newspaper article, taken from Aalener Nachrichten/Schwäbische Zeitung, Tuesday 18th December 2007. Sorry that it’s more than a month old, I’ve not had much time to blog recently.)
This article is somehow slightly scary and hilarious at the same time, in the way how the train staff systematically blame the users for their inability to use the system, rather than seeking the blame with the system itself. Hilarious because it’s so stereotypical, and scary because such a big organisation can get away with it without people putting up a fuss and explaining that this is just not acceptable.
Some highlights from the article:
Moschner [the course instructor] says that the new ticket machines have a more visible display and also accept cash besides credit and debit cards. “Are they just as cumbersome as the old ones?” an over-70-year-old lady enquires. The course instructor remains calm: “They are not cumbersome.”
Hmm. Complete denial of the existence of problems. Two more quotes indicate that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of user behaviour going on:
“Read what it says there. It is important.”
“The ticket machine really does tell you what it wants, you just have to look.”
Why should I be trying to find out what the ticket machine wants? It should be trying to find out what I want! Also, I shouldn’t have to read every word on the screen. That’s simply not what people do. People don’t even read whether doors are labelled ‘PUSH’ or ‘PULL’ before trying one or the other. People just press random buttons in the hope of getting somewhere quickly, and the system should be designed to cope with this sort of behaviour. Anything else is just unrealistic and designed for robots rather than humans.
Fortunately this course is a positive initiative, probably with a thought along the lines of “well, if we can’t get the design right, at least we can teach people how to use the broken design”. I guess that’s a valid approach to the problem. And hey, 8 people turned up to that course, maybe that’s 8 fewer people who get frustrated with the machines. Sounds a bit like a drop in an ocean to me though.
Looking back at 2007, I can’t help but think that the iPhone was probably the most important and influential technology phenomenon of the year. It’s been talked about so much that I’m actually starting to get sick of it. But that doesn’t change the fact that it has had a significant impact, particularly on the way the mobile web works.
One of the most striking developments that ensued are the moves by several popular web sites to provide versions of their offering which are specifically tailored to people visiting their site from an iPhone. Amongst others, I found:
(Most of these sites show their iPhone look only to web browsers which identify themselves as Safari Mobile. To test them in a desktop web browser, see this article.)
iPhone specific development is fashionable, it seems. Some of those sites actually borrow and incorporate iPhone design elements (such as the style of lists and tabs, animation and icons), further blurring the distinction between web sites and applications. A List Apart, a widely respected resource for web developers, has even published a long article on how to develop iPhone-specific web sites (Part I, Part II). Apple themselves also offer in-depth information. iPhoneApplicationList.com maintains an extensive list of iPhone-optimised web applications.
Christopher Schmitt argues that making websites accessible for people with disabilities would expand a website’s reach far more than making an iPhone-specific site does. And Scott Gilbertson of WIRED thinks that the current situation is very similar to the old days when people were designing web sites specifically for Internet Explorer 4 (which was ahead of Netscape at the time). Jeff Croft suggests the opposite, saying that device-specific application development is going to happen anyway, and it doesn’t really matter whether it uses web technologies or not.
iPhone market share
What is the market share of iPhone internet browsing actually like? Hard to say, because it depends so much on what you measure. In terms of sold devices, the iPhone is performing strongly, but it is still a small proportion of the overall handset market. There are at least 100 million mobile devices with modern browsers (Opera Mobile, Nokia’s S60 browser, both of which are capable of displaying standard desktop web pages) compared to an estimated 2 million iPhones. Phones with WAP/XHTML browsers or adaptation browsers (such as Opera Mini) are a lot more numerous still. So in terms of the number of devices, writing iPhone-specific sites (as opposed to Opera-specific sites, for instance) really doesn’t make much sense.
Hitslink/Net Applications’ operating system statistics show that in December 2007, iPhone and iPod Touch users accounted for 0.14% of web page views, more than all other mobile platforms put together (Windows Mobile: 0.06%, S60: 0.02%). The Register reported this too. However, Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango, points out that these figures are misleading:
Hitslink produced this report by using data from their analytics customers. These people operate HTML/PC websites. They say: “You simply paste a small piece of HTML code on each page you wish to track statistics on”.
The 300 million or so mobile phone browser users (say 50 million S60) can’t or don’t browse HTML sites. They browse mobile friendly sites (WAP or XHTML or iMode) which will not have this HTML code in.
Considering that organizations like Bango, Admob, Peperonity, Vodafone report mobile browser traffic in the billions of pages per day, most of thse being S40 or S60 its clear that by ignoring non-HTML sites these stats are misleading and mistaken.
– Ray Anderson, in an email to Mobile Monday London mailing list, 5 Dec 2007
In other words, all that Hitslink’s statistics say is that iPhone users are more likely to visit more desktop web sites, but it doesn’t say anything at all about usage of sites which are specifically designed for mobile use. The conclusion I draw from this is that an iPhone user is much more likely to visit desktop sites than Windows Mobile or S60 users, and therefore non-iPhone users either mostly use sites designed for mobile, or don’t use the web much at all. This may have a variety of reasons — due to its large screen, desktop web sites are more usable on the iPhone than they are on devices with smaller screens; Safari Mobile has pretty neat zooming capabilities; and maybe iPhone users simply approach the device with a more web-oriented attitude, because after all it is more of an internet tablet than a phone.
If iPhone users actually prefer desktop-style websites, because they work quite nicely on the large screen, it really doesn’t make much sense to design a specific iPhone version of a site. On the other hand, if it’s that increased usability of the iPhone web experience which drives web usage per person to be many times higher than on S60 and Windows Mobile devices… then there’s a very strong case in favour of designing device-specific sites.
Is iPhone-specific design just a case of companies wanting to look cool by having an iPhone-optimised site and jumping on the bandwagon? Is this just a fashion which will go away again as quickly as it came? Or do such companies actually derive significant benefits from iPhone users? I’d be interested to hear your comments.
As part of the re-launch of Ept Computing’s website I’ve also published a white paper on user satisfaction on the mobile web. Some of it consists of observations which I’ve previously blogged about, now pulled together and presented in a more coherent and structured manner. I’ve structured it according to some interesting findings from the Online Publishers’ Association. They surveyed mobile web users and found that their main sources of dissatisfaction with the mobile web were:
While I’m not quite sure what they mean with “user friendliness” — it’s a kind of compound term for all sorts of factors which contribute towards the user experience — the other two, load time and navigation, are very clear areas which need to be addressed if the mobile web wants to move forward.
Site load time is a tricky problem to address, because slowness is mainly due to packet round-trip times on mobile data services. I see Ajax and Flash to be the most promising approaches to beat the network latency — i.e. transferring more data up front in order to make the site more responsive once it’s loaded. Site navigation is mainly a question of information architects figuring out how to present information most effectively on a mobile, and there are already some very good examples of good mobile navigation design on the net.
If you’re interested, you can download the white paper (PDF, 124 kB). Here’s the abstract:
The use of internet and web services on mobile devices is expected to revolutionise our attitude to information and communication in the near future. However, in order to attract mainstream adoption, the mobile web must overcome some fundamental user experience problems. In this white paper we approach the user experience from a technical point of view, explaining reasons for deficiencies of the current approaches, and introduce some technical means for improving the user experience.
The mobile web is talked about a lot by people who have a vested interest in the mobile web becoming popular. The frequently-cited arguments in favour of web usage on mobile phones sound pretty convincing until you realise that most of those people talking so passionately about it have invested in the mobile web, and therefore may be stating their wishful thinking rather than an observed reality. (I am, unfortunately, no exception, being a mobile web developer myself.)
Mobile internet use has been hyped a lot — WAP has been around since the late nineties, and many people originally speculated on it being a huge success. Well, it never was in most parts of the world. It’s quite understandable that observers are now rather more cautious when it is announced that the mobile web is finally here, and that it is about to engulf the mainstream consumer.
In such an environment it is refreshing to hear the opinion of a neutral organisation who simply observes what is going on in the minds of consumers worldwide. Trendwatching.com produces well researched monthly briefings on the latest consumer trends worldwide. I have been following them for a while, wondering when the time would come that they would announce the mobile web as a major consumer trend. And now, in December 2007, the time has arrived. They announce in their predictions for 8 important consumer trends in 2008 (PDF):
“Five years ago, we introduced ONLINE OXYGEN as the engine behind all this excitement: control-craving consumers needing online access as much as they need oxygen. [...] If there’s one device that’s going to introduce another few hundred million people to the online world, it’s the phone. And yes, initiatives like Google’s Android and ‘their bidding on the 700MHz band’ and WiMax and so on are definitely going to speed things up. [...] don’t count on consumers’ insatiable demand to be online 24/7 to remain unmet forever.”
– Trendwatching.com, “Online Oxygen”
Although still a bit cautious in their wording, and emphasising that it won’t happen overnight, the trendwatchers have confirmed that the mobile web is not just a bubble. The signs are set for internet access anywhere, at any time, on almost any device, and it’s looking as though we won’t be able to imagine a world without it in a reasonably small number of years’ time.
But what is all that online access to be used for? E-commerce and social networking, say the trendwatchers. Social networking is a bit difficult to grasp, I think; it’s another one of those areas with a lot of hype and not necessarily much substance. E-commerce is a very important reality though, as yesterday’s article from Computing points out (UK online sales have risen by 29% since last year, reaching £130bn). And Trendwatching.com are convinced that this trend is going to continue:
“Sometimes, the Next Big Thing can be right under your nose. Consider the online riches to be reaped in 2008 from… ecommerce! Sure, it’s been around for years and years, but prepare for a forceful ’sequel’. After all, never before have so many consumers been willing to overcome security threats, still shockingly bad (or boring) design, and delivery screwups. In other words, 2008 could be a goldmine for smart e-tailers, who, if they get their act together, could make billions and billions of dollars, euros, pounds, yen, kroner, lira and rand that are impatiently waiting to be spent by web-savvy consumers around the world.
So in 2008, spend blood, sweat and tears on improving your ecommerce presence; the pay-off will be immediate, and far more substantial than investing in Web 2.0 me-toos!”
– Trendwatching.com, “Online Oxygen”
Consider that this market research organisation spends most of their time talking about brand psychology, status symbols, and the purchasing habits of particular sections of society. They are not technology-oriented in the least. And nevertheless they are announcing the coming of the ubiquitous internet, and its huge value for commerce. For me, this announcement marks the transition of the mobile web from hype to reality.
Of course, there are still a lot of problems to overcome — the top three are probably user experience, data traffic pricing, and handset market fragmentation. But if the consumer demand is there, these problems can all be sorted out. People are figuring out how to design engaging and usable mobile web sites and applications; flat rate data plans are becoming more common (in the UK at least); and fragmentation will mean that developing for the mobile web is a bit more expensive than it could be if everybody stuck to a standard, but it’s still an entirely surmountable issue.
With the economic force of e-commerce retailers pushing technology ahead, I am rather optimistic towards the mobile web.
About a month ago Victor Keegan of the Guardian wrote: “The mobile web is finally getting started”. He points out both some of the benefits…
“It is interesting why so few of us use one of the breakthroughs of recent years: the ability to search the web from wherever we are with a mobile phone. This ought to be hugely empowering, enabling us to answer any question from wherever we happen to be instead of having to wait until we are within reach of a computer.”
…as also the main reasons for its slow start:
“There are a number of reasons why this hasn’t happened and why it may be about to change. It is partly because the operators have been shamefully greedy in trying to raid our pockets by charging for all the data we download [...] the user experience is still not good enough. Mobiles were designed to make telephone calls. Now things are changing.”
– Victor Keegan, “The mobile web is finally getting started”
I recently came across some great examples demonstrating why for complex web sites, there is no alternative to designing a specifically mobile version. This is not so much for technical reasons, as rather that mobile users may have totally different requirements. It’s not so important to be able to access every single bit of content; instead those things which mobile users do require need to be instantly accessible. After all, think why a user may want to use the mobile web rather than the desktop web: it’s very much tied to now, an instantaneous requirement. In the words of Sarah Lipman, from an interesting paper on mobile search paradigms:
“‘Mobile Search’ = I want it NOW. I can’t wait, I won’t wait.
When a user gets the sense that ‘I’m not going to find what I want right now’ he stops looking, because that is almost always the path of least resistance. At the same time, he will also have a small sense of failure. [...] If search cannot deliver on the promise of ‘I want it NOW’, it won’t be utilized.”
– Sarah Lipman, “Search patterns in nature: Informing computer search interfaces”
For mobile users it is even more important than for normal web users that the designer has figured out exactly what the most frequently needed aspects of his site are, and made those aspects immediately and very easily accessible. This means that a mobile page can contain far fewer navigational elements (links) than a page intended for desktop viewing. Going from desktop to mobile therefore involves prioritising links in a page — some of them are going to have to go (moved into a sub-page, or removed entirely). This is not something which software can do automatically — a human editor or information architect has to sit down and decide.
Two examples to clarify:
Blue Flavor has also produced a presentation on the basics of good mobile web design.
On the “desktop/laptop web” (in contrast to the mobile web), we’ve become used to a page loading in about a second. On mobile phones, we are still far from seeing anything near that responsiveness — for most people, the mobile web experience is still agonisingly slow. Personally, I start to get irritated after about five seconds, and after as little as ten seconds there is a strong chance that I will go away and do something else. And currently it’s still a challenge to get a page to load within that timeframe on a mobile.
Ever wondered why it is so slow? Yesterday I was reading a few articles, and I repeatedly came across people who made a very simplistic assumption: namely that the available network bandwidth is fully used. For example, they will say: on a standard 3G/UMTS connection, each subscriber can transfer 384 kbit/s, therefore a 24 kB web page (text and a few small pictures) will load in 0.5 seconds. Honestly, if you’ve ever tried to access even a simple web page from a phone you know that this figure is just laughably wrong. It is never that fast.
Finally, after lots of searching, I found this paper by Pablo Rodriguez, Sarit Mukherjee and Sampath Rangarajan. And they give some good reasons why this is the case:
In a nutshell, TCP is really not up to the job, but it’s so widely used that there is basically no chance that it is going to be replaced anytime so on. (WAP included a layer called the Wireless Transaction Protocol, which attempted to be a better replacement for TCP. But we know what happened to WAP — nobody wants to use it.) In their paper, Rodriguez et al. go on to describe a method for partially getting round the problem by rewriting DNS and HTTP responses — it’s not ideal, but at least it removes some of the worst problems.
The real problem here is that round-trip time though. On a normal broadband connection I’d expect a round-trip time between 25 ms (within the UK) and 125 ms (across the Atlantic). On 3G, even though the bandwidth is not that much lower than broadband, we’ve got a round-trip time 8 to 15 times higher. And this time really becomes noticeable every time you click on a link:
This means that every time we click a link, we have to wait 2 or 3 round trip times — i.e. between 0.8 and 3.0 seconds — until we get the very first few bytes of the page we requested. That’s assuming that none of those first few packets got lost (because if one of them was lost, there would be no way of telling — all you can do is wait for a timeout and try again). And then we still have to transfer the whole page, and have all the TCP issues to deal with.
I just hope that mobile phones nowadays use persistent HTTP connections or pipelining which would remove some of the overheads. Does anybody know if they do? I’d like to hear from you.
PS. I thought I had accidentally deleted this post — fortunately I managed to find it again, hidden away in a binary mess, in the MySQL log file! :-)