plugawy blog

The Mobile User Experience Is Miserable

The phrase "mobile usability" is pretty much an oxymoron. It's neither easy nor pleasant to use the Web on mobile devices. Observing user suffering during our sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994. It was that bad.

In our mobile studies, the average success rate was 59%, which is admittedly higher than success rates in the 1990s, but substantially lower than the roughly 80% success rate when testing websites on a regular PC today.

Before the study, we had expected to get better results in London because the UK has a stronger tradition for mobile services than the US. However, the actual sessions didn't bear this out: the British sites were just as bad as the American sites, and users struggled about as much to get things done.

The Sharp 912SH for Softbank, for example, comes with an LCD screen that swivels 90 degrees, GPS tracking, a bar-code reader, digital TV, credit card functions, video conferencing and a camera and is unlocked by face recognition.

Can your iPhone do that? ;-)

And finally, anyone who tells you that any of these concepts will make your web site look better on mobile devices is selling you snake oil. Older mobile devices only supported a weird fucked up subset of HTML 3.2, and newer mobile devices have ultra-smart browsers that reflow even the most rigid designs and parse even the most fucked up Tag Soup markup. Every new mobile device that comes out seems to trip up on CSS in its own way, and apparently nobody told the mobile vendors about XHTML Basic (don’t ask).

Damn right - Mobile web browsers are screwed-up.