outline
- general points about usability on devices
- specific examples of usability
- final thoughts on Flash Lite
scope of presentation
- not going to cover the cell phone that lives at the bottom of your closet
- accessibility is another beast, this presentation is much more concerned with usability of apps once people are on your site, not addressing physical or mental barriers that some face
phone swap demo/fiasco
all people in room put their ringer on max, turned off their phone and swapped them around the room 3 times. then were asked to recover their own phone by turning on the device in their hands and call their own phone
room had no cell phone service, oops
were you able to: * turn it on * make a call * use call waiting * recognize your ringtone * end the call * understand any errors
results of experiment: * some people were easily able to complete the tasks, many fumbled * the differences between platforms are what make it difficult for people to adopt
differences between models
- screen orientation
- keyboard input - T9/QWERTY
- 2/4/5 way navigation
- external speakers
- touch screen
- handwriting recognition
how flash lite types
- default phone system - pops up dialog box - just like any native app on the phone
- in-flash-context T9
- in-flash-context masked to display numbers only
- try to use the default entry method
- on most phones it takes about twice as many button presses as characters for entry (40 taps gets you 20 characters, and takes about a minute for the average user)
making money
- wml and html on phones can’t spawn SMS apps
- Flash Lite can
- 64 million text messages were sent for the last American Idol
- During Sept 2006 18 million people used SMS to get a ringtone
- SMS portals are little Flash Lite apps that get prepopulated with app specific commands - list of cities that a user clicks and the app pre-populates and sends an SMS. (ie: clicking on “Toronto” is the same as sending 12345 to 67890)
design consideration and constraints
- site architecture traditionally puts logo, nav, banner, search bar, etc all usually exist above the real content
- 780,000 vs 36,308 pixels
- mouse driven content should really have a standard input equivalent - PSP joystick has fairly low accuracy
- provide quick links to common nav items (1-Home, 2-Schedule, 3-Presenters)
- try to save clicks for the user, more context for user if it makes sense
- slow apps = broken apps - animated menus that lag the system should be avoided
- make sure that your content isn’t going to thrash the standard UI of devices (all black background will eat button link names)
Flash Lite 3
- will support FLV playback
audio on cellphones
- built in speakers vs headphones
- using in a public space, give some way to turn off sound
- sharing with others?
- audio fidelity is ass
- bluetooth headset for audio via looking at the screen
