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Mobile & handheld usability testing

Filed under: all articles
By: trenton Created on: June 27th, 2006
Bookmark this article with: Delicious Digg StumbleUpon

Mobile and handheld usability testing is crucial to your business, Trenton Moss explains. Find out why and what you need to do for this unique medium...

Mobile phone and PDA usability testing is critical to your business. In fact, mobile and handheld usability testing could be even more important than computer-based usability testing. The main reasons for this are:

Which mobile phones and PDAs do you need to consider?

Mobile phones and PDAs can differ from one another dramatically, and this will radically change how people experience and use websites. Some of the ways in which handheld devices can differ include:

Because the mobile phone / PDA that someone is using will have such a profound effect on their experience of your site, you should try to test with as many mobile phones and PDAs as possible.

Of course, testing with every mobile phone and PDA is impossible. Here are some ideas to help narrow down the number of devices you'll need to test with:

Who do you want to test with?

The people you want to conduct your mobile phone usability testing sessions with will, of course, depend on your particular business and its audience. Some things to bear in mind include:

Where should mobile usability testing sessions be conducted?

Mobile phones and PDAs are used in the real world so usability testing of handheld devices should therefore not only take place in a usability laboratory.

Where, when and how a mobile phone is used is critical to a person's experience of the site they are accessing. Any of the following circumstances could influence this experience and therefore considerations of the site's usability:

As such, we'd recommend, if possible, that any mobile phone and PDA usability testing is conducted both in a laboratory and also in the 'outside world'.

How you plan and run mobile phone usability sessions will be based on your business and its audience, but the most popular methods of mobile usability testing include:

This article was written by Tim Fidgeon, a consultant at a leading usability and accessibility consultancy, Webcredible. He's extremely good at running focus groups and likes to conduct a website review as often as he can.

Comments

spessex said:

Software? <p>Can anyboody suggest any software to aid mobile device testing? Perhaps there might be a system out there similar to Morae from TechSmith? I'm aware that it is possible to use a VNC based system but was unsure if these were dependent on the device being tested?<br/></p>

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