“Keynote” says users find mobile iPhone sites frustrating

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Sunday, 12 October 2008

Page 1 of 2 ! A “first of its kind” study says users are frustrated with some sites designed for mobile viewing on the iPhone, while only a low number of users are noticing or "clicking" on mobile ads. There’s still work to be done to get the Internet right on mobile devices! Keynote Systems, a company that performs testing and measurement for mobile and desktop web sites, has released its “first ever “Keynote WebEffective for iPhone”, a study of “actual user satisfaction of mobile web sites”. Keynote says its study is a “brand new way of conducting online usability studies of iPhone customers interacting with mobile Web sites.” The study was run with “more than 75 consumers who accomplished three separate Keynote-assigned tasks on the Fox and Yahoo! News mobile portals using their iPhone”, with Keynote examining their satisfaction and the reported usability levels. I’d personally have wanted to test more sites and more users, but given that these kinds of tests cost money, Keynote has clearly decided this was enough for its first report – and undoubtedly is hoping companies with web sites aimed at mobile users take up its services in testing their sites – we live in a commercial world, after all. In terms of the testing methodology, Keynote asked the participants on “why they took the actions they did, their overall satisfaction and what could be done to improve the experience”. During the test, users’ activities were “tracked by the application and compiled for clickstream analysis to identify how users accomplished the tasks, their navigational choices and the time involved between navigation activities.” So, what were the results? Turns out that satisfaction rates “were low for both Yahoo! (51%) and Fox News (64%) mobile Web sites and less than half of users found the sites to be appealing”, showing that web designers are still yet to properly optimise sites for mobile use to make the lives of mobile users easier and take advantage of the fact mobile users are taking the time to go online while on-the-go! More results and the impact of mobile advertising on page 2, as well as the web address of iTWire's mobile site - please read on. << First page <   1 2 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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