Ten usability principles for the development of effective WAP and m‐commerce services

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) usability study, which consists of a survey, an evaluation of two UK WAP portals and an experiment that was carried out between November 2001 and February 2002. A number of usability issues, which prevented the users from completing basic and common tasks, were identified. For instance, 70 per cent of the users were not successful in searching for a textbook on the Amazon.co.uk WAP site. Additionally, even experienced users were not immune to these problems. The general conclusion of the study is that WAP usability remains poor. We argue that this could have a negative effect on the future of WAP and m-commerce. Finally, we propose a set of ten principles, which are based on the findings of this study, and we believe will aid towards the development of more usable WAP and m-commerce services.

Factors influencing the adoption of personalisation mobile services: empirical evidence from young Australians

“…For example, there is evidence in the media that using certain services on a mobile device can be quite tedious, especially when browsing internet-like interfaces on mobile devices (Teo and Pok, 2003). In addition, user-friendly and intuitive man-machine interfaces, including clear and visible steps, suitable content and graphical layouts, help functions, clear commands, symbols and meaningful error messages are likely to influence adoption (Condos et al, 2002). In addition, user-friendly and intuitive man-machine interfaces, including clear and visible steps, suitable content and graphical layouts, help functions, clear commands, symbols and meaningful error messages are likely to influence adoption (Condos et al, 2002).…”

User-Centered Design and Evaluation of WAP-Based Systems

“…Insights had been gained from our previous work on usability in our university [4] and the existing WAP-based applications and their usability studies that were carried our by several researchers [5,6,7]. The main common issues which were identified in the previous studies include cumbersome navigation, screen size, site structure and input methods.…”

The Impact of Mobile TradeManager on Fashion Product Sales: From Usability Perspective

“…As indicated by prior studies [7,37], "one-to-one content translation from e-commerce to m-commerce is not an optimal solution. " Condos et al [38] evaluated the usability of two UK portals and identified that content unsuitable for the WAP environment was one of the key issues. Wei and Ozok also argued that it was the usefulness of features rather than the number of features provided that was critical for the MC success [7].…”

“…Since the wireless sites are not a translated version of the web sites, content navigation is definitely different. Another issue raised by Condos et al [38] is "ong lists" with too many options, which will lower the usability. Studies showed that some users will never scroll down the navigation page for the other available links.…”