March 2008

Chapter Business

Chris Hass opened the meeting with job announcements and an announcement about the upcoming Usability and User Experience Conference happening on May 28th. This "Mini-UPA" conference is a great event to attend. It's low cost and provides a whole day of learning. Register today at our conference site.

Carolyn Snyder will be presenting "Usability Test Facilitation: Lessons from the Trenches" at our next meeting on April 23rd. For more information about monthly meetings, see the 2008 Meeting Schedule.

Elections for the UPA board will be held next month. Most of the current board is running for re-election (Jen is not); if you're interested in getting involved you can run for an existing position or you can also volunteer for other roles in UPA Boston. Come talk to someone from the board if you're interested.

Presentation: "Mobile Usability & Teens: Going Mobile and Agile" presented by Hilary Coolidge, Molecular

Hillary worked with Sprite on a mobile social network campaign. The purpose of the campaign was to create a mobile social network and engage people with the brand. They wanted to create a promotion or reward purchases of larger bottles of Sprite. The program worked by giving users a code under the cap and they could then contact friends and invite them to use the service.

Molecular was responsible for personas and the overall user experience. The target users were urban teens.

When getting ready for the test for mobile usability, they had to take into consideration what mobile carrier users had and several other factors:

  • Device compatibility (esp. Verizon on this particular test)
  • Specific device functionality (often required, including the ability to access a WAP site)

The real time WAP study showed that many teens had never sent a picture and many people didn't know how to bookmark sites. Others were really good and could actually text faster then the application performed.

Many users had heard of or used either Facebook or MySpace and they thought of the Sprite mobile application, called 'the Yard', as a parallel service to the existing services they already understood. Users who had prior experience with Facebook tended to be profile centric and users with experience with MySpace tended to be homepage centric.

The testing occurred on a live WAP server with real cell phones. While this provided a more realistic scenario it also exposed some issues:

  • There were numerous technical problems because of performance issues or poor signal.
  • Many users had problems sending a photo or entering data.
  • There were situational obstacles such as the phones ringing during a test or a user not being able to remember the password.

Sometimes the issue was on the phone and sometimes the problem was the site.

Lots of kids expected they could use the appilcation from a regular PC. About 50% of the urban kids had both Sidekicks and normal phones. The second phone was used to talk to parents. Many kids knew about the costs and were careful about how they used certain downloads and services. Even when a service provided a free download, a cost could still be incurred and kids knew this.

Lessons learned:

  • Lots of elements are out of control (e.g. phone, network, performance, etc.)
  • Ability to change on the fly / 'agile' usability is very valuable.
  • Registration took a long time so this was performed beforehand.
  • Tasks like uploading photos took a while so this was done first.
  • Having a spare phone in case something doesn't work as expected is very useful.

The tasks in the testing covered 18 participants. The tasks included: Register, Send a Shout, Post a Scribble, Calendar, Email & Notes.

It may be desirable to perform future studies 'live' in the field, outside the lab because:

  • The result would be more qualitative.
  • Real world tests could uncover issues not apparent in a formal sit down study. If you're holding the soda in one hand and the phone in the other you don't have a hand to hold the cap up.

This concluded the talk. The remainder of the UPA Boston Community continued to discuss the various approaches to usability and their own experiences with mobile usability.