Acording to a study by Nielsen Norman Group browsing the web from a mobile phone today is as bad as it was to browse the web from a desktop 15 years ago.

The users had difficulties doing everyday tasks on their mobile phones, like finding information about a specific wine or finding arrival info for a plane.

Some of the hurdles they found was:

• The screens are to small (users using phones with bigger screens had a higher succeed rate)
• It’s hard to type on the small keyboards on mobile phones
• The mobile Internet connections are to slow
• Sites designed for mobile phones did better than the desktop version, but it can be really hard to find the mobile version.

These findings are exactly what a colleague and I found in our master thesis – “The User Experience of the Internet on Mobile Phones” (4,8 mb PDF in danish)- which is from 2008. Here is a very boiled down section from the abstract:

Screens and keyboards are factors that feel like a hurdle and therefore reduce usage. Also, the speed or lack of it, when loading pages seems to be a hurdle.

Nielsen Norman Group found that users did better in solving their tasks on websites designed for mobile phones and they do suggest, like we did, that servers should auto-sense users’ devices and auto-forward mobile users to the mobile site. I simply don’t understand why companies use money on getting a mobile website designed and then don’t do this simple operation.

Nielsen Normans Group used three usability methods. My colleague and I made our master thesis on basis of interviews, focus groups and surveys. But the results are pretty much the same.

Design For Mobile will be the first North American mobile user experience conference. This will be a two-day conference focused on strategy and tactics for user research, product definition, interaction and other design, and usability testing. A day of workshops and training will preceed the conference sessions.

7 User Experience Lessons from the iPhone
internal presentation, given in mid January 2007, to introduce our newly formed user experience group to the development team.

Mobile takes the web back to the 90s
Does this mean that mobile internet is effectively 8 years behind the web as we know it today?

Certainly the content that can be delivered is basic. I am sure if we scour the industry we can still find some die-hard HTML coders to build these sites. I am sure designers can be prized away from Flash to build some basic 16 colour designs.

Mobile phone use increases tumor risk
The current study showed, according to an Israel newspaper, that people used mobile phone for more than 22 hours per month faced 50 percent increased risk for a parotid gland tumor.

Why The Mobile Web Had Such A Terrible Start
First attempts by mobile phone manufacturers to mobilize the web were a big disappointment for quite a number of reasons. In the fixed line world the web got an incubation time of at least a decade to grow, to be refined and to be fostered by researchers and students at universities before being used by the public who already had sufficiently capable notebooks, PCs and a reasonably priced connection to the Internet. In the mobile world, things were a lot different when first web browsers appeared on mobile phones around the year 2001.

JupiterResearch Finds Creating Better Browser Alternatives Would Stimulate Mobile Internet Adoption
“Browser alternatives such as widgets or applets, which are mini applications that allow for content to be easily accessed from a home screen or with just a few clicks, can meet consumer demands for quick access to information,” said David Schatsky, President of JupiterResearch. “The goal should be to engage the user through ease of operation so that accessing information in this manner will eventually become second nature.”

Nokia sees HD video on cellphones in a few years
Video recording on cellphones is set to reach high definition (HD) quality in a few years’ time, an executive at the world’s top cellphone maker Nokia said on Wednesday.

“It’s coming. Technically, we are a couple of years away,” Nokia’s Chief Technology Officer Tero Ojanpera told Reuters in an interview. “It’s still a few years away.”

Google’s Android targets iPhone power
London’s role is to come up with brilliant new ways to use the internet on a mobile phone. European mobile internet may not be mass market yet, but users here are leagues ahead of their American cousins. Which makes the UK one of the best places to test new products and find software developers who understand the medium.