Customer Reviews

Handheld Usability

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am an experienced interface designer who has never designed for a handheld. So, when I faced a new project that would be deployed on a handheld, I looked here to further my education. This is the only book I could find that is specific to handhelds.

When I was considering this book I read seven glowing reviews, and one total pan. The pan got it right. This book may be more useful for someone who knows very little about interaction design, usability testing, prototyping, and all that, and who isn't interested in gaining more than a superficial understanding of these topics. (If you are new to usability design, you'll find a much better place to start with Mayhew's "The Usability Engineering Lifecycle: A Practitioner's Handbook for User Interface Design.") If, however, you are a usability professional looking for insight on how you need to think differently now that your screen is the size of a Post-it note, wait for the next book to be written. I could have written this book, and the sum of my handheld experience is that I own a Palm and a cell phone.

I originally reviewed this book in Sept, 2002. Though the book had been available for a while, my review was the first. I'm revisiting my review in order to mention that within a week after I posted it, seven or eight glowing reviews suddenly appeared, as if in response to my pan. Still, I stand by my original:

There are few books available on the subject of designing usable products for handheld devices -- a fast-growing discipline -- so I was eager for the publication of this book. Via his web site and his other organizing activities, the author has done a lot to foster a growing community of handheld device UX specialists, but his book was a big disappointment.

I hardly know where to begin.

The book is poorly organized and would be greatly improved by the addition of sidebars, pullquotes and other methods of coding and grouping information. A more comprehensive index would help too. As it is, it's difficult to scan and nearly useless as a reference.

In many ways, the book is both too general and too specific. Less than seven pages are devoted to "Designing for WAP for Mobile Phones," which is not enough space to cover the topic at even the highest level, yet those seven pages are full of strangely specific guidelines that fail to consider the real world range of WAP applications and contexts. For example, his list of "important principles" includes the remarkably specific recommendation to "use 'Main' instead of 'Home'. 'Home' is ambiguous - is it the carrier's portal, or your application's start page?" The implicit point he's making is certainly a good one (i.e. be careful about how you link to the various things that can be interpreted as 'Home'), but he doesn't seem to understand how to write at this more useful level of abstraction. As a result, many of his recommendations as they're written do not apply in the real world.

The few nuggets of useful information in the book are often incongruously buried -- in the middle of paragraphs, in the middle of chapters discussing other things entirely. He drops these useful tidbits here and there and spends no time supporting them with evidence, research or even an explanation of his own rationale. In an early chapter (called "Handheld Devices"), he includes just a single short paragraph(!) under the heading, "Design for Small Screens". In this paragraph, he makes a few recommendations (e.g. "never use blank lines" and "use dashes... to create separations in content"). These are useful, but they belong in a different chapter, and they should be supported.

The meat of the book is the author's discussion of what have essentially become the tenets of the UX/IA/ID field: usability testing, prototyping, the iterative design process, etc. But these discussions consist mainly of repetitions of the obvious, amounting to a thin survey of what you will find in the standard texts of the broader field (by Neilsen, Norman, Raskin, Tufte, Wurman, etc.).

The book does contain some moderately useful bits about wireless technologies and devices in general, but not enough to justify the price tag.

The upshot of all this is, 'Handheld Usability' does not provide a broad enough overview of the discipline for the curious or those just getting started, and it doesn't go deep enough to help mobile UX professionals like me.

I thought that this book was user friendly, easy to read and wriiten for all users including the layman. The layout is pleasant and the graphics have "eye appeal".

We need additonal publications to ease our way into the PDA world.

I am a Product Designer with 30 years experience designing consumer electronics. This book is an excellent reference guide to what issues and concerns should be investigated and addressed in developing handheld products. The only minor complaint I have is that owing to its 2002 publication date, some of the devices used as examples are so outdated that many readers have probably had no hands-on interaction with them. However the principles and methods discussed are still very relevant and useful.

The book is deceptive. It seems to be `common sense' and perhaps to say very little, yet in fact it contains a great deal of practical information, written in a highly accessible style. This book needed to be written, and Scott Weiss has more than ably risen to the challenge.

For me, this is not a highly technical `how to do' book, nor should the reader expect such detail from this book; that is to miss the point. It is a `how to think' book, and all the more valuable for that. The author's recommendations are clearly based on hours of observing people trying to use mobile devices. This is someone who knows. His recommendations are based firmly on direct knowledge of the real difficulties faced by users of handheld devices and of how they intuitively expect a device to behave. This book points up the fact that knowledge without understanding is not enough. Designers are challenged to understand who they are designing for. They are not necessarily designing for other experts. With this in mind, the author gives guidance on how to avoid design mistakes - to avoid reinventing the wheel. This book will tell designers things they already know (or should know), but didn't know they knew.

It encourages designers to start the design process from the right place - don't start from what is possible but from what is desirable. This is the basis of great design.

The chapter on how to carry out a usability test was impressive, not least for the author's sensitivity to the people he works with - the general public. For those who wish to carry out their own usability tests, read this book if only to find out how to deal with 'difficult' clients in a charming, inventive and non-offensive way. Here, the author is clearly in his element. The author here describes in detail the entire process (from choosing pariticpants to what the moderator should wear).

For the reader who wishes to carry out usability tests for the first time, without outside help, read this chapter first and think. Then think again. This is a fine art, and the author is clearly a grand master.

The book also contains a useful glossary and an interesting potted history of telephony and mobile devices.

I have read the book from cover to cover with great enjoyment, and have already returned to it several times as a reference work.

Zipf's law states that common words are very common, and that uncommon words are combinations of uncommon words. For example if you start typing the letters `th' then you are probably trying to write the word `the' rather than `theologian'. Applying this simple insight to mobile phones gave us predictive text entry, where a small dictionary allows the phone to guess the word that the user is most likely trying to enter. For example if you press the keys `82' while entering a text message on a modern phone, the phone will predict `the' as your word. This invention allows QWERTY-snobs like me to approach the speeds of Finnish teenagers in tapping text messages on a mobile phone.

Such innovation is just amusingly clever on a PC, but on the small screens of handheld devices, it is essential. A good user interface converts a small device from a limiting gadget to a useful tool. European consumers' `wapathetic' response to WAP-enable phones was due to over hyping by the telecommunications industry, but also poor usability of the devices.
So a textbook on the topic is certainly appropriate.

Handheld usability defines handheld devices as highly portable machines that can operate with no cables and can be operated within one's hand. In addition, they must either allow the addition of applications or support internet connectivity. So the book's focus includes handheld computers (such as Palm-powered machines and Pocket PCs) and mobile phones (with WAP, i-mode or email connectivity) but excludes devices such as music players.

Naturally the discussion includes details of devices that are obsolete. Such is usually the case with any discussion of the details in information technology. But the principles are timeless and the practices will remain practical.
Perhaps the most useful chapter is the one on prototyping. Weiss' advice is that this should be done with a pen and several pieces of paper. For example the designer would draw the first screen on the paper. The user would then say what he or she expects to see on interacting with each element of the "screen". During this feedback, the designer would draw the next screen, and again ask the user what he or she expects. This technique is of course cheap but I was surprised by its effectiveness. No doubt Weiss' clients also found it useful.

If your team is designing applications for handheld devices, consider hiring Weiss. If you cannot afford that, buy his book. You cannot afford not to.

Review appeared in British Medical Informatics Today, Issue 41

There's been an explosion of handheld devices in recent years. Some manufacturers are more guilty than others of creating unusable interfaces for their users.

This volume from usability practitioner Scott Weiss provides a timely and hands-on guide, concentrating on helping designers address practical issues in designing for handhelds.

You may find Weiss's style dry, but he's packed a lot in by cutting the prose. Handheld Usability highlights the particular challenges of designing for smaller mobile devices (he doesn't cover held devices such as tablet PCs), making a great companion to the standard works on general interaction design.

"Handheld Usability" is well-organized, articulate, and surveys all of the existing technologies for this medium. The author clearly carefully researched every angle of design for handheld devices.His research is neatly organized into consistent, well-thought-out sections.

It is especialy helpful to see how Weiss applies traditional HCI design strategies to small computing devices. He provides ample examples throughout this well-illustrated, easy to follow volume.

The appendix on Paper Prototyping Palm OS was particularly helpful, with its photographic illustrations and clear instructions on how to produce a paper prototype. I have looked for a long time to locate a book on paper prototyping, and this is the first one available. He covers the topic fairly, presenting its strengths and weaknesses, and gives good instruction on the technique.

This book is easy to read, written in an instructive, helpful style like a good "hands on" textbook. There is a companion web site, handheldusability.info, which has additional materials that supplement the book nicely.

I recommend it highly.

Don't buy this book.
I cannot find any usabiltiy testing technique in this book. Just explain what PDA and Palms are and all thing we already knew. Alsom appendix is too long.
I don't want to know Palm history. Why author explain detail about each funtion of Palm or PDA?
Save your money!

This book is one of the first serious works about usability for handhelds. Explanations are accompanied with interesting examples collected from the renowned author's experience in the field. I find it a valuable reference book for University students of HCI. It is also a very useful guide for usability professionals.