The Wireless Web Usability Handbook [Paperback]

Mark Pearrow (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1584500565 | ISBN-13: 978-1584500568 | Publication Date: February 25, 2002 | Edition: 1st

Today a Web site is only as valuable as it is productive. Users need sites that are easy to use and helpful. The sites that are not, lose their visitors interest quickly and can cost companies loyal customers. This is even more of an issue when users might be coming to a site via a wireless device. Not only do designers have to consider different platforms and browsers when designing sites, now they need to consider different devices and user agents for viewing with those devices. So how do you design a site that is effective on all these devices? You begin by knowing your users and understanding how and why your content is accessed. From there you can address the needs of your specific users and design accordingly. The goals of The Wireless Web Usability Handbook are threefold: provide designers with a new awareness of the ways that pervasive computing affects how humans interact; give designers an understanding of the problems and risks involved with this new generation of devices; provide the tools to ensure that the content designers create for pervasive computing devices is usable. These and other valuable guidelines are provided here in a pragmatic style that clarifies what designers really need to think about when designing Web sites for current and next generation devices and applications.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Wireless designers face the challenge of achieving their vision in the limited environment offered by devices like cell phones and PDAs. Recommended for all public libraries, Usability Handbook modifies advice found in web usability guides (see Computer Media, LJ 5/1/02) for the wireless environment, focusing on how wireless devices work and how best to design for them. Chapter summaries and discussion questions aid understanding; the CD-ROM includes WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) emulators and templates. Larger public libraries can consider the next two guides: for beginning wireless developers, WAP 2.0 discusses developing with WAP, then moves on to more advanced topics such as WMLScript, ASP, and connecting to databases. For more advanced developers, Wireless Java teaches wireless application development through step-by-step examples. The CD-ROM contains sample code.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Mark Pearrow (Dedham, MA) is a sponsored research staff member at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, MA. His current research is in the area of Technology, Psychology, and Society. He is also the author of the first edition of the Web Site Usability Handbook and The Wireless Web Usability Handbook (Charles River Media).

Product Details

• Paperback: 377 pages
• Publisher: Charles River Media; 1st edition (February 25, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1584500565
• ISBN-13: 978-1584500568
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 1.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,976,937 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Watch this space for more info

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The buzzword buzzword handbook, April 12, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Wireless Web Usability Handbook (Paperback)

As a person practicing and researching usability, I was interested to see what can be written about this challenging subject.

In the index of the book, you can find chapters suchs as: Cell-Phone-Class Devices; the physcal layer, the logical layer, the cognitive layer etc. The same goes for PDAs, pager-based systems and so on. It seems very interesting...

... until you read the text. For example, the book tells us that the Cell-phone class device has a logical layer that "is really a tiny PC, with small amounts of 'main' memory..." This is so rude, oversimplified metaphor, that it is more misleading than anything else! This book is full of such oversimplified descriptions or lists of obviousnesses.

Big disappointment.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Long-waited & deeply disappointing!!, March 29, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Wireless Web Usability Handbook (Paperback)

What a waste of time and money to have this book! No more needs to be said but you are not going to gain anything substantial from this book. If the author's book on the wired web usability has some value, this on is just a collection of obsolete whitepapers and heuristic principles.

Don't buy it if you can resist the title.

3.0 out of 5 stars Ten Years After, August 30, 2011

By 

Mark J. Pearrow - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Wireless Web Usability Handbook (Paperback)

It has been almost ten years since this book was released, and over ten since work began on the manuscript, so there's little chance in any new review impacting the book itself - its sales were sunk back in 2002. Whether or not these reviews really were written by authentic readers who were truly upset and disappointed - or by people with a different agenda - will probably never be known.

The other reviewers of the book seem to have completely missed out on some of the most important concepts - like the ecological model of usability, in which the user's context is at least as important as the content or the device; or that the proliferation of mobile devices was beginning to have an invasive effect on health and privacy, and the emphasis users' safety as an almost-Hippocratic-oath of the usability engineer.

Also missed, it seems, was the attention given to mobile computing devices as an enabling technology for the disabled, and that accessibility techniques benefit everyone, especially in the confines of mobile environments where one is without the luxuries of having all of one's cognitive and motor capacities focused on the system. And by the way, all of that "less is beautiful abstract emptiness" would have seemed much less empty to the reader if he or she had actually read the concrete implementation examples of each guideline.

Given that the book came out when mobile computing was a veritable Tower of Babel - and as the dire sound of the Dot-Com bubble bursting was still reverberating - I suppose these dour reviews are an accurate sign of those disappointing times. But I don't think the book ever really got a fair shake.