Customer Reviews

The Wireless Web Usability Handbook

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I must say I'm more than disappointed. The book really doesn't seem to have much to say about usability considering the wireless web. Although technical stuff is presented quite widely, there is no point in that. "Device x does not support audio". That doesn't help! There is no path whatsoever from those techical details to how they should be dealt with. It's all that "less is beautiful" abstract emptiness..

"Use emulators" - How does the author think these kind of apps are developed? Of course one must use emulators to get anything working!

The "new PCD specific heuristics": "Safety - does your device/system irradiate your users with unsafe amounts of microwave energy?" For crying out loud! I'll have to watch out not to radiate other people (by using radiating XHTML code :)! Other heuristics are not any better or more useful.. And a lot of the book is the same old Nielsen related stuff (why here - again?)..

Well, a bit angry review I guess. Just seems that there's really no point in this book..