On Widgets & Celltop Usability

Alltel, a regional operator in the US, partnered with Frog Design to launch Celltop widgets. I mentioned this briefly in January.

This past week, Scott Weiss of Usable Products announced a usability study comparing Celltop to WAP and native UI for a variety of tasks.

What I found so interesting about the Usable Products study was that they compared the usability of a new interaction (CellTop) to that of well-learned applications (e.g., native UI for looking at call logs). As the entire session was only one hour, which included several tasks attempted both with and without CellTop. Thus the users had a year or two of experience with the native UI and were comparing to a UI with a new interaction paradigm. It's no wonder Celltop fared poorly.

Some tasks did not have quite as steep an experience difference. Checking weather is likely something many users only do occasionally, but the limitations of the mobile browser on the tested device means that the experience was reasonably familiar.

Celltop does indeed break many of the user expectations a bit. Some of this was done with intent. At the Austin Mobile Monday event in April, a key Celltop designer actually mentioned that she did not see the point in softkeys, and she pretty much ignored them. I disagree with her, but perhaps if everybody ignored softkeys the Celltop learning curve would have been more shallow.

In short, before believing that the Celltop widgets were indeed "less usable" than the native and WAP counterparts, I would like to see the test repeated with users who had been using Celltop for a few weeks. Alternately, give the users the opportunity to explore Celltop for half an hour, setting it up as they wish, on their own phones. Then compare task usability.

I couldn’t agree with you more! I found the study to be quite flawed and sense a good degree of sensationalism in the way the researcher published the headline and tried to make it “news.” Mobile widgets are very clearly a powerful way to ease discovery of content.

I think that mobile widgets are like any application technology. By itself, the ability to put a bit of web or local content into a mini-application does little in terms of ease of discovery of content. However, a well-designed mini-application within a well-designed widget framework with ready access and push information, coupled with a well-designed information flow, could.

iTunes and Quicken, for example, are local applications providing access to web content and local content. While nobody would call them widgets, I’ve seen other applications with the same structure (Peachtree, for example) be perfectly horrid.