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Usability refers to "ease of use". It is quantifiable on a number of scales. I frequently use "usability" to mean "quality of user experience", but that is a lazy shorthand.

Accessibility refers to the ability of different people to be able to use the application or web site. Can a blind user use the phone? (not a RAZR, she can't, probably not even to make a voice call). Can a hard of hearing user make a voice call? Can a vision impaired user use the web site with large font? Can a blind user use the site with a screen reader?

Accessibility is a bit more binary: can the blind user use the site? We can separately measure the usability of such access.

There are lots of tools and techniques for accessibility, and a lot of experts in the field, including Anitra Pavka.

What does this have to do with mobile? Quite a lot, actually.

First, mobile devices are in many ways like our differently abled users. The devices have differing capabilities, and the optimal design for each device depends in large part on the capabilities. Many accessibility experts, including both Anitra Pavka and Aaron Marcus already know this. These experts also know that accessibility and usability are not the same thing.

Unfortunately, mobile professionals do not understand the difference. Time and time again, "best practices" documents are published with an eye towards accessibility by all devices. These documents, in an effort to make application development as easy as possible, say how to make the application work on all devices.

The WAP Forum did this with their "General Content Authoring Guide" in 2000 that ignored all the usable aspects of the Openwave browser and some of the usable aspects of the Nokia browser. Sites were limited to links and a couple form elements only: no cache control, no navigation aids, nothing else.

The W3C did it again with the Mobile Web Best Practices document coming out of the mobile device working group. They have a token item saying "you should target devices", then the other 95% of the document is all about the least common denominator approach. (My style guide work has been included as a reference but it is clear that they did not bother with purchasing the document, which would have provided them with dozens more pages about specific techniques. They stuck with the free overview information. )

These approaches will ensure accessibility of information. They will not enable usability. Without device targeting with techniques like XSLT on the server, CSS on the device, using information about device interaction abilities not just technical abilities to target the design, you will end up with poor usability for all users, although they can actually access the information.

What would a desktop-only site look like without using various user targeting techniques such as CSS variants and alt text? For users using screen readers there would be a "skip navigation" link at the top of every screen. No graphic would contain text execpt perhaps the logo. For vision impaired users, all fonts would be very large. For color blind users high-contrast colors with a very limited color palette would be used, except where the information was redundant with the text. For hard-of-hearing users there would be no sounds. Flash would be very different. The experience would be limited for everybody.

Sprint customer service insists that I do not have Picture Mail on my account. Perhaps this is true, but I have Picture Mail on my phone!

If you want Picture Mail on your Sprint EVDO phone, but don't want to pay for it, try this:

1. Get Power Vision pack for $15. This gives you web access.
2. Go to picture messaging on your phone. It will claim you do not have an account. Agree to a $5 monthly charge.
3. Set up a user name and password for your new non-account.
4. Send picture messages. Copy your own email address, since you won't be able to get to your account online!

Here is a picture I sent from my camera on my non-account - we'll see how long it lasts given the fact I am posting it:

I've told Sprint customer service about this, twice now.

I recently had the need to change out my Sprint phone as well as acquire and activate a RAZR. Boy was this process educational.

The Sprint change-out went okay, except that the new Sprint store in town is actually a "Sprint Express" store, and they didn't bother labeling it as such. I had to go to the next town over.

My new Sprint phone (Sanyo MM-7500) turns out to be a really wonderful device, with a camera actually worth the name. Well, between that and a new baby, I decide that I need to experience Picture Mail. I tried to sign up for Picture Mail from the site. I failed, completely (using Safari with pop-ups blocked, but I couldn't find anywhere to sign up). A couple days later, I tried using Picture Mail from the phone to see what would happen. Hey, it lets me sign up! Great! Moments later, literally, I was sending my first picture message to proud grandparents.

The punchline to the picture mail experience is that I still can't get in to see my pictures on the desktop site. Upon contacting customer support, the reason is that I do not have Picture Mail set up on my account. So I can send messages but can't see them on my computer. No problem, I'll just copy myself on all messages. (I went ahead and mentioned this to the customer care agent. We'll see what happens.)

Acquiring the RAZR was even more illuminating. I went to Best Buy the day that Cingular pulled theirs from the shelves, so I went with Verizon. They guy had never activated a Verizon phone with data service, despite having worked there for 2-3 months. Fascinating. The activation web site he had to use was really poorly designed, and neither one of us could figure out how to get web access turned on for the phone. Finally, through some guesswork, we succeeded for only another $5 per month.

Well, my client is using a GSM RAZR, which has three softkeys, not two. And when we sent a SMS to the phone with a link to the content we wanted to put on the phone, the link didn't work. Apparently Verizon really really doesn't want you getting any content from them. I can't use the phone for the purpose for which I purchased it.

So, back to Best Buy. Apparently waiting until the weekend was over was the wrong plan - it was now 17 days after I purchased the thing that I can't use. I have to pay a $125 cancellation fee because they won't give me the appropriate service. As a side bonus, every time I used the browser, for which I was paying an additional $5/month, I was using minutes.

Now, on to Cingular to get their RAZR. Fortunately, there is a sale today - $79 instead of $99 or $129 (I am uniterested in paying an additional $20 to get a pink phone). The clerk says that they always activate Cingular phones by calling up the company. I have to pay an additional $20/month to get browser access - I don't want to deal with $15/month for 10MB when $5 gets me unlimited data but only for sites within the walled garden. Well, they need an expiration date on my driver's license, which expired the previous day and the DMV was closed. So, no Cingular phone either.

This all makes me appreciate Sprint more.

I've long said that the information that you get from a field test of a mobile device is different from what you get in a laboratory usability test. Recently, Kaikkonen et al published Usability Testing of Mobile Applications: A Comparison between Laboratory and Field Testing, investigating the differences. In their research, the field test involved the participant navigating Helsinki while performing tasks on the phone, essentially a dual-task design.

In this study, there were indeed differences in what laboratory and field studies found - but only in severity. The problems identified were all found in both field and laboratory settings, but most were found more frequently in the field study. Since field studies take twice as much time, the researchers concluded that sometimes laboratory testing is preferred.

20 participants were used in each version of the study, and that is generally more than enough to find the critical flaws in any given application. (They used this many to increase the statistical significance of their findings; comparing the behaviors of two groups of 6 probably wouldn't get meaningful results). Given the frequency of problems was slightly higher in the field study, it may be that we can get away with slightly fewer participants for a meaningful study, causing laboratory testing to lose some of its advantage.

However, I believe a typical laboratory usability test is good for iterative design and even formal analysis. The numbers in the study support this, and it reduces cycle time. It is easy. However, neither standard laboratory techniques nor the field test technique described in the article will get the whole picture.

Our recommended procedure for the final round of testing is compatible with marketing-style field trials. Recruit 20-40 users. Give them access to your application or web site or service for 1-2 months. Track on your server when they have accomplished key tasks based on server demands (this won't work for applications not relying on your server). A strategic amount of time after a user has performed a task, send her an SMS with a callback number. Have her fill out a simple VoiceXML form relating her experience, including some standard task usability scores as well as free-form entry.

Couple this technique with laboratory testing at the beginning and end of the trial period, and interviews at the end of the test period. You now have very deep knowledge about what tasks people are actually doing, how they did on them, whether they had certain types of trouble with the tasks, what they were actually doing when they performed the task, how they feel about the product, how much they learned, and even usage behaviors across time.

You already know about Vodafone's difficulty screening out porn from children. It's tough to do. What if we could actually do something about it, at least for mobile applications?

Imagine if parents could inform the operator that the line belongs to a child. The phone number would be registered in some type of national database, with an indication of the child's (approximate) age.

Applications with a sense of responsibility and potentially sensitive content could check with the database before allowing an instance of the application access to adult-themed content. A news service might filter out particularly disturbing stories - this story is rated "R". Movie listings might be limited to just PG-13 and below. Media clips could also be rated and filtered. The application would have to know what phone number it is attached to, of course.

While we are at it, I would like a hybrid plan for my child's phone. I want a monthly bill for the privilege of having a phone, a phone number, and 50 or so minutes per month. Phone calls to my child's phone to and from a set of phone numbers that I provide come out of those minutes, and we would pay overage rates for anything above that. However, my child's social calls (those to anybody else) would come from a prepaid card. It would be my business about whether I gave her money to increase her minutes.

I keep hoping for a good home automation system. Actually, it's not the home automation, but the remote monitoring of the home that I would like.

I'd like to put a set of cameras around the outside of my house, and connect them to a server. This server would monitor for changes - even if it does capture pictures of deer or fox, that would certainly be interesting. A certain class of images would trigger an SMS to my mobile phone.

If a vehicle pulls into my driveway, I'd like to receive an MMS (or other picture message) showing me the vehicle. If a person knocks on my front door, I want to receive an MMS with a picture of whomever is knocking, along with a link to open up a Voice over IP session to be able to talk with the person.

"Yes, please leave the with my neighbor"

"Please put us down for one box of cookies"

"" (that's what I might say to proselytizers)

Certainly if a smoke detector went off in the house I'd want to know.

While we're at it, let's put this same type of system in at my child's school. Let me look into the classroom whenever I choose. If we get fancy about it, put a face recognition system in: whenever my child looks into the camera for more than 2 seconds and starts talking, pipe it through to me and let me see it and respond if appropriate.

I envision the mobile phone as a personal control and communications device. Let's get on with the control part.