ARTICLE
Horrible Wireless User Experiences in 5 Easy Steps
Bill Pawlak, bill.pawlak@xor.com
XOR, Inc.

We spend a lot of time and energy designing and developing positive User Experiences and helping our clients understand how to design useful, usable technology products. We're constantly fighting the good fight against the Evil that is Bad Design.

But even Superman needs a rest every once in a while...

So for this short article on wireless application design and development, we thought we'd take a slightly different, admittedly sarcastic, approach. Follow the recommendations below, and we guarantee that you'll create an absolutely horrible User Experience for your users.

If you're really careful and follow our recommendations to the letter, there's even a good chance you'll even cause your company to go out of business! Can you believe we're giving away this knowledge for free? Let's get started!

Step 1. Ignore Established Standards

As with the wired web, the W3C is working very hard to establish a set of standards for wireless application development that, if followed, should go a long way towards making the creation and maintenance of these applications much easier for just about everyone involved. Further, the standards are intended to help ensure presentation consistency for all users on all devices. Ignore them.

Try to force the situation in which people can only view wireless content if they purchase a specific device or subscribe to a specific service. The biggest downside that we can think of is that you may actually inhibit the overall adoption of wireless technology, but what does that matter?

The web browser manufacturers ignored the standards created for the wired web, opting instead to create their own proprietary formatting tags and rendering rules and yet still made billions of dollars. Who says you can't do the same? Yes, it will make development much more difficult than it needs to be and will frustrate your users, requiring them to constantly update (if it's even possible) both their hardware and software, but it's all about market share. If you can just force 1 or 2 more percentage points, it'll be worth it.

Step 2. Ignore Device Limitations

One of the biggest problems industry experts point to when evaluating the current state of wireless technology is the fact that of the current devices available, most are woefully inadquate as tools for accessing and interacting with internet data.

Some would argue that cell phones were never originally designed to do anything other than transmit sound through an earpiece and that putting a display screen on a phone doesn't automatically make it a viable solution to entering and accessing data. If asked about other handheld devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), these experts might not agree with making users learn a new way of writing just to input text efficiently.

But are these considerations really that important? Should we actually be modifying the types of services we provide because people can't reliably use the current set of devices they have to access more complex interactivity? No. Should we be designing new devices that are specifically created to allow usable, intuitive access to interactive data? Hardly.

Just because the current set of available devices were never actually designed to enable internet data access doesn't mean they can't be used to do just that. Yes, there may be some limitations to these devices, but ultimately, they still look cool and people have a lot of tolerance for things that look cool. So go ahead and require users to enter a lot of text data or pretend that screen size doesn't matter when they need to read lots of information. People will get over it.

Step 3. Forget Context

Let's face it, people are going to access internet data on their wireless devices only while sitting in a comfortable chair, in a well-lighted room, with few distractions, guaranteed signal strength, and all the time in the world. It's what being "mobile" is really all about!

Given that, consider it okay to:

• Create complex navigational structures that focus on depth, not breadth
• Require users to sign-in in order to view content
• Hide the most important parts of the site under cute, catchy labels, thereby encouraging browsing
• Rely on the use of the "soft keys" for critical interactivity, despite the fact that the implementation of these buttons is inconsistent across most device manufacturers, and
• Create a rigid structure for problem solving that, if violated, presents the user with cryptic error messages

People have an unbelievable amount of patience and typically feel that efficient operation is an overrated luxury that they can do without. As such, they'll be willing to significantly modify their behavior just for the chance to use a new technology.

Step 4. Advertise, Advertise, Advertise!

Remember, the wireless world is the next big place where we can all make lots of money. And, as with everything else, what better way is there to make money than through advertising?!?

Sure, naysayers will complain about wireless advertising and loss of privacy... but in reality, the proliferation of wireless access devices presents a great conduit for directly reaching individual consumers.

So if you really want to rake in the dough, ignore anyone that tries to tell you that most people don't actually want to view advertising and actively seek ways to block it whenever possible. And pay no attention when someone tries to remind you that the current user-subscriber models in use by most wireless carriers are designed such that users will be charged for each advertisement you send.

In short, exploit as much valuable screen real estate as you can with coupons, catchy sayings, and distracting information. Who knows, you just may increase your "click-through" rates - and that means money!

Step 5. Think "Wireless Web"

Just because people can only access data at extremely slow speeds, use teeny tiny screens with virtually no graphics support, have to deal with abysmal text-entry procedures and pay for every minute of use doesn't mean you need to offer smaller, more specialized versions of your content or service offerings! No way! Believe the hype! You can take the applications and services you currently have and quickly and easily port them to the world of wireless! Even better, consumers are really excited that you'll do so!

In fact, people are practically begging to be able to shop for books, read late-breaking news stories, and fill out loan applications while they're out walking, having dinner in a restaurant, or negotiating rush-hour traffic!

So don't just offer the small number of tasks that users would actually want to conduct using a wireless device. There's no rule that everything in your application needs to be considered 100% useful ... feel free to add in whatever extra functionality, advertisements, and related content you feel like - whenever and wherever possible.

Hey, if works with the wired web, it'll be even better when it's wireless because it's "mobile" and "digital" and you know that that makes all the difference!

And that's it! You're almost ready to go! All that's left for you to do is to hire programmers to design the user interfaces for your application, justify the savings gained from the elimination of usability testing, and allocate millions of dollars to advertising your new presence on the Wireless Web!

Good luck!