Book Review: Handheld Usability from Scott Weiss moves Mobility Forward

We've seen an explosion of handheld devices on the market in recent years, with some manufacturers being more guilty than others of imposing unusable interfaces on their public. On balance, it has to be said there's still some room for improvement, but also a dearth of practical advice on designing the mobile interface.

This new book from US usability practitioner Scott Weiss is certainly timely. It's a hands-on guide aiming to help designers think through practical issues involved in designing applications for a range of handhelds form factors.

Weiss makes no assumptions about the reader's technical knowledge. He ranges over matters such as device types and connectivity, approaching the technical aspects with authority and providing clear explanations that assist the non-technical reader. This provides a firm basis for the analysis and guidance in the later chapters.

The book goes on to cover a wide range of information architecture issues from a handheld angle, such as 'select' versus 'type', the use of icons and audicons on handhelds, and types of interfaces for specialised applications. Inevitability in a book of this size, and with so many aspects of the interface to cover, the treatment of major issues such as globalisation does not really go beyond the cursory.

Weiss argues convincingly in favour of the need for prototypes as a 'proof of product' and takes a practical approach, using one chapter to lead the reader through constructing and using paper prototypes of handheld products. The final chapter deals with practical steps involved in conducting a usability test, from writing a respondent screener to using transcript data.

There's a wealth of useful information in the appendices: a handheld history timeline, a practical example of creating a paper prototype application, and an extensive treatment of a usability study conducted by Weiss's own company.

Perhaps inevitably, to be able to offer sufficient useful advice to handheld designers in a book of this size, Weiss has had to restrict his coverage of form factors. Explicitly excluded are the larger held devices such as tablet PCs and palmtop devices, with the argument that 'they look and work like desktop computers'. I would beg to differ. Designers of A5 tablet PC hardware and applications, for example, face many of the same issues as Weiss describes, including limited screen real estate, absence of external keyboard, touch screen issues, on-screen keyboards, stylus input issues, handwriting recognition, exterior use, wireless connectivity, docking and battery life. But perhaps it's unreasonable to ask the author to address such a wide range of devices in a volume of this size.

Some readers may find Weiss's style dry, but by cutting the prose he's able to pack a lot in. While Handheld Usability cannot hope to comprehensively cover all the usability aspects of handheld devices, it certainly fulfils its objective of highlighting the particular challenges of designing for 'on the go' devices.

Associated Link: Find a fuller review of this book here

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