the 200ok weblog

The future has arrived, it's just not evenly distributed. - William Gibson

In the past few weeks I've seen two presentations about the mobile web and the future of mobile phones. Both presentations talked about the need to educate the user, particularly as a way to increase adoption of new features/technology. Neither presentation discussed cost as a key factor, which seems odd to me.

I think people don't use new technology because it costs too much. In Australia, telecommunications of all kinds are a classic case. Consider mobile phones for a moment:

• Sure, you can get a great phone that does everything and even has an MP3 player and 3 megapixel camera in it. It will just cost you anything up to a couple of thousand dollars (for a phone)..
• Sure, you can do video calls and picture messaging; but you'll regret it when the bill turns up.
• Sure, you can browse the web; but you'll be paying by the kilobyte.

That last one is a kicker. I'd use mobile web content all the time, except for the fact that more or less on principle I refuse to pay for any form of "web" content that is charged by the kilobyte (and it's slow).

the total spend

When you consider the total amount being spent on communications, you find that in some ways new technology is being sabotaged by the old. The cost of landlines keeps people from spending more on broadband or mobile content.

The calls made on my landline could easily be switched to mobile or VOIP calls. So why keep a landline? I have to maintain a landline to get ADSL. No way around it, particularly when your average unit block's body corporate won't let you install cable.

With caller ID enabled my landline costs as much as my internet connection. So actually I spend quite a lot of money to get basic broadband. If the landline was cheaper, I'd spend that money on better broadband.

An average person can be easily be paying AUD$100 every month just to be connected with a landline, mobile and internet - then you pay for calls and data. The telcos do offer bundles for these services, but the so-called "broadband" is generally pathetic so they're not a good option.

how pathetic is the broadband?

It's 2006 and Telstra is still selling a $29/month plan with 200megs of included data. Megs, not gigs. Even at 256k speeds that's a joke. After you burn through 200megs, you pay $0.15/MB for the rest of the month. If you go through 20 megs a day - hardly a stretch - you'll have a $90 bill at the end of the month. Hope you didn't plan to update your operating system or download some podcasts.

Meanwhile Optus charges the same amount for just 100megs (300megs if you bundle it with other products), after which point your connection drops from 256k to 28.8k. That's right, after 100megs you'd have a better connection with 56k dialup. But at least you're not paying for extra data.

These plans are far worse than my first broadband plan (256k/3gigs), which a co-worker once described as "ghetto broadband". To really put the icing on the cake, the TV commercials for both telcos tout the benefits of "lightning fast" broadband, letting you download music and videos at broadcast quality with no delays. Some even made a big deal of how cheap it was for this amazing experience.

The reality is the connections are slow and expensive... and that's in the cities. Don't even get me started on Telstra's TVCs showing people using broadband and standard mobile phones in the outback.

wifi?

Wireless access in Australia is rare and usually expensive. There is some talk of wireless coverage for major cities, but those cities who have run trials all seem to have ditched the plan after the pilot.

Nobody seems to want to pay for bandwidth... probably because it's so expensive.

what about other media?

It's not just phones and internet. Australia also has a low adoption of digital TV and pay TV.

Digital TV was greeted with hostility - nobody could recall asking for digital TV, yet suddenly we were told our TVs would stop working and we had to spend several hundred dollars to buy something called a "set top box". There was no incentive, it was just free-to-air TV with an added cost.

Unsurprisingly, takeup has been so bad that the date for analogue switch-off was pushed back from 2008 to 2012. We finally have a couple of extra channels; but I still don't have a set top box and in fact few of my friends have them either.

Meanwhile pay TV is priced firmly in the "luxury" bracket, then to add insult to injury you get commercials anyway. That's right, you pay for it; then they take money from advertisers as well and make you sit through ads.

Even so, most people would still love to have pay TV - maybe some sports, movies, comedy and music channels. Right? Well they saw that coming so each of those options is in a separate, additional package. To get that selection you have to buy everything, at a grand cost of around $92 per month.

That's on top of the $100 you're already coughing up for your phones and internet. Feeling broke yet?

digital radio?

No, we don't have that. Next!

education vs. cost

Getting back to mobile phones, there is a plan afoot to run an advertising campaign to explain How Mobile Stuff Works™. People buy expensive phones yet don't really know how to use them; and the industry thinks that telling people how to use their phones will have them MMSing and video calling like mad. The Shareholders Will Be Appeased.

The thing is, people will learn even the most arcane of interfaces if their level of motivation is high enough. Think of SMS - the interfaces aren't great, yet it's wildly popular. People haven't complained to mobile phone companies that it's too hard to send an SMS - they've developed ambidextrous thumbs.

So why aren't those same users going wild for MMS? Well, SMS seems cheap and MMS seems expensive. The motivation just isn't there.

filthy lucre

Everything boils down to money. We could all have fantastic experiences with available technology if things were cheaper, but then various companies wouldn't make so much money. So we drag along with slow broadband, overcharged mobile phones and landlines which continually degrade in value and quality.

It costs so much for our phones that most people can't seriously consider pay TV even if they wanted it. It simply doesn't make financial sense to pay all that money, unless you have a large family that won't leave the house ever again if you get pay TV (thereby replacing your entire entertainment budget).

The Future™ is already happening - if you have enough money you can have it right now. But for most of us, we're cancelling pay tv and hoping this month's phone bill isn't too high. As long as the tyrrany of price continues, Autralia will remain a communications backwater.

Labels: australia, broadband, landlines, mobile phones, pay tv, telcos, telecommunications, wifi

Or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the stylus

Most people in IT are exposed a lot of different web-enabled devices, but we probably don't pay enough attention to their interfaces. Many web developers have a tendency to just think about desktop PCs running Windows, or perhaps they'll think about Macs too. But what about all the other devices?

I've been pushed into thinking about this over the last few days, mostly because I've been using a borrowed tablet PC while my desktop was having some niggly hardware problems. The way I've used the tablet is substantially different from any other device I've used before.

devices and their interfaces

Let's take a look at a few of the devices people are using. I won't dwell on desktop PCs of any flavour since they're reasonably consistent: keyboard, mouse, full size monitor. Walking across a university campus, you're increasingly likely to see any and all of the following devices.

laptop pc

Usual inputs

• keyboard and touchpad/joystick/trackball
• when docked, full size keyboard and mouse

Gotchas

• a lot of people are slower when using touchpads and joysticks

tablet pc

Usual inputs

• stylus and on-screen keyboard when undocked
• any combination of stylus, keyboard and mouse when docked

Gotchas

• forms with no submit button - the stylus "clicks" so you have to pull up the on-screen keyboard and use the enter "key"
• precise clicks - the stylus tends to drag a little when you're trying to click, so very small click areas and close-spaced links can be irritating
• links with no "active" style - when you're not completely sure if the click has registered (or if you clicked the right thing), you'll really wish there was an active style on the link

Notes

• absolutely awesome for any interface which uses click+drag (play Solitaire or Bejeweled to see what I mean)
• if the interface is sensitive enough, great for drawing
• users far more likely to switch between portrait and landscape orientation

mobile phones

Usual inputs

• keypad, sometimes joystick-style buttons or stylus
• some models have extras like little keyboards and so on, but they're not especially common

Gotchas

• apart from phones with Opera, the embedded browser is likely to be pretty limited with unpredictable support for standards, plugins, etc
• almost none of the browsers properly support media="handheld" ....yet, hopefully
• most phones have low bandwidth connections and/or can't load big files
• some interfaces forget the "enter" key and can only submit forms with the stylus (or the user won't know how to find the enter key, which is effectively the same)
• very small screens (relatively speaking)

pda and handhelds (including game devices)

Usual inputs

• stylus which is also used to enter text with graffito or on-screen keyboards
• many PDAs have addons like keyboards or mice, but they're not universal
• game devices often have cross-pad devices, some have joysticks

Gotchas

• all stylus-related limitations of the tablet pc
• all browser/UA limitations of mobile phones
• relatively small screens or even split screens (eg. Nintendo DS)
• some screens have glare/backlight issues
• some have very odd text input methods - eg. the Sony PSP takes some getting used to and URLs are a pain to enter

user familiarity masks problems

Users do find ways around many limitations, or become so used to poor workarounds that they no longer think of them as "problems". However if you have a system that needs lots of workarounds, users are also likely to simply stop using your system and go elsewhere. User familiarity should not be seen as a substitute for good usability.

connecting in the first place

Many of these devices have "wireless capabilities" but this can mean many things. Wireless LAN without security, wireless LAN with security, bluetooth, WAP, etc. A large number of devices can connect to a wireless network but won't get past corporate VPN requirements. For example there's no VPN client for the Sony PSP, which put an abrupt end to our wireless testing at work (although the PSP is actually capable of using most of our systems, so long as VPN is down at the time).

Even if you can connect, wireless networks (at least in Australia) usually aren't the nirvana you might wish for. Slow, prone to dropouts and generally not free, wireless is absolutely not "ubiquitous" and not necessarily "high speed".

so what do we learn from all this?

To a large extent, you could summarise by saying that - between all the options- users with devices other than desktop PCs have the same requirements as disabled users. That means some of the most technology-savvy, youngest and brightest users are actually the ones at risk of hitting problems. The user base also includes key decision-makers like managers, CEOs and so on who like to have the latest and greatest toys.

One interesting thing to note is that some users are essentially mouse-only users, which is less commonly considered than keyboard-only users. Most devices do offer a keyboard substitute but many of them are limited.

conclusion?

Here's the good bit. You can cater to varied devices by doing all the "right things": build to standards, don't use tables or fixed width layouts, let users choose or override style settings, keep page weight to a minimum.

It's not a new message, just a lot of new reasons for the ones we already know. Best of all, they're reasons based on the latest gear rather than any form of moral highground or expectation that everyone wants to follow Best Practice.

Standards are good for the boss's latest PDA; your kids' expensive new game handheld; and the tablet PC you kind of wish you didn't have to give back to your employer. They're not the most laudable reasons, but they sure do motivate people.

Labels: graphics tablet, hci, interfaces, keyboard, mobile device, mobile phones, mouse, pda, stylus, tablet pc, trackball, ui, ux