Designing for WAP?
And other views on whether WAP is Dead!

overall I agree with what you had to say...

I recently presented with a leading US integrator, in China....

People were telling the audience e-mail on the phone would be great. Next day, I took the presenters (from a leading manufacturer and the integrator) to task. I challenged them to (a) read the email I just sent to them and (b) type out a 100 word reply.

The next thing they show is things like the restraunt finder. As the Wall Street Journal article published "well that's great but when people did try to use it they didnt get directed to the restraunt they were standing in front of".

Next we see banking transactions such as balance enquiry....yawn are we all asleep yet.

Then Euro2000 was on at the time, and they talk about using the WAP phone for soccer results. Hello did anyone mention SMS messaging as pushing the results real time.

Now finally I put up an example of my telephone bill for the last month using WAP services. $800 for the month of which $600 is in telecom connection charges.

So lets look at the option of using the phone to book a movie, based on current connection fees and the time it takes to navigate through the transaction that just became a $5 transaction. (Well this is great for telecom operators...all they have to do is give everyone a free brain freeze) So much of Wall Street's article in my opinion was caused by people trying to suggest the WAP phone could be used for information...It was simply poor choice of applications and bad information architectures.

As Nokia admit the key features of the 7110 WAP phone are (a) Snake II and (b) the button that ejects the slider for speaking.

Now the problem basically comes down to the fact that today wireless is not suitable for information viewing (the screen is too small, the difference in the formats reduces ability to use advanced features, and the bandwidth is too slow to deliver large volumes of content..even when GPRS solves that the browser will blow up since it has very limited internal storage.

Regards,
David Bye
Singapore

Dear Editor,

As a producer who has just created their first WAP service, I read with interest the article on WAP. I thought the author not only had a wonderful concise style but also showed real understanding of the subject.

I spent ten years in TV and many of them in Australia where the ratings really could get your show off air if they didn't win a big enough audience. With any compelling content you have to start by asking what do people (the audience) want and usually that is predicated on what you want to see. Then you ask yourself how do I get this message across in a way which is exciting, visually and aurally intensive but without losing the point? Then you make the show (of course this last bit is always the hardest 'cos it actually costs money!)

It seems to me that WAP developers are still wound up with what the technology can or might do. This means that they are using it to explore the boundaries of that technology (And in WAP/WML case it isn't that broad) rather than to explore ideas/ services.

Let's hope the buyers of content will learn a few lessons from their TV colleagues and see that development of ideas is as important as the development of technology.

Best Regards,
John Denton

Hi David

Your article, though critical of the way WAP has been introduced, makes a refreshing change from some of the hysterical finger pointing which has appeared lately (in the European press anyway).

The UI issues, in our opinion, lie not only with the form factor, but also with the preferred mode of use of persons in a mobile setting. The challenge is how to respond to the information needs of a mobile user who wants to pull a device out of his pocket, find the answer to a question and/or execute a command, then put it away again. In the mobile setting users want information faster than they do at a desktop, but find it harder to navigate to reach it. One solution, and the one my company subscribes to, is for the device, or more correctly the network server sitting behind the thin client device, to have some awareness of the context of an individual user before the information request is made. By knowing who a user is, where he is, and what he is likely to be doing, an intelligent information device should be able to come up with an improved menu structure to reflect his current needs. We see this as the real value of automated high resolution location detection in phones. Not for Starbucks to pump me spam when I walk past, but to modify the UI of my limited form factor device to reflect where I am now and what I am likely to want to know or do next.

Take the example of travel information services, my particular area of interest. A user should be able to issue a 'go home' command (or go wherever). If the user is in a city the device should bring up the departure boards of the nearest public transport nodes with connections to the user's destination.

Regards
Damian Bown
Kizoom Ltd. - Solutions for the Mobile Internet.

uidesign.net reply:

You are hitting the nail on the head in my opinion. For a mass market application, devices needs to know a lot more about the user and what they are doing. The aggregator is in a position to enhance this if they aggregate knowlegde across home deck service. For example if I use the Sabre travel service and have tickets to fly to New York on a given day, then my WAP phone (on the server-side) should know that and use that information appropriately.

FWIW, I think that the vertical corporate market is where WAP will do best in these early years. Mobile work forces are a really good area where the phone can become a vertical market information appliance. For example, a BT engineer visits your house in the UK to install or fix a phone line. When finished, he hooks up a handheld computer to the phone socket and it tells him where to go next. A similar application could easily be provided on mobile phone for a number businesses, such as parcel collection and delivery. With a parcel company, you know the vans schedule and home location. You can also have a cellsite or potentially GPS location for the phone at any time. Put these together across a workforce and you can start to optimise van usage and driver time. That kind of application is truly compelling.

Regards
David Anderson
Editor

David,

The mobile handset of late 1999 (epitomized by the flawless Nokia 6110) represents a watershed. The arrival of the first legitimate candidate for what Donald Norman and others refer to as an information appliance: an easy to use device of strictly bounded functionality incorporating compatibility yet not perceived as a computing device and used by everyone.

Note, the natural habitat in which to observe this device in action is within a GSM wireless network which means Europe and Asia. The ten billion (10,000,000,000) SMS messages sent each month happen solely within the bounds of the GSM wireless network for example. By the way, as I understand it SMS was included in the GSM only as an afterthought. Something to do with available left over bandwidth. Incredible.

As an American based in Scandinavia for over two years I still marvel at the teenage boys and girls that routinely sit on my doorstep waiting for the bus clasping their Nokias and Ericssons like some religious talisman. There they are hunched over against the cold, tap, tap, tapping out SMS messages to their homies, or sweethearts. If you walked up to a pack of giggly thirteen year old girls at the mall sending SMS love notes and told them they were using a computing device in a entirely new and unprecedented way they would stare at you blankly wondering how anyone could possibly be so boring and have no idea what you were going on about. Ah, progress.

I say all this to point out that there is an extremely rich and powerful (addictive?) pre-existing usability environment that Internet services must be adapted to if they are to be viable on a mobile handset. I think of this environment as a kind of warm and comfortable bubble. It appears and surrounds you whenever you call or SMS someone.

A well designed Internet service will not inadvertently burst this bubble. In other words, if you send me unwanted spam on my PC I get angry and press delete. If you send me unwanted location-based spam on my mobile phone I get angry, press delete, and walk into your location-based store and get in your location-based face.

Cheers,
Douglass Turner

uidesign.net reply:

Douglass,

Your continued commenst in this area of technology are greatly appreciated. Keep them coming. Your observation that a new mass market must grow out from the exitsing bubble of SMS is an interesting and astute observation.

Thanks

David