Re: UKNM: WAP Numbers

[Tom Hume]

At 17:03 11/12/2000 +0000, UKNM Digest wrote:

>WAP Usability Report was released at the World Tour event in London

>November 30. Conclusions:

>         - 70% of the users answered no when asked whether they would like

> to have

>a WAP phone within one year;

>         - even the simplest tasks take much too much time to provide any

>satisfaction to users;

>         - even after spending a week using a WAP phone, user performance

> remained

>appallingly low;

>         - WAP content was frequently designed for the Web and not for the

>requirements of the mobile medium, further reducing usability: repurposing

>didn't work when putting brochureware on the Web in 1994 and it doesn't

>work when fielding mobile services in 2000


The fact that 95% of WAP applications out there are dreadful doesn't imply

the medium is unworkable.


When the web was in its youth, exactly the same criticisms were levelled at

it - "no one wants it", "it takes too long", "it's slow", "it's limited".

Nielsen draws this parallel himself, in the sub-title of his report ("D�j�

Vu: 1994 All Over Again").


Compare the takeup of the WAP to that of the web, and it's really not too

shabby; according to Euromonitor there were just 385,000 UK net subscribers

in 1994 (within a year of the release of Mosaic - and many of them would

have been email/ftp users). Forrester put the number of active UK WAP

subscribers at 450,000 (which is at least in the same ballpark as figures

from the telcos: 75k for Vodafone and 400k for Cellnet, I don't have

figures for Orange), and we're just over a year from WAP's commercial

launch in the UK. So the growth rates of the web and WAP in the UK are

currently not too far apart - the comparison is a good one.


I'm personally quite surprised that people working in new media aren't more

upbeat in general about WAP, considering a fair few of them must have had

similar experiences with the web 3-5 years ago.



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