ESPN Mobile Usability Results
In Usable Products Company’s Mobile ESPN Usability single-product study, self-professed “sports nut” respondents struggled with the handset’s navigation features, despite enjoying the gorgeous screen and video quality. Mobile ESPN created a service that delighted respondents with its wealth of sports news and statistics, but bewildered them with an inconsistent user interface that proved hard for respondents to follow.
In Q2, 2006, we conducted a suite of six usability tests with mobile phone-using sports fans, whom we recruited in New York City. Each of these people used mobile media services frequently and did things typical of sports enthusiasts: attending events, watching sports on TV, visiting sports web sites, etc. We asked each participant to find leading sports news, stories about boxing, and their favorite sports team’s standings and statistics. We then asked participants to locate and play a sports highlights video, and to set alerts about upcoming game scores. We asked participants what they thought about the handset and service throughout the process.
In our study, participants struggled with the Sideline, which is a lot like the Orange signature handset UI on steroids. The Sideline is a vertical icon menu, engaged by pressing left on the five-way directional keypad. I’m no fan of these five-way controllers, which are quite hard to use. I’ve watched usability respondents initiate Enter when they want Up or Left, for example. While respondents had little difficulty discovering the Sideline, some respondents had difficulty using it consistently: actions mapped to the direction keys were dependent on the screen state, especially when used with the ESPN Menu, which appears as one of the Sideline elements. 
You can see from the image of the Mobile ESPN UI that there are a lot of interactive and information components. The designers missed the point of higher resolution displays: increased pixel counts should be used to display content more attractively, not to stuff more content into the UI. The text displayed on the Mobile ESPN handset was particularly small. Our respondents were skewed to younger people, who had no problem with the text size.
We asked respondents’ opinions of the handset at the outset of the interview and after they spent nearly an hour using it. Respondents liked the Mobile ESPN handset more after they used it than beforehand, a good sign. Average final reaction was 4.2 out of 5, while initial reaction was 3.7, a 0.5 increase. 5 was equated to “I like it a lot,” while 1 was equated to “I dislike it a lot.” Respondents were especially pleased with the display and video quality, as well as the selection of sports news and statistics available. However, respondents were disappointed by the dearth of video content, slow download speeds (despite being a 3G service on Sprint’s EVDO network), and the lack of clarity of the organization and menu nomenclature. Who knew that sports nuts cared about usability?
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Zi’s Qix: Innovative Interactive Handset Search
At Marek Pawlowski’s MEX (Mobile User Experience) conference this week in London, I saw Zi Corporation’s Qix product, an in-handset interactive search user interface that is compelling. As users type on the numeric keypad, Qix utilizes predictive text analysis to produce optimized search results in the form of sequential menu choices on the phone. Qix differs from T9 and similar predictive text technologies, which display only the best word guess rather than the digits typed. In T9, “84” appears as “Th”, as the predicted combination of one element of each set, (T, U, V) and (G, H, I). T9 has many usability problems, but is well suited to text message entry.
In the example photo for Qix, typing “93” is interpreted as any combination of one element of each of the following two sets: (W, X, Y, Z, 9) and (D, E, F, 3). The result set is displayed in a list, with a logical order: phone numbers, contacts, handset features, optimized results, and then everything else. In the example, a phone number in the contacts list, “+1 33 935 60 68 55” includes “93” as part of the digit string. Next in the list is a contact, “Wendy Crétien”, which contains “WE” as part of the string. Zi optimized the search results further for the “Web Browser” feature, which also contains “We”. I was unable to witness the performance of off-handset searches, which could be frustrating due to data service connection speeds.
As it was demoed to me, Qix optimizes all of the phone’s key features, like the camera, clock, and alarm. They go further to monetize off-handset terms, such as song titles and artist names. The fundamental link to external search is promising, and allows the operator to monetize keywords by prioritizing off-handset results.
Performance in the demo I saw was terrific, on a Nokia Series 60 phone. I’d like to see Qix on a Fastap or other QWERTY phone, but I was quite impressed with the utility and apparent simplicity.