Usable Products Company’s recently-completed report, Celltop Usability, found that Celltop was harder to use than WAP. Alltel’s Celltop is a mobile widget solution, which Usable Products studied alongside Axcess Web, a WAP portal, on LG’s AX8600 mobile telephone.

Mobile widgets are ‘Web 2.0’ for phones. Mobile widgets are highly interactive, Internet-aware applications. Celltop is a mobile widget solution launched by Alltel in January 2007, with the promise of increased usability. A case study from the designers of Celltop states that “Celltop … was created specifically to communicate the Alltel brand attributes of reliability, simplicity, and service.”

Unfortunately, Celltop is less usable than WAP. Only 7 out of 10 usability test participants were able to successfully check the weather in Miami, Florida using Celltop, while all 10 were successful using Axcess Web, a WAP portal. Furthermore, of those who succeeded, Celltop took 36 seconds (27%) longer than WAP. Half of the participants started with Celltop; the other half started with Axcess Web.

Participants checked the phone’s call log using Celltop and the phone’s native user interface, with similar results: 70% were successful using Celltop, while 100% were successful using the phone’s native user interface (UI). Celltop required 161% more time to check the call log than the phone’s native UI. Participants needed a full minute to check the call log with Celltop, and only 23 seconds using the native UI.

Celltop is visually appealing, but its ease of use is inferior to LG’s native UI. Despite poor usability, participants preferred Celltop overall, 6 to 4. However, not for checking the weather or the call log—in those cases, participants favored WAP and the phone’s native user interface 7 to 3 over Celltop. Usability tasks included finding and launching Celltop, checking the weather, sports scores, stock quotes, the call log, adding the News cell, and reordering cells. 10 one-hour usability interviews were conducted in Spring, 2007.

The report, Celltop Usability, delivered in print and on CD ROM, is available for immediate sale from http://usableproducts.com. It spans 50 pages, starting with background on 7 mobile widget solutions. The report contains 17 charts, dozens of high resolution photographs, 10 demonstration videos of Celltop in action, and 15 usability video clips.