Mobile App Testing

Independent restaurants. And as it turns out, they’re not particularly good when it comes to the web either. Here’s the story via TechCrunch:

Restaurants just love to put Flash intros with auto-playing music and animations on their front pages. If you are trying to look at one of these sites on your mobile browser without Flash, chances are there is no way to bypass the animation and get to the information you want because the complete site was designed in Flash.

It’s not just these obnoxious animations that make accessing restaurant websites on the go a hassle, though. According to a new study by Restaurant Science, a restaurant industry information and analytics provider, only one out of eight full service restaurant chains and a depressing one out of twenty independent restaurants have a mobile website. What makes this even worse is that according to some reports, half of all visits to restaurant websites are from mobile devices.

Not having a mobile site may be forgivable for some small family businesses (though restaurant chains really should know better at this point), but the bad news doesn’t end there. More than half of the restaurants surveyed in this study didn’t even have a website to begin with (the researchers actually called all these restaurants to make sure they really weren’t online).

Read the rest >>>

The debate has been raging for awhile: Which will win out? Mobile websites or native apps?

There have been solid arguments for both and even hybrid compromises (like native app icons that take you to a mobile site). But another melding of the two forms has just appeared in the form on CNET’s new mobile site.

In an article published yesterday CNET details how the design aesthetics of a native app influenced the redesign of their mobile site. The thought they put into their site is thorough and interesting and might just give mobile site designers a few ideas to think about and build on. Here’s what CNET did:

We know that there’s nothing as frustrating as a hard-to-navigate mobile Web site. There’s so little space on a phone screen that every pixel has to earn its keep. So when we redesigned our m.cnet.com site from the ground up, we took cues from something everyone knows and loves: mobile apps.

First, we simplified the layout of our mobile site and made its navigation familiar to anyone who uses Facebook, Path, or any other common mobile app. …

Just because m.cnet.com looks like an app doesn’t mean that is an app, though. Anytime you click a link that takes you to a CNET page on your phone’s browser, you’ll get this experience whether you’ve installed a CNET app or not. We’ve made our article pages clean and easy to read, with standard sharing navigation at the upper right.

Get more details at CNET >>>

Has anyone used the new CNET mobile site? What do you think of it? Is it intuitive and easy to navigate or did CNET miss their mark? Is the concept of “native app design for mobile web” something you think will or should catch on?

We’ve covered (at great length) the difference between native apps and the mobile web from a testing perspective, but never from an overall business perspective. For that, here’s a nice infographic from the zabisco.com blog:

You know what needs to be done. Yes, you’ve worked hard to develop, test and optimize your mobile site (or native app). But guess what? It’s time to blow it all up and start over. Sound unreasonable? Take a look at what Twitter recently did:

Twitter has redesigned its mobile website using HTML5,turning it into a Web app, which allows the social network’s mobile site to look and act more like the native Twitter apps available on smartphones.

Penner said in a blog post about the update that Twitter scrapped its old mobile site and built the new version ”from the ground up for smartphones and tablets, which have more advanced browsers that support the latest Web technologies, including HTML5.”

The same functions found in Twitter’s smartphone apps are there in the HTML5 mobile site, including the ability to quickly scroll through a user’s timeline, move between tabs to see @mentions and direct messages, search and view trending topics and lists, and of course, write Tweets, she said.

But the HTML5 verison of the mobile site can’t yet be viewed on every smartphone on the market, Penner said.

Read the rest of the article >>

We’ve spent a great deal of time on this blog discussing the testing implications of native apps vs. the mobile web. While the mobile web has continually been written off as “dying” , “obsolete” and “inferior” by many of the experts, everyday mobile users tell a different story….

TechCrunch recently analyzed a report by mobile advertising firm Jumptap, which found that 58% of mobile  users get their content via the mobile web and NOT from native apps. Here’s a few selected quotes from the article:

An explanation for the discrepancy was not given, but I suspect this has something to do with there simply existing more websites than there are apps, and that jumping from one app to the next to consume content isn’t as good a user experience as simply opening a new page or tab within your mobile browser of choice.

Additionally, a lot of major Internet services (Gmail, Bing, Google search etc.) tend to function as good or even better through the mobile browser than via native apps.

To put together the report, freshly funded Jumptap analyzed 10 billion ad requests on its mobile advertising network, made by 83 million unique users. The company not only looked at content consumption from mobile handsets, but also at how well users respond to mobile advertising, finding that ad engagement trends upwards with age and income.

With users still essentially split between native apps and the mobile web, testers will need to continue refining their skills in both areas until a clear winner emerges.

Your mobile testing objectives will depend heavily on the overall strategy you choose to employ. Here, the main choice is between developing a native app or a mobile website. Are you looking for one common platform with a consistent look and feel, or are you looking for lights out usability at the expense of expense or alienating entire device families? It’s not an easy choice and it is ultimately dependent on your business model.

That said, let’s take a look the benefits and drawbacks of both approaches:

Mobile Web

Arguments For:

• Single platform (the web)
• One app to build, launch and maintain
• All that’s needed for some companies

Arguments Against:

• Less controlled user experience
• Slower user experience
• No app store distribution
• Lack of standards across mobile browsers

Native Apps

Arguments For:

• Rich media functionality
• Controlled user experience
• Faster experience for users
• App store distribution

Arguments Against:

• Multi-platform
• Must build, test and maintain multiple apps
• Not necessary for some companies

Here’s usability guru’s Jakob Nielsen’s take on the matter:

Read more…

I just posted a Testing the Limits interview with Jakob Nielsen – aka the King of Usability – over on the uTest Blog. The subject matter will of great interest to readers of this blog, as we had an in-depth discussion on the past, present and future of mobile applications. Here are a few clips where he discusses native apps vs. the mobile web, tablet usability issues and his take on the iPhone vs. Android situation.

On native apps vs. the mobile web:

JN: Apps are superior for 3 reasons:

• Empirically, users perform better with apps than with mobile sites in user testing.
• Apps are much better at supporting disconnected use and poor connectivity, both of which will continue to be important use cases for years to come. When I’m in London and don’t feel like being robbed by “roaming” fees, any native mapping app will beat Google Maps at getting me to the British Museum.
• Apps can be optimized for the specific hardware on each device. This will become more important in the future, as we get a broader range of devices.

Apps have the obvious downside of requiring more development resources, especially to be truly optimized for each device. If a company doesn’t have enough resources to do this right, it’s better to have a nice mobile site than a lame app.

A second downside of apps is that users have to install them. Our testing shows poor findability and usability in Apple’s Application Store, and many users won’t even bother downloading something at all for intermittent use. So ask yourself whether you’re really offering something within the hardcore mobile center of need: time-sensitive and/or location dependent, and whether your offer is truly compelling in this crowded space. Most companies are never going to make it big in mobile. In some cases all they need is to make their main website somewhat mobile-friendly. Many others should deliver a dedicated mobile site but not bother with apps.

On usability problems with tablets:

Read more…

Presented without further comment:

Whenever a company has a major shakeup (like a change of ownership), it tends to set off a chain reaction throughout operations, affecting everything from marketing to sales, to development, and yes, even testing.

Case in point: Palm, which was recently acquired by tech giant HP, will continue to make the Palm Pre and other devices we all know and love. That much has stayed the same. But as we’ve seen from the new webOS2.0, that’s about the only thing that hasn’t changed.

Evidence can be found at PreCentral.net, which as the latest specs from the new mobile operating system. There’s plenty of new features that developers and testers should familiarize themselves with – so let’s start from the beginning.

• Palm’s multitasking ‘card’ metaphor is getting a refresh with Stacks
• Universal Search is getting majorly beefed up with ‘Quick Actions,’ will be opened to developers, and rebranded as Just Type
• Apps can have custom Touchstone at-a-glance views with Exhibition
• Synergy is opening up to developers
• HTML5 and Javascript support is much improved
• Hybrid PDK/SDK apps will be fully supported

Stacks
A new multi-tasking feature known as “Stacks” will enable users to quickly sort through applications in use. Interestingly, developers will not have to worry about about enabling the functionality themselves. Rather, the operating system will automatically sort them based on prior activities. So expect this feature to consume a greater amount of testing’s time, as opposed to that of developers.

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Rumors of the mobile web’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Despite some compelling arguments in Wired’s latest series – where experts assert that native apps have (or will soon) totally displace the web as a medium of choice – we’re not quite ready to pull the plug. Apparently, neither is the general public. Not just yet.

More on that in a second, but first, let’s examine why some are making this claim. It’s true that there’s been a meaningful shift towards native apps over the last few years, thanks mostly to the iPhone and its offspring (i.e. smartphones). What was once the Great Wide Open, the Internet has been parceled into what Wired calls “semiclosed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display.”

In other words:

You wake up and check your email on your bedside iPad — that’s one app. During breakfast you browse Facebook, Twitter, and The New York Times — three more apps. On the way to the office, you listen to a podcast on your smartphone. Another app. At work, you scroll through RSS feeds in a reader and have Skype and IM conversations. More apps. At the end of the day, you come home, make dinner while listening to Pandora, play some games on Xbox Live, and watch a movie on Netflix’s streaming service….

You’ve spent the day on the Internet — but not on the Web. And you are not alone…

Quite true. But you are also NOT alone if you’re still using the mobile web. As part of our weekly “What Do uThink” poll question, we asked our community whether they prefer to get information via native apps or the mobile web. Here were the results:

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