{"id":132,"date":"2008-03-01T23:35:07","date_gmt":"2008-03-01T22:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/01\/usability-reflections-how-google-failed-to-keep-their-blackberry-experience-simple\/"},"modified":"2008-03-21T11:19:28","modified_gmt":"2008-03-21T10:19:28","slug":"usability-reflections-how-google-failed-to-keep-their-blackberry-experience-simple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/usability-reflections-how-google-failed-to-keep-their-blackberry-experience-simple\/","title":{"rendered":"Usability reflections: How Google failed to keep their BlackBerry experience simple"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Getting a CrackBerry was my latest step in showing total devotion to my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zemanta.com\">employers<\/a> big ideas about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zemanta.com\/demo\">changing they way people blog<\/a>. Since we use Google Apps for part of our intranet solution I thought it would be nice to integrate this gadget with their servers. Sadly this made my already bad initial experience with the whole <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/BlackBerry\" title=\"BlackBerry\" rel=\"wikipedia\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"zem_slink\">BlackBerry<\/a> platform just worse. Even though they made a number of steps to confuse their users, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m just going to concentrate on just their web page on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/a\/help\/intl\/en\/users\/mobile.html\">Mobile offerings for Google Apps<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/03\/googleapps-page-snapshot.png\" alt=\"Snapshot of the Google Apps mobile description page with non-linked URL\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s highlighted\" style=\"float: right\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The basic idea of the page is to communicate that their suite offers a wide variety of mobile options of accessing the content. Yet It does this as it was designed as each section was its own page in some mobile providers glossy section.<\/p>\n<p><strong>No hyperlinks<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>They make hyperlinks to their mobile addresses part of normal text, making it really hard to notice and read. It also makes it impossible for someone to open the page up in their mobile browser and actually <em>click<\/em> on the links.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Lots of diffrent hyperlinks<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The links they want to promote (in between links for non-blackberry users) are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/m.google.com\/a\">http:\/\/m.google.com\/a<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.blackberry.com\/GoogleTalk\">http:\/\/www.blackberry .com\/GoogleTalk<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/m.google.com\/sync\">http:\/\/m.google.com\/sync<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Even though m.google.com tries to keep it simpe the blackberry address in the middle destroys the message from Google to go to m.google.com with some sort of appendix for the addresses.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Failure to actually include crucial information<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One such example is at the bottom where they promote their docs service, yet fail to include address for mobile access. My understanding after playing around a while is that I have to (or at least am able to) download an extra app to have great experience, yet they do not tell me that.<\/p>\n<p>It also seems that their idea of mobile is BlackBerry and then everything else. While I appreciate their thought that they support everything with BlackBerry badge, a developer in me has its doubts. There are also some other very powerful <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Smartphone\" title=\"Smartphone\" rel=\"wikipedia\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"zem_slink\">smart-phones<\/a> and it would be nice to address that issue a bit more clearly. They also do not make clear if they target at everything mobile or just the smart-phones.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Not speaking users language<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The last section casually mentions \u00e2\u20ac\u0153or other phones supporting WebKit browser\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. My iPhone has Safari inside, that you very much as other mobile phones had a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Browser\u00e2\u20ac\u009d, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Mobile Internet Explorer\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and such. It is a bit a stretch to expect users to know what rendering engine their mobile device uses.<br \/>\nThe same section goes on to mention \u00e2\u20ac\u0153xls\u00e2\u20ac\u009d format which is probably known to users but naming it <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Microsoft_Excel\" title=\"Microsoft Excel\" rel=\"wikipedia\" target=\"_blank\" class=\"zem_slink\">Excel spreadsheet<\/a> (with .xls ending) would make it more clear for the wide variety of users who actually don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t see the endings of their files in Windows.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Not providing simple mobile accessible URL and total failure of consistency<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>While Google actually offers mobile search at <a href=\"http:\/\/m.google.com\">http:\/\/m.google.com<\/a>, the page there actually doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell you anything about their mobile offerings. In order to get that you have to Google around to find <a href=\"http:\/\/mobile.google.com\">http:\/\/mobile.google.com<\/a> which promotes a downloader for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153all\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Google products in one go. Which is a nice idea for the fact that the installer actually doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t offer GTalk client.<br \/>\nBut all of this is besides the point as this information is <strong>not on the page<\/strong> which actually forces users to go back at browsing the inter-webs to stumble on this information somewhere.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What could they do to improve the page?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Provide a clear, nice URL on top with all the links or even better &#8211; make their installer at that page actually able to install all of their offerings.<\/li>\n<li>Separate the BlackBerry page from other mobile offerings. It seems sensible to have different pitches for Blackberry, iPhone and other mobile users.<\/li>\n<li>Make the URL\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stand out and normal hyperlinks so it is not that hard to notice them.<\/li>\n<li>Make some line breaks so the text on the page is actually readable.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The page itself feels like it was written in some marketing department, without any actual purpose to be helpful for any existing users that located it through search in hopes that it will tell them how to actually mobile stuff. This is also the message of this blog post:<\/p>\n<p><strong>People will find your marketing materials while searching for help on the topic. Design it in a way that it will at least point them into right direction for real help, if not actually help them in using it.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p id=\"zemanta-pixie\" style=\"margin: 5px 0pt; width: 100%\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.zemanta.com\/\" id=\"zemanta-pixie-a\" title=\"Zemified by Zemanta\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/img.zemanta.com\/pixie.png?x-id=6c03ba00-674b-4a21-881f-7e1764a87464\" id=\"zemanta-pixie-img\" style=\"border: medium none ; float: right\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Getting a CrackBerry was my latest step in showing total devotion to my employers big ideas about changing they way people blog. Since we use Google Apps for part of our intranet solution I thought it would be nice to integrate this gadget with their servers. Sadly this made my already bad initial experience with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14,41],"tags":[134,153,133,135,154,936,73,155],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rant","category-tech","category-usability","tag-blackberry","tag-blackberry-pearl","tag-google","tag-google-apps","tag-mobile","tag-usability","tag-usability-reflections","tag-web-page"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}