14 DAY TRIAL // A Keynote study, the first of its kind, has compared satisfaction among iPhone users performing tasks on the Fox and Yahoo! News mobile portals to reveal that the experience is lousy. The findings highlighted “user frustration points.” However, the study's results go both ways, as they also provide new opportunities to improve mobile websites, the report says.
Keynote Systems, a company dealing with mobile and Internet test & measurement solutions, announced today the results of its “Keynote WebEffective for iPhone study of actual user satisfaction of mobile Web sites.” According to the official report, Keynote WebEffective for iPhone offers a new approach to online usability studies on iPhone users browsing the web. For more information on the actual online research tools used by the folks at Keynote, visit this address. For the study's results, read on.
The same report reveals that more than 75 participants were tasked with finding an entertainment news story, reading a news article, and searching for a story on a specific topic. As soon as they were done doing this, one last task was to send it to a friend.
The Keynote WebEffective study on these iPhone users found that satisfaction rates were low for both Yahoo! (51 percent) and Fox News (64 percent) mobile Web sites. Less than half of the users found the sites to be appealing. Just four percent of the participants clicked through the ads, while a quarter just noticed the advertising but didn't take it into consideration. Fox News users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience, the report reveals on. Yahoo! users, on the other hand, found the experience to be much worse than on a computer.
Hopefully, the study was not performed on subjects who were unaware of the fact that Apple had to make some sacrifices if it was going to port the desktop web browsing experience to the iPhone.
Continuing with the results, Keynote reveals that 60 percent of Yahoo!'s users reported frustration with the site, while disappointed Fox News users counted just 33 percent. So, what have we learned here, kids? That Yahoo! needs to improve, improve, improve!
Expected user frustrations included “site errors, cluttered pages, poor site speed as well as excessive scrolling,” Keynote reveals, while "path analysis" provided the necessary evidence that users had indeed encountered and attempted to work around these issues. What the survey did not expect / aim to find was a lack in visual appeal and difficulties related to the search feature, Keynote Systems laments.
How do you like your mobile Internet experience?