A study of application and device effects between a WAP phone and a palm PDA

Abstract

Technologies like Java 2 Micro Edition and Microsoft's .NET framework allow applications to be developed and deployed across a range of mobile devices without having to significantly change the source code. However, mobile devices have very different interfaces and capabilities and it is not clear whether these generic deployment technologies adversely affect the usability of applications by ignoring individual device characteristics. This paper describes an experiment that aimed to see whether users of two applications written with J2ME and deployed on two devices experienced any differences in the usage of the applications on the different devices. Our findings indicate that usability can be maintained through multi-platform deployment, but that there are may also be usability advantages if the specific interaction paradigms of different mobile platforms are taken into account. This would require means of separating not just the interface from the functionality, but also the interface functionality from the interface data. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.