[IxDA Discuss] Mobile device testing

[Barbara Ballard]

On 11/16/07, Bryan Minihan <bjminihan at nc.rr.com> wrote:
> My question is, if we anticipate at least SOME part of the mobile version
> will deliver highlight videos, and others will likely be RSS-style text
> alerts (who's new, who matches my saved alert, etc), which devices should we
> target for testing, in order to capture a pretty significant user base.  Our
> primary personas fall in these categories:  high school athletes & their
> fans (generally teenagers - approx 14-19), what I call "advocate fans"
> (parents & close friends helping the athlete get recruited), high school &
> college coaches (we're researching now, but estimating their ages fall in
> the 25-50  range).

Some resources:

- a presentation on how to choose mobile technologies
http://www.slideshare.net/barbaraballard/going-mobile-choosing-target-devices-platforms

- mobile UI patterns
http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/

- recent mobile device & usage stats
http://www.admob.com/metrics/
http://chetansharma.com/

- testing your app (NOT usability testing) on multiple devices
http://deviceanywhere.com/

- useful mailing lists
http://www.mobiledesign.org/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/wmlprogramming/

- design guidelines
http://dev.mobi/book/export/html/293

In general, you'll find that video clips are going to be your most
challenging technical objective. You may want to go web-only first;
your market probably isn't saturated with iPhones. Video clips will
require device detection and some sophisticated logic unless you
partner with a service provider who does it for you.

If you need to go cheap on the user research, you can consider that
Amp'd did quite a bit of high school boy user research for mobile.

-- 
Barbara Ballard
barbara at littlespringsdesign.com 1-785-838-3003