You've seen the vision. You've understood the potential. Now you're busy enabling a mobile workforce within the enterprise. Why should you read this article? Well, I'll tell you why: usability is a critical factor to the success of any mobile computing deployment or strategy. Even if you are not a developer, usability is still very important for anyone involved in an enterprise mobile system deployment. Whatever your role, you can still play a very important part in raising awareness of usability in your organization's mobile strategy. Just like everything else in the realization of the mobile paradigm, the quest will not be easy. But endurance will be rewarded with an unprecedented level of enterprise capability, productivity, and profit!

MOBILE USABILITY

What is usability? It is not just one factor, but rather a collection of various interacting properties. For mobile systems, these would include intuitiveness, ease of use, efficiency of use, and reliability (In this case, "mobile system" would be defined as a combination of software and a specific device). Although just about any software developer can write programs for mobile computing devices like the Pocket PC, it takes a developer who fully understands the mobile paradigm to design and develop a system with high usability.

Most of the properties that make up usability on a mobile system are non-orthogonal, which means that the various properties cannot vary independently. For instance, efficiency of use and intuitiveness are often opposite ends of the same continuum. If the efficiency of use is increased, the intuitiveness may be inherently reduced. Although that is not always the case, this is a very common usability battle. What you need to understand is that your software can't have everything, and that you must make compromises based on what you're trying to accomplish through the software. It's possible, though, to have a variety of different front-ends for your application so that users can select the interface that is best for their needs. You must simply learn to understand these properties and their relationships with one another if you want to develop for usability.

INTUITIVENESS

This is the measurement of how natural it is for the user to use the software. How easy is it for users of this system to learn how to use it? How hard is it for users of the system to find features that they may not have used before? How steep is the learning curve, and how fast does it level off? In standard software development, it is considered acceptable for a user to spend thirty seconds to a few minutes searching for a specific feature, but it is not acceptable for mobile users to spend more than just a few seconds looking for something. The standard software on Pocket PCs is for the most part extremely intuitive. Just about any experienced Windows user is able to pick one up and quickly feel comfortable using it. On the other hand, non-computer users may find it extremely difficult to use Pocket PCs because they aren't familiar with some basic yet critical concepts.

EASE OF USE

This describes how straightforward it is to operate the system once a person has learned how to use it. If aspects of the system are inconsistent with one another, it will detract from the ease of use. If the design of the system requires thinking in a mode that is different from the user's normal mindset, it will be less usable than a system that is designed to allow users to operate it without switching mindsets. This usually becomes an issue when the system designers don't understand the specific details of how the potential users currently perform their job functions.