Keynote Systems (News - Alert), a company offering on-demand mobile and Internet test and measurement solutions, has announced the results of its Keynote WebEffective for iPhone (News - Alert).

 

Keynote WebEffective for iPhone is the first study of actual user satisfaction of mobile Web sites, and a new way of conducting online usability studies of iPhone customers to improve the online experience,a according to the company.

 

Keynote WebEffective is a commercially available SaaS (News - Alert) (software-as-a-service) product that offers insights into a mobile Web site’s effectiveness and online business performance through in-depth customer experience research.

 

Under the study, more than 75 iPhone users were tasked with finding an entertainment news story, reading a news article, and searching for a story on a specific topic.

 

For analyzing the user behavior, the Keynote WebEffective tracked it as the participants completed assigned tasks. Further, the tool combined the behavioral aspects of clickstream analysis, the quantitative data of surveys and the qualitative feedback of usability labs to understand the customers behavior.

 

The study has drawn some startling conclusions, such as it says that satisfaction rates were low for both Yahoo! (51 percent) and Fox News (64 percent) mobile Web sites and less than half of users found these sites to be appealing.

 

Further, the study says only four percent of users tapped into advertising, while nearly a quarter noticed advertising but did not click through.

 

The Fox News users were found to be more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience, while a bigger number of the Yahoo! users found the mobile experience to be much worse than a computer experience, claims the Keynote study.

 

According to the study, 60 percent of the Yahoo! users reported frustration while browsing the site than just 33 percent of Fox News users. Expected user frustrations included site errors, cluttered pages, poor site speed as well as excessive scrolling.

 

Dan Richards, senior product manager at Keynote said that the iPhone is a breakthrough mobile smart phone, but the Keynote WebEffective study shows that the user experience of surfing Web sites is not that mobile smart.

 

Richards noted that there are some areas of usability that need to be perfected for end users to be fully satisfied, as mobile web designers are having to learn and adapt to a brand new world.

 

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