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You are 35 percent less successful completing website tasks on a cell phone than on a regular PC according to new research. No wonder why so many people simply don’t use their mobile devices for the web.

It is neither easy nor pleasant for people to use the Web on their mobile phones, according to a report released today by user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group. In usability studies conducted in the US and UK, NN/g researchers found that the average success rate for users completing tasks on the mobile Internet was 59 percent compared to an average success rate of 80 percent for websites accessed on a regular PC.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, principal of Nielsen Norman Group explains:

The phrase ‘mobile usability’ is pretty much an oxymoron,” said “Observing users suffer during our user sessions reminded us of the very first usability studies we did with traditional websites in 1994. It was that bad.

Not counting poor cellular signal, researchers identified four main obstacles that mobile users face to getting a good user experience:

• Small screens: When users see fewer options at any given time, all interactions become harder to do;
• Awkward input: Text entry is particularly slow and error prone, even on phones with mini-keyboards, and it is difficult to operate GUI widgets without a mouse;
• Download delays: Getting to the next screen takes forever, often longer than it would on a dial-up connection;
• Mis-designed websites: Sites optimized for usability under desktop conditions, meaning they don’t follow guidelines for mobile access, create all kinds of additional obstacles for mobile users.

User experience specialist Raluca Budiu, lead researcher for the study and co-author of Usability of Mobile Websites comments

The first two problems are inherent to mobile devices, and as for connectivity, it’s going to take many years before mobile connections are as fast as even a modest cable modem. The key opportunity for improving the mobile user experience lies with websites being designed specifically for better mobile usability

When test participants used sites designed specifically for mobile devices, their success rates averaged 64 percent compared to the 53 percent success rate they experienced when using “full” sites on their mobile phones, in other words, the same sites offered to PC users. User performance could be improved 20 percent by creating mobile-optimized sites.

Nielsen Norman Group’s research combined three usability methods for the study of the mobile Web: user testing, diary study and a cross-platform review that looked at 20 sites using six different phones. The firm’s research findings and recommendations for improving the mobile user-experience are detailed in a 130-page report, Usability of Mobile Websites: 84 Design Guidelines for Improving Access to Web-Based Content and Services Through Mobile Devices, co-authored by Raluca Budiu and Jakob Nielsen.

The report is available to download for $198 from the Nielsen Norman Group website

Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., is a world renowned expert in the field of usability. He is a principal of the user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group, which he co-founded in 1998 with Dr. Donald A. Norman (former VP of research at Apple Computer). From 1994-1998, Nielsen was a Sun Microsystems Distinguished Engineer His previous affiliations include Bell Communications Research, the Technical University of Denmark and the IBM User Interface Institute. Dr. Nielsen is the author of the best-selling book “Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity” (2000) and its May 2006 update entitled “Prioritizing Web Usability.” Nielsen’s other books include Eyetracking Web Usability, and our favorite Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

The Nielsen Norman Group is a user-experience research firm that advises companies on how to succeed through human-centered design of products and services. NN/g principals Jakob Nielsen, Don Norman and Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini are world-renowned user-experience pioneers who advocated human-centered design and usability long before it became popular to do so. Besides authoring books and evangelizing at NN/g events about user experience, they and others on the NN/g team offer high-level strategic consultation on the usability of websites, consumer products, software designs and anything else that needs to be easy-to-use.