I happened to be in Singapore a couple of years ago. If you’ve ever gone to Singapore you will know about the amazing electronic gadgets that are cheap as chips compared to what we pay here in New Zealand. Reciting some seemingly important work related reasons why I needed the (then) latest Visor Prism PDA, I convinced myself that I needed to buy one. I think I used it solidly for about 3 months.

Today, I’m using a trusty $10.99 paper diary from Whitcoulls while my Visor Prism sits relegated in a box at home. If we talk return on investment, I think my diary has outperformed my Visor by a magnitude of a thousand.

I’m pretty sure that my experience with the Visor is not unique. Why is that? Of course, there could be hundreds of reasons why I didn’t use my Visor and it also depends a lot on what I had intended to use it for – but at the end of the day, I stopped using it because it took too much effort. Although my paper diary doesn’t do email, send text messages or allow me to read ebooks, it does one thing really well – I can scribble appointments and notes in a fraction of the time it takes me to do it on the Visor. I know that newer models do a lot of fancy stuff – and they’re getting painfully close to being practical, but I’m sure that they too have their own set of usability and interface challenges.

In a just over two weeks I’m off to Melbourne to attend the Mobile Commerce World conference. There I hope to meet some interesting people who’re responsible for integrating usability into these next generation mobile devices. People like Scott Jenson, formerly the head of Symbian Design Lab, who know what it’s like to balance the utopian desires of usability and the commercial reality of budgets and requirements. There I hope to learn more about the reasons why basic mobile devices are so pervasive while the uptake of more advanced gadgets and services are disappointly sluggish. With my background in telecommunications, this is an area that we’ll be getting involved in.

In other news from the Optimal Usability desk, we’re making a presentation at the New Zealand Computer Society on Thursday 28th August, we’re working on a study of the state of commercial usability in New Zealand and starting some research with Victoria University around video analysis in usability testing. Plenty happening and certainly looking forward to reporting on these in the next news update.

Sam