J2ME Portals
There’s a growing tendency for companies to create mobile JAVA applications that allow easy access to information and services outside the network operator’s portal. These JAVA portals have come about due to network operators’ reluctance to open up their portals so that they can control and gain maximum revenue from their subscribers’ access to content and services…
The biggest problem with such portals is attracting people to download the JAVA application. I recently came across CD-WOW’s new mobile service which uses a JAVA portal. It offered £5 off my first order which was ample incentive for me. I downloaded the program and it crashed and closed on me when I browsed the CD listings. I tried again and got all the way to ordering. I even got to press the ‘Confirm’ option - and it crashed again. I didn’t know if my order got through - I assume it didn’t as I didn’t get a confirmation email. I sent an email to CDWOW explaining the problems.
A week later I received an email from Reporo, who wrote the application. They apologised for the problem and asked me to download and try again. This time it worked. However, I had some frustration remembering the PIN I had used when pre-registering payment on the Reporo web site when I first tried the application. This highlights two other areas which are problematic for mobile - payment and simplicity.
If it’s not easy to pay people will be turned off and use an easier way of doing the same thing. Buying CDs isn’t exactly an urgent or impulsive activity (for me at least) and I can wait until I am in front of a PC.
If there are too many steps required to use the application people will also be turned off. Some studies say that you lose up to 20% of your audience every time you add another step. Pre-registering on a web site AND remembering the PIN in the future is a huge step for most people.
I think the CD-WOW program suffered from insufficient testing. I also found the program too slow to browse the available CDs. I don’t think it had sufficient ease of use or impulse factor for anyone to use it any more than once… as might be the case with many JAVA portals.