Give WAP a break

by Joanie Wexler

February 14, 2001 —

Companies looking to embark on mobilizing their applications for increasingly nomadic workforces can learn some lessons from the ongoing Wireless Application Protocol saga.

WAP, one of the industry’s earliest mobile frameworks, consists of a pile of technical specifications for security and commerce protocols, development environments, and markup languages that enable mobile users with WAP-enabled handheld devices to view and interact with Web-based content. Folks who WAP-enable their Web sites are making their content available to users with WAP-enabled cellphones.

As a pioneering effort, WAP rollouts have been bumpy and have drawn significant criticism. The latest round comes from a study published last month by the Nielsen Norman Consulting Group, which surveyed 20 new WAP users in London about their experiences. Needless to say, the results were not favorable; the novice users reported trouble navigating WAP-enabled sites, getting the information they wanted, and being able to perform the transactions they wished.

But using WAP as the scapegoat for the mobile industry is getting old. In matters IT-related, the culprit in less-than-exhilarating user experiences usually has more to do with implementation and execution than it does with technology, and I think this is what is happening with WAP.

In the latest study, user complaints tend to be related to the way WAP sites were designed. As with any IT project, technology must be implemented in a way that motivates a user in some intrinsic or extrinsic way to use it. Lengthy menus, tons of options, and disorganized content formatting don’t cut it on a tiny screen, which is often text-based. Confused users get frustrated and give up. The WAP Forum has published a set of technical specifications under which a mobile data environment is made possible, but it can’t develop everyone’s WAP Web sites for them.

An issue that has come up in several of these newsletters is that mobile projects are less than optimal when companies simply transfer existing Web content, designed with certain assumptions about user desktop/laptop screen size and Internet connection speeds, to WAP-enabled phones. Like it or not, you need to tailor your content for mobile users, at least by screen-scraping and, more importantly, by developing mobile business logic -- in effect, creating a " mobile version " of your applications. You can do this yourself, or, if you are tired of continually recasting your apps, enlist the aid of a wireless application service provider or wireless consultant.

Most mobile phones shipping currently are WAP-enabled (about 20 different types of devices have been certified by the WAP Forum as compliant), so WAP-enabled apps are a critical piece of an overall mobile strategy. It won’t be the only piece. It may not even be the most significant piece. But it will be appropriate for a certain subset of users if implemented properly. Just because a new industry is still struggling to implement WAP in a way that is useful doesn’t mean that the technology itself is a loser. Let’s give WAP a break.

Network World