Tonight I spend some hours debugging and testing DopplerMobile on a HTC Universal owned by Robert Oosterhuis. It was an enlightening experience. Especially the user interface part was good to see on a real device. Robert was in The Netherlands, I was in Belgium. Using his webcam I could see what he was doing and it turned out that DopplerMobile could really use some UI enhancements for PocketPC devices.

DopplerMobile is primarily developed on a Smartphone after which I port the different versions to the other platforms. That shows in the user interface. However, as the PocketPC interface is much richer than a Smartphone interface and the way users interact with a PocketPC also differs greatly from Smartphone users, it became quite clear that enhancements where needed.

Whereas selecting a post on a Smartphone is done by a single click on the joystick, the PocketPC users have to double-click/tap. As I’m developing on an emulator running on my PC, double clicking with my mouse is not a problem at all, however, double tapping with a pen is rather different. Besides that, opening an item on a PocketPC is normally done using a single tap.
Another issue is that a PocketPC user is used to close a dialogbox using the close or ‘ok’ button at the top right. That’s different from a Smartphone user, who closes a dialogbox with a ‘done’ button at the bottom left. If you run the current released beta of DopplerMobile on a PocketPC you are actually required to close forms/dialogboxes etc by selecting the ‘done’ menu item at the bottom left. I also did not take into consideration that for field input an on screen keyboard pops up every now and then, resulting in some fields not being visible on the screen. Again, not an issue on a Smartphone. The VGA resolution of his device also showed issues with screen scaling.

So it turned out that the UI that I implemented for the PocketPC was not as intuitive as I wanted it to be. Running DopplerMobile on a real device showed me the areas which needed improvement quite clearly. A lot of the things that popped up during my session with Robert you will see implemented in Beta 4 of DopplerMobile.

I came to the conclusion that it could be really handy to have a Windows Mobile 5.0 PocketPC device around. Any sponsors out there?

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2005 at 3:06 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.