PDA and VideoGame Usability Test 1

First on my Sega Dreamcast using the Sega Web Browser 2.0. The Sega Dreamcast now sells for 50$ new and you can get them used even cheaper. Sega was driven out of the market hardware by the Playstation2 but they had a 56k modem and could surf the web out of the box. The PS2, Xbox and Gamecube will all ship online connection kits later on this year so the Sega Dreamcast is the closest you can get to these future clients. If you were going to be designing a site for people age 8 to 30 it would be in your best interest to make sure it works on the game systems. The Sega web browser blows up type to where it is readable on TVs but has similar compatibilities as a 4.0 browser but it can only have one window open at a time but it has no Java or Cookie support. It has a version of the Flash 3 plugin. Sony has an agreement with Macromedia, AOL and Netscape so you can expect Flash, AIM and Netscape on the PS2 soon.You can use a keyboard and mouse with the Dreamcast but you can type Urls in with an onscreen keyboard. It displays at 640x480 on TV and in this case a VGA monitor. CSS for layout is a bit stripped on it but the new browsers for the other game systems will be on a newer more compatible generation.

I would say the site was about 80% compatible on the Dreamcast. Some of the screens were too long and wide and the PDF content was un-readable. But it was very usable and showed up better than I had expected. The biggest problems were that the screen was too long needed to be broken down a bit more and the URL was WAY to long and complex. I actually typed it in wrong twice before getting the right one.
http://www.visitfairfieldcountyoh.org doesn’t roll of your tongue.
http://www.FairFieldOhio.com or http://www.GoFairFieldOhio.com would be easier to remember and input.

The yellow banner ad-looking banner did not show up correctly. And a top horizontal text menu would have helped. These are pictures of the computer monitor so bare with me. I don’t have a screen capture tool for the Sega Dreamcast.

The tables for layout work and the browser highlights links like Web TV does.

Here is my testing station. I will give $100 to who can guess the game in the Super Nintendo there. I have some game systems most people have never heard of.

Some of the photos were justified to the right on a larger than 640 screen and I had to scroll over to see them. The pictures could have been cropped a bit tighter but they were quite legible. The search engine worked super!

Also if you went with a Url of
href=“cemetery/” instead of “http://www.nameofsite.org/cemetery.html”
would allow you to change the format of the page and location of the server without having to re-do the link.

All PDF content could not be viewed because there is no PDF viewer on this platform. I can’t read the newsletter online.

Really long URLs that were easy to screw up and mistype. Also the script (calligraphy not JavaScript) type in the images could be hard to read. Unless you are doing wedding invitations and calligraphy I see no reason to use Script fonts on the web.

Here is my Palm m130 with 40 megs of Ram, Palm OS 4, and Handspring Blazer Web Browser 2.0 on the left and the 56k Palm Modem on the right.

The pages took a while to load on the palm and the URL was hard to type in but I would say that this was about 70% compatible on this platform. Alt tags were very important before the graphics loaded and all graphics that were larger than 200x200 were scaled down automatically. Some text in Images were hard to read.

Using bold and h1 tags really help when the CSS and font tags are stripped away. Also Blazer will not render Tables by default. Make sure you have a text nav menu near the top to help with navigation.

Since the Tables were not being rendered the side menu was really long.

Graphics that were really small on the PC are huge on the PDA. Text links look dandy.

While there is a Palm Acrobat reader it is not possible to view them online or download them without a computer. So make a HTML version and offer that beside the PDF content.

Your main site also worked swell and was linked at the bottom of some of the pages.

Large images were scaled down some worked better because they were cropped closer than the wider shots that were illegible. Also this page was quite bit heavy and took a while to load. I could have been chunked out used thumbnails of the pictures linked to the high rez versions.

Lots of Italic text and a lot of bold text looks bad on the Palm but is Ok when used sparingly.

This report took about an hour to shoot and an hour to write. But was fun and I learned alot. Hope it helped.