My hospital distributed PocketPCs to a group of clinicians a little bit ago, me included, and I’ve spent the past week playing around with the new toy. The platform that was standardized on is the HP iPaq hx4700, in a large part because of its built-in WiFi, and that means that in most places in the hospital, I’m able to get online. Of course, because I’m such a geek, that means that any time I get bored I find myself surfing the web. I usually end up crawling around the various sites that specialize in PocketPC-related topics, and one thing that I’ve been pretty amazed by is how many of those sites don’t do jack shit to make their pages display well on the platform. In fact, most of them don’t serve anything different to PocketPC browsers, meaning that I usually spend about a half a minute trying to find the place on the page that has content, another minute or so figuring out where the navigation elements are, and then about a microsecond giving up and hitting the back button. It’s am interesting case study in not knowing your audience, and as a result, providing a substandard experience.
Oct 27, 2004 | Q