Comments on Masabists: Thick vs Thin Clients In Mobile Today

Hi Andrew,Thanks :)The page still held 60 statemen...

2007-08-15T18:37:00.000+01:00

Hi Andrew,
Thanks :)
The page still held 60 statement items most with supplementary details, amounts and running balances (using ampersand encoded pound signs etc) in a multiple column table - everything that bloats any (X)HTML page! It was larger than I expected as well...

The installation issue is a big problem on some devices for inexperienced users (and very good on others eg. S60), particularly finding the installed content (as downloading a file isn't too challenging once you get past a couple of dialogue boxes), you are absolutely right. Games are helping for some demographics but there is still some education required for other users and a lot of potential for handset manufacturers to really differentiate and improve the handset UIs.

Cheers,
Tom

Thanks Tom. 20-30K still seems like a lot for disp...

2007-08-14T23:56:00.000+01:00

Thanks Tom. 20-30K still seems like a lot for displaying what is essentially a table of numbers, but I'll take your word for it that you produced something equivalent to the thick client screenshot.

In terms of usability, a thin client with Javascript support (more common among the latest handsets) should be able to provide more along the lines of the instantaneous response that you talk about, although unable to capture the direction keys from what I understand. However, there is also the aspect of usability related to the installation of the thick client that you didn't really cover off. There is an argument to be made that having the app run straight out of the browser without needing to install anything is a strong advantage.

Anyway, I appreciate the clarification. :)

Simon, last time I looked the Orange UK network di...

2007-08-14T13:08:00.000+01:00

Simon, last time I looked the Orange UK network didn't support USSD so if you were trying to launch a service in the UK...

Hi Simon (sorry, missed your comment there!),Good ...

2007-08-14T09:17:00.000+01:00

Hi Simon (sorry, missed your comment there!),

Good point - I have to hold my hands up and say I know very little about USSD apps beyond the fact that you don't see many of them on European phones because they would require a high degree of operator collaboration.

It is very true to say that across the developing world they are proving very successful - banking over mobile can be such a huge factor in people's lives that any usability quirks are irrelevant, and data costs can be kept low or factored into the service costs with operator support. I was mainly trying to cover options that would work in the more advanced markets where this isn't really such an option, but it would have been worth a mention given the banking example!

Tom

Hi Andrew,I'm sorry if my writing was not clear, I...

2007-08-14T08:48:00.000+01:00

Hi Andrew,

I'm sorry if my writing was not clear, I'm new to this blog thing :)

You are right to that a mobile-optimised page could be redesigned to look similar to the thick client display I showed, and this would be a much smaller download. This is exactly what I was doing when I recoded the original HTML in XHTML-MP, stripping out redundant whitespace and minimising the irrelevant information around the screen. I very much wanted to compare like for like! That is what the 20-30Kb figure represents - the range depends on how much info was stripped out; any CSS and images would be in addition to this data, precisely because the CSS/images would at this point in the session already have been downloaded and sit in the cache. Sadly that is still a large number because XML is a very bloating protocol transmitted OTA as plaintext - it's for that reason that I dropped in the Opera Mini comparison as well, which can crunch things a lot further with its proprietary binary protocol.

You should note that on most phones the cache does not hang around forever, so it is likely that the CSS and images would be downloaded once per session. If I have time I will try to post a more detailed analysis of the cost of doing mobile banking using HTML, optimised XHTML-MP, Opera Mini and a thick client across an entire session - I suspect that after the initial download, this would even more heavily favour the thick client over time.

I'm afraid I didn't include a screenshot of my optimised XHTML-MP page as it was pretty rough and ready - I didn't want to spend time rewriting the CSS etc to make it all fit in a proper branded way. The main purpose of the comparison screenshots was to show that even the best server-based page transcoders cannot work miracles from a usability perspective.

I have to disagree with your statements on usability though, but I can understand how just looking at a screenshot is insufficient to grasp what you can make the thick client do with the data once it arrives. I briefly touched on them in the text but clearly not enough. I would list them as follows:

1) Scrolling round the data is much faster than any mobile browser I have found.

2) We can with a single keypress (left/right, to change tabs) reorder the data and group it in different ways to optimise for the various reasons you might choose to browse a statement - we did some research into these common user tasks and worked to make them simple, though ideally we'd do much more!

3) We can selectively hide some information and only display it for the selected statement entry, and we can have a lot more control of font sizes (phones usually don't have many built in, but we encode them as images to work around that) - we vary how the data is displayed for each type of view but if required a lot more data can be packed onto the screen than in an unscriptable mobile browser.

4) Navigation is just done with the soft keys and, sometimes, popups generated locally. This is carries a huge speed and simplicity advantage over a browser, which must track a cursor over the entire page (including very long tables) - some browsers have shortcuts to jump to links but users often don't know them and they lack the clarity and immediacy of the system we put into the thick client.

You can see some of this demonstrated on the YouTube video we put up with the press release: http://www.masabi.com/release150307.html

I hope that answers some of your questions - I really did go all out to compare like for like, I intended the post to be as balanced as possible without making it the length of a novel explaining every little detail! Thin clients have their place, and thick clients have their place, and every application should be considered on its own requirements: I hope this message at least came through.

Tom.

An interesting article, but I think you overstate ...

2007-08-14T07:08:00.000+01:00

An interesting article, but I think you overstate the problems with rendering the Barclays app as a web page (thin client).

If the bank wanted to, they could deliver a page to a web browser that looked pretty much exactly like the thick client version, so usability would be equivalent. Similarly, if the statement was delivered as a table (with rendering elements in CSS and images residing in the phone's cache), then the amount of data required to deliver it to the phone would be greatly reduced. Please compare like with like!

I admit that a thick client will probably always be able to deliver its data to the phone more efficiently than a (non AJAX) web browser due to the web browser's need to retrieve presentation information along with the data. However, the difference in usability and traffic consumption between a well-written thick client app and a well-written thin client app should not be as vast as you imply.

Hi thereGood article, but why no mention of USSD? ...

2007-08-13T21:35:00.000+01:00

Hi there

Good article, but why no mention of USSD? Its way more useful than SMS for sensitive transactions, is totally universal across all GSM handsets and is used extensively across the developing world...

Simon Cavill
Mi-Pay Ltd