Russell Beattie

I love Nokia's RSS feed, it's so nice to keep up with their latest documentation when it's published, rather than go back every few weeks and just get drowned by the amount of new docs published. Just this morning, Nokia published a guide to create documents for their Series 60 phones using XHTML-MP (WAP 2.0). It's a great document - very concise with a good overview of all the tags, recommandations on content style, moving from WAP 1.x sites, and more.

2.3 Make Structure Easy for Novices but DonÂ’t Forget Power Users

In mobile services it often seems that a shallow structure is easier to understand than a deep structure. Links and pages should feature descriptive names to help the user find the information s/he needs.

It is hard to say how many links should be provided on one link list page. If the links clearly belong together and are easy to browse (one line per link, alphabetical or otherwise logical order so that the user does not have to read through each link), it is better to provide 30 links on a single page rather than five links on six pages. If there are tens of links, it may be a good idea to provide sorting options before showing them. If the link can fit on one row, it makes the selection clear and the page look better.

There are no elements in WAP 2.0; instead, they have been replaced with accesskeys. However, most users seem to be unaware of accesskeys and unable to find them. To help users to understand the concept of accesskeys, developers should make sure that they are visible on the screen and in a form that resembles phone keys.

If possible, a search function should be provided. Power users appreciate it, as do novices navigating large sites.

Interesting stuff. Good overview for those of you already familiar with XHTML-MP, great introduction if you're not.

-Russ