How To Run A Beta Test... Or Not?: "I had high hopes for this beta test. It was a 0.1 upgrade release of a product I'd been selling for 3 years. Most of the bugs had already been squashed, so I intended to spend most of my time surveying testers and soliciting ideas for improvements. I thought I could build word-of-mouth by using a large beta testing team. The expectation was that this would be a very quick and simple beta.

Oh man. How wrong could I have been?"

Jon at FP client Wiretown forwarded me this piece of research, Fluid Lives: "People found their Internet-enabled mobile phones frustrating from the start with technical set-up problems and confusing phone interfaces. The complaints continued even once these problems were overcome. Mobile content was considered to take far too long to download. Even those who did succeed in downloading quickly hit a wall in terms of storage capacity. Unreliable access was also an issue, particularly for mobile TV. "

Flirtomatic.com - Flirt like mad, baby: "I first checked out Flirtomatic a long time ago when it first launched. I was impressed then and, after quite a few revisions and improvements, I am still very much impressed. "

Fitts Law and softkey optimization: "On a scroll-and-select device, distance is measured by the number of clicks to accomplish the task. Clicks include scrolling through the screen, pushing a Select button, pushing a softkey, scrolling through a softkey menu, and activating an item in a softkey menu.

Distances are increased when the hardware buttons are far from the user’s current thumb position."

Via ChewedMelon, Shaberu! DS O-Ryouri Navi : "a DS title that features over 200 recipes that are broken down to many steps and read aloud to you by the narrator. You can bark voice commands at your DS, such as "next page" and "more detail" for even simpler instructions."