UX Booth

Wapple.net is, initially, an easy sell. As someone who hasn’t specifically targeted a website or application towards a mobile market, Wapple makes the process of doing so look simple and even fun. After the (notable) page load, the carousel used up top immediately draws my attention. The color scheme is bright and energetic. Seeing the Watchmen graphic and many images of phones instantly gives me two impressions: this site relates to a culture with which I identify and has content familiar to me. While I later learn that I won’t be seeing the Watchmen on my phone via this site, I still trust the wapple.net because the people behind The Watchmen did.

As soon as I logged in and created my mobile site, Wapple has an important notice for me:

Wapple Canvas™ is the gateway into building your mobile internet site. Here you will find all the tools necessary to create an outstanding, professional mobile site completely suited to your individual needs.

The curious Phone Group setting, note the “save” and “undo” icons at the bottom, instead of the usual suspects.

This is an example of fluff, information I don’t need to know. Marketing copy, unless it can be applied as instructional copy, should not make its way into a paid application.

In another situation, managing the styles for my site turned out to be painful. As a front-end designer, I’m used to using raw xhtml and CSS to get at the code for my site and control it’s presentation. Wapple allows me to control neither at first glance. Many of the options I would expect to find are conveniently hidden or located in a section other than “style.”

Lastly, looking around, I found the option to add a phone group. This is one of many areas of the site that could use better explanatory copy. What exactly do I need a phone group for? After spending some time figuring out the UI for this section, I created a default phone group with a couple of phones. The only problem is I have no idea what purpose it serves.

Wapple.net provides a great-looking preview of my site on each and every page, helping me see the affect of every setting I change. Additionally, I like the concept behind the quick start checklist which gives me a high-level view of all of the aspects of my site that I can change, and whether or not I have changed them.

The Quick Start Checklist allows users to quickly look over all aspects of their site before showing it off.

Overall, the Wapple Canvas is an easy dream with a sobering reality. I find the vision for the application immediately appealing, but getting my first mobile site online was a wholly frustrating experience.

In many ways, Wapple Canvas targets an audience similar to that of MailChimp. Both of these services help their customers adapt their content to emerging and non-standard mediums. Unlike the (relatively) mature landscape of desktop browsers, cell phones and email clients don’t always play by the rules. Both Wapple Canvas and MailChimp try and get people involved as quickly as possible, but the devil is in the details. While Wapple Canvas provides few headers, and many links, Mailchimp takes a more direct approach. By guiding their users around the dashboard and making good use of contrast, it’s hard to give the MailChimp dashboard a glance without immediately seeing where you can get started.

The Wapple Canvas dashboard pictured next to the MailChimp dashboard.

Unfortunately for Wapple, they have a lot to aspire to if they want widespread adoption of their service. However, by increasing their overall design aesthetic and making it simpler to get things done, Wapple can certainly serve as an invaluable asset to business targeting this market.

Suggestions

• Make use of Blank Slates — In many areas of the site-creation process, it’s hard to get a full grasp of the kind of site I can build. By providing me with a blank slate I can get up to speed and inolved.
• Provide Instructional Copy — In some cases, the Site Builder application presents me with a page of options and icons but no instructional copy. This feels irresponsible, and breaks my trust. How does the live preview work?
• Allow for Undo — After using wapple for 45 minutes, I found that my site was completely unreccoverable. Even if it was possible to retrace my steps and undo my work, it would have taken too long. After trying (in vain) to delete my site and start over, I gave up on customizing my home page.
• Icons should serve as visual cues, not text replacement — Throughout the Wapple Canvas application, icons are used in place of links and buttons. This is a barrier to less web-savvy individuals. While the visual cue certainly helps supplement text on the page, it is hardly ever appropriate for it to replace that text.
• Provide a sense of context — Overall, the Wapple Canvas application continually fails to give me a sense of context. It’s exceptionally frustrating to use the site builder because I don’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes. Even after interacting with the application for an hour, it feels like I haven’t scratched the surface of all of the options available to me. Providing a discrete set of navigation elements, as well as highlighting where the user is inside of the application, will go a long way towards helping a user feel grounded.
• Make better use of Contrast — Consider again the comparison of Wapple Canvas and MailChimp. In the top left of the Canvas Dashboard, we see a high-contrast icon and heading. Is this necessary? A high-contrast area calls attention to itself, so it better be valuable. However, in this case, we’re merely informed of what section we’re presently on. High-contrast navigation calls more attention to itself and therefore begs the user to jump around. On the other hand MailChimp uses orange, high-contrast buttons to provide gateways to two common actions, both related to creating a campaign and using their service.
• Make use of White Space — In many cases, the itnerface of Wapple Canvas feels cluttered. The use of whitespace in the application is greatly disparate from the whitespace found on the wapple.net marketing site.