Squace UI seriously disappoints

by: admin Monday, June 9th, 2008

Rating: Photographic memory needed to navigate this one

When I saw the Press blurb (see previous story) on the new mobile UI from Squace, I thought this is exactly what the industry needs. Having tested it, I’ve discovered that it’s a complete flop. It will never fly.

The idea behind Squace is great. Mobile phone users shouldn’t have to type in a single character to navigate their way to content on the mobile Net. Which is absolutely true with Squace.

The downside, of course, is that mobile phone users would find this incredibly frustrating to use. There’s no way of knowing where links to online content are hiding. It’s total guesswork.

Squace divided up the screen on a Sony Ericsson W901i into a grid of squares 13 by 13. As you move the cursor across the screen, each square triggers a pop-up that indicates what’s behind the link.

The catch is that these squares are totally arbitrary. I found the BBC web site behind one of them. However, given that the company is Swedish, several of the squares pointed to Swedish language sites which are totally useless to me.

The crucial point is that I can’t remember which square hid the BBC site. I have a one in 169 chance of finding it again the first time. That’s crazy.

Squace could improve the concept by using far less squares, but then the UI would become very similar to Celltop from Aricent. Which is infinitely easier to use.

Squace will probably argue that the UI can be personalised. However, it would be much simpler to feed all my favourite mobile sites into a browser as bookmarks and use them instead.

So Squace very much gets the thumbs down from me.