Usability consulting firm Keynote Systems released results of a limited usability test involving 75 people using the iPhone and the mobile Web. Users were assigned tasks associated with Fox News and Yahoo!. Users were asked to rate satisfaction levels and offer other, related comments.

Here's what was publicly released by Keynote:

• Satisfaction rates were low for both Yahoo! (51 percent) and Fox News (64 percent) mobile Web sites and less than half of users found the sites to be appealing.
• Only four percent of users tapped into advertising, nearly a quarter noticed advertising but did not click through.
• While Fox News users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be better than a computer experience, Yahoo! users were more likely to find the mobile experience to be much worse than a computer experience.
• Significantly more Yahoo! users (60 percent) reported frustration with the site than Fox News users (33 percent).
• Expected user frustrations included site errors, cluttered pages, poor site speed as well as excessive scrolling. Path analysis reveals how users encountered and attempted to work around these issues.
• Unexpected findings included a lack of visual appeal and difficulties around the search feature.

This study doesn't tell us much except that most of the participants liked the Fox news experience better than Yahoo!

There may be a range of variables, including user expectations that come into play here. Also, it appears that users were not instructed to use Yahoo!'s mobile-specific applications and properties.

Regarding the advertising and response rates, the publicly released data doesn't reveal anything about the ad creative. I'm guessing all of the ads were banners and probably didn't have an associated offer or call to action. In that context a 0.4% response rate (as in CTRs) is reasonable and more than double the online average. 

The results also show, however, that 25% noticed the ads. As an aside, CTRs are the wrong metric to apply to graphical advertising. There are branding and latent purchase effects that have been repeatedly observed from display advertising. Clicks myopically capture immediate action but don't adequately account for overall influence of display advertising.