EEZi-Pee (www.EEZi-Pee.co.uk), is a mobile Website designed to help those suffering from paruresis or bashful bladder, a phobia that manifests itself as difficulty in urinating, particularly in the presence of others such as in public restrooms.
It lets the paruresis sufferer listen (hopefully using headphones in public) to a variety of running water sounds on their phone in times of need. While it would be easy to joke about the condition and this app, paruresis is actually fairly common (one study suggests up to 14% of the population suffer from it). If EEZIi-PEE helps someone I’m all for it.
Unfortunately, EEZi-Pee only seems to work on the iPhone! The seven different sound files are ordinary mp3s, which the majority of phones would be able to play if they were simple links to streaming or static files. But EEZi-Pee doesn’t use links. Instead they use Softpress’s Freeway JavaScript library to create a separate embedded media player object for each mp3. So there’s an unnecessary dependence on JavaScript, which many phones don’t support. Plus it seems to be iPhone specific JavaScript. On Android the players are entirely missing and on an S60 phone all seven players try to play at once sounding like hell and locking up the browser.
According to the Softpress site, Freeway is cross platform, although the only mobile platform that I could find mentioned is the iPhone. I suspect that it’s possible to use Freeway to target other mobile browsers which support JavaScript. But it doesn’t look like EEZi-Pee made any effort to support anything but the iPhone. So what’s wrong with that? Well, according to the Tomi Ahonen Almanac 2010, worldwide there are about 3.9 billion phones in use 56% of which or 2.2 billion have a media player. But only about 34 million or 1.4% of them are are iPhones. EEZi-Pee is missing over 98% of its potential users by not implementing the site in cross platform manner.
Thank you for your review of what was essentially an experimental website, albeit one with a serious purpose. I am not a sufferer from paruresis, although I have met others with the condition, which can cause embarrassment and suffering.
The site has not been updated recently as we wanted to analyse the statistics over a six month period for the seo. Actually, almost 60% of the users of this free service are using Nokia handsets, which rather makes your point of it being iPhone only, redundant. We hope soon to be optimized for Android, as we take your point about the smaller percentage of iPhone users in comparison to worldwide mobile use, but stress that our experience of the site user analysis leads us to conclude that it is not solely being used on Apple platforms.
We thank you for your balanced appraisal and would appreciate any more comments you may have on the usability or otherwise of this micro-site.
Thanking you for your review,
Regards
Eezi-pee.co.uk
Really funny service :) Well, there’s one J2ME game for other phones, where you can listen squirrels farting. That may help as well :D