Web design for mobile devices learning from UX
28 May 2007
Interest in designing web sites for mobile devices is heating up and it is good to see large companies like Google investing in insights from the usability field. In that post, Max Lord summarises the current state for mobile web design:Basic problem solving still completely swamps any other creative concern when working on mobile sites. A refreshing blast of Spartan usability problems, mobile site design is uncluttered with your typical mamby-pamby web problems. Can a user get the information, and fast? Answer this question and you’re far ahead of everyone else.The lack of use of the existing web standards on mobile browsers seems to be holding us back. Perhaps until mobile manufacturers get the lesson learned by desktop software companies about making web browsers standards compliant, designing for web mobile is going to be horrible. Thankfully software like the Minomo browser (from the Firefox people) and the Opera mobile browser are leading the way, and getting good feedback from users.
Why don't mobile phone manufacturers just stop putting effort into creating their own web browsers on their devices, and use these standards-orientated third party ones instead?
Lessons from the desktop
A key lesson from the usability of web sites on a desktop is that users are comfortable with what they've seen before. It would seem with the mobile web audience, users are still very much learning how to use web sites on a mobile device, but this is probably because mobile web designers are still trying to work out how to make much of the desktop features work on a mobile. Chicken or egg?
Max says:
...browsing a large feature set on a mobile device is so cumbersomeI would recommend we stop trying to offer a large feature set on a mobile. As always, we should analyse what our audience is expecting to achieve on our web site, and make that the prime directive for the design. If they are on a mobile device, you can guarantee their use and information needs are going to be different from what they expect on a desktop.
I'm not going to use my mobile to look at the local council web site for information on building consents, but I might want to find out when the local swimming pool is open and what it costs. If you want another example, I would not want to read and view all the details about a new movie, like you can at IMDB, on my handheld, but I would want to see what time it is screening at my local movie theatre.
The first can't really be delivered on a handheld device, and probably shouldn't, while the second surely can?
PS: And I loved this comment from Max:
And in the most astonishing detail, the UX team actually gets to sign off on engineers’ work before each release. Progress!Progress indeed. If I could get web developers to do the same, I'd be a happy man.
posted by Greg on Monday, May 28, 2007,
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