Needles and Plastic

Update: would seem Gerry McGovern agrees with us on this. Check his article on how using the web can help deliver cost-effective service to customers.

Mobile web-browsing re-visited

What else has been happening? The official arrival of the iPhone in New Zealand earlier in the year gave many web designers a chance to think about how to design for it. The excellent LibraryTechNZ blog ran a series about web writing and optimising web sites for the iPhone. Apart from telling you all the web tricks that don't work on the iPhone, the above article, and this one on web design for the mobile provided an excellent list of resources and sound advice for the web designer. They also challenged libraries to think about meeting the challenge of providing content for mobile devices, as they said:

There are so few websites out there that have optimised for mobile or iDevices (or even thought about it) that I believe we have a real opportunity to make our mark while we wait for the rest of the world wide web to catch up.

Naturally, I was disappointed they didn't discuss the way the zoom-in Safari interface operated, although their first article mentions they expect to zoom a lot. Since I wrote the early articles on this blog about how trying to use a web site on a mobile device using the zoomed-out/zoom-in technique was nuts, I've since upgraded my own mobile device to a HTC Touch and have had more experience with using such a small screen to search and use the web. It ain't easy.

The Touch device only has a 320 x 240 pixels touch screen, which is fine, but the iPhone 480 x 320 screen really does put it to shame. I've tried the Windows Mobile IE browser that came with the device and the latest version of Opera Mobile. IE is a pain, no surprise there, while Opera seems designed for the user experience.

The Opera Mobile 9.5 browser works well for a touch-screen mobile user, with large icons and menu symbols that are easy to use with your fingers. It also uses a zoom technique, but it doesn't work so well due to the lower resolution of the HTC screen. It's hard to tell if the content you are looking at is what you need, so I have found myself zooming in and then moving around, which as the LibraryTechNz blog says, "is like interacting with a newspaper page using a rectangular magnifying glass."

The zoom does work better on the iPhone but I think it is due to the increased screen resolution, from what I've seen. The technique is still wrong. Why try to make a web page look on a small mobile screen, the way it looks on a wider desktop/laptop LCD monitor?

Although I'm sure many web designers will scream at this, I think Google's provision of a filtering app to make web sites easier to read on mobile screens presents a more useful way forward for mobile web users (hat tip to the Canadian Slaw legal blog for covering this little-known Google option. The app does strip out style sheets, which may not be the best option, but considering most mobile browsers don't implement style sheets in any web standards way yet, you can't blame Google for taking this route.