Just What Is The Mobile Web?

[Gruden]

Introduction

With the dominance of the iPhone, the rapid rise of the iPad, and the advent of a wealth of devices based on Google’s Android or Windows Phone 7, the web is moving more than ever into the spaces beyond the desktop. While the mobile web has long been considered separate from the “desktop” web, it’s become increasingly clear that mobile and the desktop are just at different locations along a spectrum of web access. We can no longer define devices just by their capability or by their context of use. (I like to think of the iPhone as enabling “on-the-go computing”, while the iPad delivers “living room computing”, but even those boundaries are blurred.) We can no longer assume that only certain tasks will be desirable to someone using a mobile device, and it seems a dangerously inefficient path to start creating specific versions of a site for specific devices.



At Gruden, we’ve always tried to build sites that would work across a range of browsers on machines with varying capabilities, and our approach to mobile is similar. Think about the core content and functionality across your site, and then think about the ways it might be*enhanced in specific contexts or with particular capabilities.

Web vs Apps

“Web vs Apps” is a false dichotomy — like most things, they exist at different locations on the same spectrum. Some things are obviously “apps”, with features that can only be delivered or only make sense well beyond the web — this can be clear when using, for example, a mobile device’s camera or contacts list, or for games that need the resources available to a native application. But at the other end of the spectrum, many of the things available in the iTunes App Store are really just web content, repackaged.

Where things get the most interesting is in the middle, where we extend your core offering beyond the web using features available in certain contexts. If your primary offering is a service, think about the different ways you engage with a customer in different contexts. If your web offering is about the content, think about how people consume that content, and how they can really engage with it. In some cases, given particular requirements and audience demographics, packaging something for the App Store makes sense. But in other cases, more might be gained by building atop your existing web site. Mobile browsers are increasingly offering up access to functions that were traditionally only available to native applications — it’s straightforward, for example, for a website to ask a mobile device for its physical location, or to “install” itself to a user’s device for use without a web connection.

Examples

The classic mobile web examples suffer by extrapolating too much from a device to a user’s context. One imagines a restaurant site — visited on a phone it might offer contact details and a map, while on a desktop it might favour the menu or function details. But what’s to say a user’s not using their iPhone from the couch, or while making their way to the restaurant and wanting to know more about the menu? Or maybe they’re at their desktop looking for a map to work out how to get there? Similarly, some banking sites will offer a mobile version that shows someone their current bank balance or the nearest ATM, but — for no apparent reason — not let them transfer money to a new account.

Even stranger, a site might offer up a “streamlined” version of itself to any visitors on mobile devices, but not consider whether it could*always be streamlined — if you have extraneous information that needn’t be shown to mobile users, maybe it needn’t be shown to desktop users either.

Users may also get confused when they’re being asked to access your site in multiple different ways. Facebook offer both a “mobile” version and a “touch” version of their website, both with slightly different looks, the latter pointing iPhone users to their iPhone app as well, and both offering a link through to the “full” version of the website. The iPhone app offers some native functionality (eg, access to the camera and photo upload), but when accessing the website it’s unclear why there are multiple different versions that a user may need to select from.

Design for the mobile web may be well-intentioned, but it too often fails to take a holistic approach. The key to successfully designing for the full spectrum of web-enabled devices, from the desktop to the phone through tablets of all sizes, is in consideration of your content strategy as a whole. Successful mobile web offerings either target a specific niche or are about offering users a coherent experience regardless of how they access your site.

Next Steps

So what comes next? We’d recommend a range of activities; the specifics of each would vary depending on where your offering lies between content and product or service, but the high-level principles all apply:

• IA Review; a look at the breakdown of your site, and content hierarchy both between and within pages
• Content Strategy Review; a workshop with the people responsible for the creation and publication of your content
• Customer Touchpoint Review; a look at the different ways people interact with your organisation and your content or services, both on and off the web; this may include an*Analytics Review where the data is available
• Techniques for Flexible Content and Structure; a workshop with your content and technical teams to review options and common problems when presenting content across different devices

Performing these activities will give you a strategic direction on which to move forward, and our design and development teams can assist in implementing a*Mobile Web Solution that presents your content appropriately, integrates with your content workflows, and targets your users regardless of device and context.



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