Before the smart phones arrived, desktop computers were virtually the only means of information consumption. Mid-sized and Large companies have started paying attention to their web presence on mobile devices(iPhone, android phones and iPad). In this blog post, I discuss some of the key issues that affect the mobile web experience.
Just to give an idea, Twitter currently receives more than 60% of it’s tweets from mobile devices. Likewise Facebook receives a sizable amount of it’s traffic from mobile devices. Restaurant and news websites in particular are adapting to this need compared to others.
Users visit the websites from mobile devices with a variety of needs, like:
- Contact information (Directions and Phone)
- About
- Service (for example, chase bank has a mobile website which users visit for their account related information)Here are few things that affect the user experience on mobile devices.
- Text Due to the size and form factors, the information or descriptions shown for the mobile devices have to be shorter and much more precise. The longer the text, the less the chance of it being read. So the content strategy for mobile devices has different goals compared to desktop devices.
With that said, you might be thinking – should I be writing content to suit each and every device? The answer is no and yes. Take this blog post for example, instead of showing the whole blog post, it’s better to show only an excerpt or the title on mobile devices.
- Design Mobile websites should be designed by paying attention to information architecture, image quality and aesthetics. Graphics have to be smaller to accommodate the bandwidth limits.
- Video As you might know by now, iPhone doesn’t support Flash. So videos have to displayed using players that support html5 video. Similarly to images, the videos shown on mobile devices should be small to make good use of the bandwidth.
- Effects/Animation A finger is different from a mouse. Go animations that make use of hover effects don’t work well on mobile devices. Instead developers could make use of advanced gestures like swipe.
There are certain limitations to what you can do in terms of interacting with hardware (camera, gyroscope, accelerometer etc) for mobile websites, in which case mobile apps which are installed are the only way to go currently.
Conclusion:
A careful consideration of all the above factors and evaluation of user needs will lead to a better mobile web experience for users and improved conversion metrics for organizations of all sizes.
My blog post on the Finelight Blog about Mobile web experience
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