Mobile Web Design: Mobile web problems, the mobile user, the goal - 1 of 4

Hey everyone. So my name is Matthew. I'm with notixtech. We focus strictly with mobile web solutions and QR codes which I'll touch upon and a little bit. Out of curiosity, how many of you are doing stuff with mobile right now be it apps, or building a mobile site, or what have you. Ok, a few of you.

Alright, 33% of mobile web users have complained about formatting on smartphones. This was a report done by eMarketer back in June 2010. By formatting I mean when they go to your site they have to scroll, zoom, and pinch to get the information that they need.

A couple things they complained about was load times, functionality on the mobile site, and then errors. Load times could be trying to load large graphics on your site that is not optimized for mobile or if it is, and then there is also sites that have a lot of HTML mark-up code and what not. They take longer to load on the mobile web browsers. It's more a bottleneck of the hardware on the phones. Newer phones with dual-core processors are getting better with that. For functionality, John touched upon navigation on smartphones. Websites are built for 17" screens, they're not built for the small smartphone screen so things like drop down menus where you hover over something on the navigation menu... there is no hovering on smartphones because they're touch based. So, that's that.

I want to talk a little bit about the mobile user. John mentioned that they're on the go. Mobile is really about convenience and being able to access the information you need when you need it at that time. It's always with them in their pocket.

Three things I want to highlight. Mobile user is less patient, they have a different intent, and I want to talk about their expectations. By the way, if you have any questions, feel free to jump in. So they're less patient. They're on the go. They could be accessing your site while they're in the car, while they're waiting for the bus or something. Listening to a speech. So there is this real time constraint. I know on the desktop someone might be looking more for research information. They might want see more text to learn more about it. They also have a different intent. When they're surfing your site there really should be an end goal and I'll talk about strategy in a little bit so what are they looking for? Is it maps of the city, is it emergency numbers, or what is that critical information that they're looking for. And also the expectations. Right now mobile web surfers are very tolerant of the mobile web. The mobile web is not optimized for smartphones so they're used to poor experiences and this is an opportunity to differentiate yourself and build a site that results a great experience for them.

So I want to touch a little bit upon Facebook. About a third of people access Facebook from their smartphones. That's about 200 million people. 200 million people. What's interesting with this stat is that it's also representative of the number of smartphones in the United States. This is a world wide stat. But in the United States Nielsen reports that nearly one in three people own a smartphone. comScore said one in four people own a smartphone. That equates to around 63 million people in the United States. I know Michael touched upon their being more smartphones in the United States by the end of this year. With Twitter, about 46 people are tweeting from their smartphone.

The goal here with mobile is to create a positive experience. I was trying to count the times Michael mention the word experience in his talks and it's very important. That's really what this comes down to and optimizing for the mobile user and making sure that their experience is optimal.

• Category

  Science & Technology