Posts Tagged ‘web design’
Mind the Gap – Mobile Devices and the Web
I built my first web site in 1994 while an undergraduate. I used the pico editor which of course required building everything using text and that most revered of markup languages, HTML. I probably chose pico because it was like pine, my e-mail tool. Of course, there was no WYSIWYG, which is not always a bad thing. After many hours of work and looking at HTML for the first time, I launched my first web site.
It was horrible.
It wasn’t just sort of bad either. The category of “abysmal” comes to mind, but only if there were actually enough public web sites to actually form categories back then. There weren’t. Actually, all the sites back then were as horrible as only the early-90′s era web could be. They were meant to run on NCSA’s Mosaic and share basic information (usually a photo, my university e-mail and research links). Of course it didn’t really matter as they were being rendered on ancient university computers the processing power of which we marvelled at because they could also run MATLAB, do word processing and possibly draw some black and white images (not at the same time of course).
It wasn’t just the computers, it was the network. The pages were being sent over fairly slow university networks, possibly via my SLIP connection or, *GASP*, AOL or Prodigy, and a speedy 28.8 or 36.6 modem… maybe faster if money was no object and you got lucky. Animated gifs (remember those?) loaded slowly… but once they did we could all get a good chuckle about the animated dog running back and forth at the bottom of the page or the dance of numerous small fuzzy rodents filling the screen.
The bad news is that there were limits, the good news is that there were limits. That isn’t a typo. Limitations and constraints make us think about what we’re doing. It forces trade-offs and, possibly, leads us to a more rigorous thought process where we are forced to make choices. Fast forward 15 years and the world of the web has less limits. We now face a gap that is forming between what designers and developers can do and the systems users use to access those web systems.
For a (hopefully) brief moment in our history, we are being thrown backwards as the mobile web becomes more important and the capability gap of mobile devices vs. their desktop/laptop brethren are painfully obvious. Once again economy of design and speed are important. The first mobile phone call was made by Martin Cooper at Motorola in 1973. He first called a competitor at Bell Labs, presumably to gloat, much like associates who acquired first generation iPhones in 2007. Now we have mobile web browsers on devices such as Blackberries and iPhones and a growing dependence on mobile technology. Mobile subscriptions worldwide have far exceeded those of fixed lines. Some estimates put those mobile subscriptions at 4x more than landlines, while also growing at a faster rate than landlines.
Unfortunately, many designers and developers are simply trying to make web sites that have the most flash, features, buttons and advertisements in an attempt to monetize their content, create traffic to their web site, generate leads or meet some other business goal. Many of the aspects of these sites can not be utilized by mobile web browsers.
Sure, maybe the iPhone users can view your “awesome” web site, with some work, but everyone in the world doesn’t use iPhones. Designing just for the iPhone is the equivalent of designing for a particular browser, instead of testing for cross-browser compatibility. Notably, in the United States, iPhone users are stuck on AT&T’s 3G network which is abysmal and unpredictable… faster than dial-up in 1994, yes, but only when it works. Apparently this is helped by praying for forgiveness to Steve Jobs nightly for that old PC you still use from time to time.
Also, many phones don’t have the horsepower or compatibility to look at your flash-based web site. As a matter of fact, maybe you didn’t know, Mr. and Mrs. Designer, your site actually crashes some browsers on regular desktop computers. The fact that it locks up many of our mobile web browsers should be obvious.
It is time once again to reconsider what good web design is and consider anew how to best approach building or repurposing web sites for mobile. Some of the lessons of the “old days” of the web can still be instructive as we wait for mobile devices to catch up to the modern web. Content is still king (well, services too) and economy of design, AKA “less is more”, is still the best philosophy. If the web is about content and applications to utilize that content then the central system to your mobile strategy should be a Content Management System (CMS). I am continually amazed at how many international companies do not have a CMS. They have plenty of content, but they horde it, serve it up in a single language, don’t repurpose it for the web and generally have poor work flows for updating the content.
These are well known problems a CMS can help solve, along with a group of people in the organization committed to change. Multi-platform content distribution applies to mobile devices as well, no surprise. Mobile devices are almost a language unto themselves, they require that we translate our sites so that they can understand, often with WAP or WML, but most importantly with the way we produce and distribute content and services. This would be tedious to do by hand, but with a CMS it becomes much easier and will help bridge the gap between mobile devices and the latest web content and applications.