Opinionated comments on mobile phone industry news
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All entries are written by Anders Borg, CEO and Consultant of Abiro, that has a long experience in strategic planning, developing embedded and Java software, usability aspects, and the mobile phone industry in general. You can also read the latest Mobile News entries on your phone via wap.abiro.com, and we provide many News Feeds from popular news services. For advertising and contribution queries, please use the feedback form. News feed (local) FeedBurner Feed
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Tuesday, December 19, 2006
How not to design a mobile site
Little Springs Design has a short piece called user experience goes beyond user interface, that's about web developers still not understanding the limitations and special needs of mobile phones when designing sites for mobile access.
If they had actually tested the mentioned site on real phones during development and together with the customer, it would have been blatantly obvious that they would have to go back to the drawing board and re-do everything.
Practice makes perfect, as they say, so just reading a book (as Barbara suggests) is just a starting point, albeit probably a good one in this case.
A practical case in point (based on experience): E.g. Opera for PC supports WML (and also XHTML-MP?), but don't use it for testing mobile sites:
* It's much faster than a phone browser
* It has access to tons of memory for caching complex content
* The communication link of a real phone is way slower
* A phone's display resolution is lower and/or the pixels are smaller
* Opera is very buggy at least when it comes to WML
* The UI of a PC is way more advanced: e.g. on a phone you don't want to enter a lot of text, so use check boxes etc instead (if possible), etc
Maybe I should wish for Barbara's book as a Xmas present <:)...
If they had actually tested the mentioned site on real phones during development and together with the customer, it would have been blatantly obvious that they would have to go back to the drawing board and re-do everything.
Practice makes perfect, as they say, so just reading a book (as Barbara suggests) is just a starting point, albeit probably a good one in this case.
A practical case in point (based on experience): E.g. Opera for PC supports WML (and also XHTML-MP?), but don't use it for testing mobile sites:
* It's much faster than a phone browser
* It has access to tons of memory for caching complex content
* The communication link of a real phone is way slower
* A phone's display resolution is lower and/or the pixels are smaller
* Opera is very buggy at least when it comes to WML
* The UI of a PC is way more advanced: e.g. on a phone you don't want to enter a lot of text, so use check boxes etc instead (if possible), etc
Maybe I should wish for Barbara's book as a Xmas present <:)...
