Part 1: Getting everyone on your team to understand the mobile landscape
Mobile is the first mass media to spawn mass confusion among marketers. Put together a room full of decision makers and you will get:
- One person who will text for the first time during that meeting (usually the top decision maker)
- One person who has a mobile phone from 1999 that she only uses for phone calls (usually the project manager)
- Three people on three different web-enabled phones with varying size screens and methods for pointing and data input (touch, scroll ball, buttons): an iPhone, a BlackBerry and a Samsung Instinct.
As a result, when people talk mobile, everyone imagines something different. Life was simpler when everyone saw the same TV commercial, billboard or banner ad.
So parsing out the mobile landscape really helps get everyone together. When it comes to publishing content for mobile consumers, there are web sites, WAP sites and mobile web sites, alongside the explosively popular “apps” and (as mobile web browsers become more capable) mobile web apps. The team has to understand the differences and then move to coalesce around a mobile design goal.
1). Mobile Design with WAP
The primary criteria in identifying the mobile design goal is related to the types of mobile phones that are targeted. It’s given that the marketer wants the maximum audience reach provided by targeting the broadest user-base. It was once the case that designing for WAP resulted in adequate performance across all mobile phones. This is no longer the case for two reasons: 1). WAP performs miserably on touchscreen phones – text links are normally too small and too close together, and 2). with the proliferation of mobile phones with modern web browsers, consumers have come to expect a nicely designed user experience with rich graphics and convenient user interfaces. WAP will afford neither. Targeting the broader audience of web-enabled mobiles with rudimentary browsers and navigation methods (for instance keypad navigation: “press 1 for home, 2 for prices, 3 for directions”) eliminates a much sought after audience of active web users on modern touch screen mobiles.
2). Mobile Design with Webkit
If the mobile site is styled for iPhone users only, with beautiful background images, animated transitions and big branded navigation buttons, the resulting audience will be relatively tiny.
3). No Mobile Design (Full HTML)
How about the middle ground: targeting all mobile phones with modern Safari, Chrome or Firefox web browsers, decent screens and qwerty keyboards by simply doing nothing: with the advanced capabilities of such phones, the existing web site is rendered faithfully (if in miniature) on the device. Still only a subset of the available audience, but doing nothing is always an attractive solution. This option is being promoted by Google and Apple as if to say to consumers and advertisers alike “come on in, the mobile web is fine.” But truly, it’s not fine. The site designed for desktop screens can never, under any circumstances, adapt to a 2 inch screen. The unexpected mass adoption (by smartphone users) of downloadable apps designed specifically for the device is a testament to this reality. The other testament is your own common sense.
4). Mobile Design For Everybody
The best answer we can think of is, let’s target all consumers on mobile phones with a web browser of any kind. A design solution must be developed (or chosen off the shelf – like Everywhereigo.com) that detects the mobile phone type and provides a style appropriate for the device features and capabilities. With a solution such as this, the process can proceed smoothly to the next step – so look for part 2 in the Mobile Design Considerations series.
Go To Everywhereigo
