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Platform Game
To what extent do companies have to design separately for mobile users?
There is less talk of ‘the mobile web’ these days than there was a year or two years ago, which is a mercy - mobile devices of all sorts view the web, not their own specific network, and if you’re going to talk about ‘the mobile web’ you should go the whole hog and talk about ‘the tablet web’, ‘the smartphone web’ and one or two others. But one of the things that make the web the web is that it’s independent of the device used to browse it. ‘Mobile is just the channel, the web is the content’, as our pundit Stephen King puts it.
That said, the explosive growth of mobile apps has muddied the water a little, and thrown up new questions. Good news for usability researchers like mob4hire or testing specialists like DeviceAnywhere - whose business is booming - but another challenge for publishers. If your web site is smartphone-friendly, easily browsed and navigated, do you need to design an app as well? This is slightly different, in that an app can be used off-line, allows layout features beyond the browser environment, and is generally simpler to start up, for example.
The best course usually lies somewhere between two extremes, and in this case the two are:
- different content and design for every single channel, and
- just one web site, to be picked up and interpreted by all channels as best they can.
 I think site owners can go too far in trying to provide specialist content. At the very least, they must group media into categories, and I’d make these broad. All those media which have a graphical, interactive and mostly visual interface can be served with pretty much the same content, leaving only a few such as text and telephone-accessed services needing special attention.
That leaves delivery, and it would be equally wrong to suggest that a big brand can afford to deliver to all the above graphical media with just one package or style. The cost of developing most apps, if you’re a household name brand, is pretty negligible and as King says, ‘Right now, the strongest brands are doing all the app platforms as well as a mobile web site.’
For smaller providers, this is a pain to say the least, but common sense should prevail. Stephen King, whose last company mob4hire is not only focused on testing site and app usability on a vast array of handsets, but also the popularity of these via a global panel of mobile users, is in a very good position to steer us on this one. He says: ‘I think support of most platforms as well as web and even HTML5 is very important. It all has to be consolidated; with a common back-end server, and a way to distribute through a single site with automatic handset detection.’ On the other hand, ‘There have always been lots of devices accessing the web, so why define one just for mobile?’
It’s beginning to have a very familiar ring to it, for anyone who’s ever dabbled in web design. Mobile hasn’t changed the game so much after all: good publishers have always kept a close rein on versions of content, whilst designing for the broadest possible audience. If you can afford an app, produce a core version and tailor it for the main platforms starting with iOS and Android and working down the market share list. If you can’t, just revisit and update those golden rules that made your early sites work on everything from Lynx to Mosaic and Netscape, and if your content’s good, mobile users will be viewing it too.
Nick Thomas
Stephen King is a consultant on Strategic Technology Commercialization, at www.stephdokin.com.
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