It Doesn’t Matter if You Have The Best Mobile Web Site
Even if you think you have the best mobile web site on the planet, many people still think the overall mobile experience is terrible. That means that your wonderful mobile web site isn’t all that special to those people.
Let’s take a look: Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks
1. Wireless carrier networks are SLOW
2. Public WiFi access is a SCAM
3. Sites aren’t formated for small screens
4. Mobile device screens are too small
5. Advertising gets in the way
Yes, it’s true that the mobile phone user experience is getting better all the time, but it still isn’t good enough for a huge fraction of potential users. Putting that another way, I think that people *want* to enjoy web sites from mobile phone and mobile devices, but they can’t for one reason or another. (See the above article if you can’t understand why browsing the web from a cell phone or mobile device stinks.)
By the way, you have to remember that it isn’t just the devices. Few people can claim they have “The Best Mobile web Site” — Indeed, most web sites aren’t even viewable from a mobile phone.
The iPhone and Blackberry, for example, have made the experience better. However, again, it isn’t just about the device. Coverage is spotty and expensive and complicated. That makes the experience miserable in many cases. And, the business models aren’t friendly to users. Take a look at issue number 5 from Five Reasons Why The Mobile Web Sucks — Advertising gets in the way.
The bottom line is that the mobile experience is better than it was but it still has a long way to go. Creating the best mobile web site will help you but you need to try to make the entire user experience is excellent. That’s hard to do since so many factors and variables are out of your control.
Eventually things must get better. However, right now, it’s a train wreck…
October 25th, 2007 at 2:24 am
From an engineering perspective, try nailing down a mobile platform and browser to support and then QA’ing it. For B2B this is pretty easy - Blackberry. For B2C, best of luck to you!
December 18th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Yeah, it’s not that the user experience is not that good, but also tha wireless internet is extremely expensive (specially here in Europe).
December 29th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
Over the past few years, I used a few handsets to browse the web. Never did I have a good user experience. Verizon Wireless and my phone required me to overcome these obstacles before I could get online:
1. UI - I needed to go through at least 2 or 3 menus to get to the place where I could begin my web experience.
2. Service - if I didn’t have access to the web/data service, I was stuck. If I was at the point of getting on the web with my phone, I first need to review the service agreement and agree to the additional monthly fee. (I think it was about US$10/mo. That fee was about 10%-25% of my total bill. Geez.)
3. Navigation - browsing was too slow. Scrolling up and down was difficult. Moving among links was tiresome. If I made a mistake and pressed the wrong button, I might have to start the whole process over again. So, recovery from error was very poor.
4. Input - It was simply too laborious to enter a web address of my choice. I could drive home and get on my computer before I could enter a full URL and view the page.
5. Design & Content - Not optimized for a phone. Site designers were not detecting small screens and delivering the appropriate designs. The user experience was horrible because most sites at that time were not XHTML and CSS compliant or the sites required Flash. Many sites are still not XHTML and CSS compliant. (In case you are unaware of the importance of these web standards, read Zeldman’s book.)
6. Lost Connection - If I lost my wireless connection, my web browsing was toast.
Along came the iPhone.
My mobile web experience is grrrreat!
It’s a bit slow… partially due the speed delivered on the Edge network, partially due to a number of other web performance issues such as large graphic files, complex table+font markup, etc.
Rob S. knows that we’re dealing with a moving target. However, I don’t think it’s easy to do B2B without a good amount of user research and testing. Plus why should business users be restricted to using Blackberry when they may feel that the iPhone is a superior technology?
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