* Keeping up with the growing interest and viability of mobile browsing
Once upon a time building a Web site was pretty easy, but now what with CSS, AJAX, JavaScript, Flash, and XHTML – along with all of the back-end technologies that are out there – the magnitude of the job is far more complex.
And if that wasn’t enough of a headache the growing interest and viability of mobile browsing – Web browsing on mobile phones and other untethered devices – means that your target markets may be changing. Your job: Keeping up with your market.
Now to be fair, the mobile market is still small – less than 10% of the 2 million or so cell phones out there have full blown Web browsers, but if you wait too long, say, beyond next quarter, your lack of a response to the mobile Web may turn into a serious marketing problem for you.
The toughest part of building Web content for mobile devices is that simple solutions such as Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Markup Language (WML) weren’t good enough – in fact WAP and WML turned out to be not even adequate (WAP was often disparaged as “Wait And Pay”).
The evolution of the mobile markup language market has been complex, and coming out of that are two major approaches to building content for mobile devices.
The first is to create your Web content so that it is flexible enough to rescale and reconfigure for devices that possess reasonably sophisticated browsers. This is the case with devices like the Apple iPhone where the challenge for a designer is to make content that works on a screen that is small but graphically sophisticated. In an important sense, the content has to be “degradable.”
The alternative, which covers a broader swath of the mobile jungle, is to redesign the content. Rather than aiming for one content construction that fits all, a redesign specifically for mobile use ensures that even the simplest devices can show what the user wants. And therein, ladies and gentlemen, lies the key to successful mobile content: It is all about what the user wants.
Let me explain: When I’m sitting at my desk I want breadth and depth in my searches – I want detailed content and because I have a fast connection, lots of screen real estate, and I’m amenable to getting the big picture I can tolerate a tsunami of content. Not so with a mobile device.
When I’m out and about using a mobile device I’m not going to be browsing with the big picture in mind, I’m going to be looking for specific information; flight and train times, road conditions, weather, news headlines and so on. I doubt that I’ll be browsing MySpace or YouTube except in moments of desperation (being stuck at the airport for 10 hours and out of reading materials qualifies).
The art and science of satisfying your mobile market is not only in the look and feel of your content, but also (and perhaps more crucially) in its relevance. Keeping up with your market requires a lot more effort than just adding or subtracting the chrome in your content. You need your market to be paying attention which, in turn, means that you have to pay attention and do so in a much different way than you are now.
