Do You Want The Full Web On Your Phone?

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Preaching to the choir on cell phones

One of the topics that does not receive enough attention in web design is Usability. That’s true even for web pages designed to be seen with desktop PCs. User tests just don’t get done. User experience is something of concern only to a fraction of all web designers. Perhaps in some cases it stems from the tyranny exerted by some graphic designers. Just like some architects, they know what is best for us.

When it comes to web pages that may be seen on a cellular phone, the challenges are even greater. Of course there is something appealing about the notion of web pages that can be seen satisfactorily on all devices, whatever their screen resolution. It’s called the one Web principle. The WAP Review is promoting this with its request for The “Real” Web on Phones.

The mobile web is always evolving and one current trend is the rise of the full web on phone. By the full web, I mean being able to use any and all the web content available on a PC on a mobile. It’s happening, thanks to better browsers and transcoders that can render almost any page on a phone screen. I’ve still believe that a made for mobile page will give a better user experience than a programmatic conversion of a page designed for an 600X600 px screen into something that fits the 176×220 px window of a mobile. But we need the full web on mobile phones too.

There are many who are strong proponents of this view. The Opera browser has done sterling work to create a version, Opera Mini, to handle such full web pages and has received critical acclaim. Nevertheless even though the experts are comfortable with all this, how do persons in the street feel about what appears on their cell phones? I believe if user tests were done on what is acceptable on a cell phone, very much simpler web pages would be needed for mobile devices.

The Google search web page has been one of the best examples of simplicity even for desktop PC web pages. Perhaps that will be one of the spin-offs of their Open Handset Alliance. It may well be that such simpler web pages would also need to be designed to work with voice commands. That’s moving even farther away from what works on desktop PCs.

2 Responses to “Do You Want The Full Web On Your Phone?”

Jo Rabin Says:
November 25th, 2007 at 3:23 am
“One Web” does not mean “one-size-fits-all”:

“One Web means making, as far as is reasonable, the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. However, it does not mean that exactly the same information is available in exactly the same representation across all devices. ”

http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/#OneWeb

Jo
Barry Welford Says:
November 25th, 2007 at 11:55 am
You’re right, Jo. However the One Web principle does require that one URL will deliver that ’same information’ to all devices. Just on bandwidth cellphone charges and on limited battery capacity, I think it’s better to have several URLs delivering that ’same information’. There’s a limit to how far device detection and different style sheets can deliver a technically satisfactory content to different devices from just one URL.