Mobile Information Architecture: Designing experiences for the mobile web

Notes taken from informative talk by Christian Curmlish, Yahoo! Pattern Detective

Mobile web – now becoming affordable and escaping the limits of WAP 1.0.  Exists with mobile apps and texting.

While the common issues for IAs, the unknown device specifications (e.g. screen resolution) remains a special consideration, a more important area for analysis is that the context is different – the mobile web goes with you anywhere (come to me web).

It is perfectly acceptable (well not really -but that is what the business expects) to bombard your consumers with messaging while they ’surf’ the mobile web’s context of use is different in that when it is used you have people in a variety of states of motion.

     

   

Mobile web users are typically seeking information, looking for answers to questions – does not involve a lot of reading – targeted gives you the thing you are looking for

e.g. addresses, movie times phone numbers

Emerging Standards (not w3c more like patterns)

Thinking horizontally on web browser, but on mobile device think verticals.

Lists of links, long columns of content.  List of links are usually numbered so that the phone keying gets link.

The lack of the mouse makes the UI extremely different (e.g. think vcr menus and remote controls)

Decisions

1. Is the mobile site necessary?
2. Do you build one or two web sites?  If you build one, then no duplications, no syching issues, but requires strategy, technical solutions for rendering well in each context. – involves content that may not fit in mobile context – you can hide content but users is still paying to download it, may involves serving up design elements.  Two sites, you can fine tune for context, maintenance issues 3rd normal form failures, may have find-ability problems, how does users get to site - technically sniff out mobile browser or do you advertise the site to your users.
3. Does all the browser destined content  belong in the mobile context? e.g. side bar content, lengthy content.

Most menus are lists, so likely that using a different css can produce different ui.

No specific ‘classification’ that makes mobile browsers mobile – may be able to determine it is not a desktop browser.

More than 5 nav items are lengthy on mobile web to navigate .  If list us more than 10 items, users will be confused by navigating using keys (requires use of asterisk plus numbers)

Must be willing to changes the importance of content on your sites.

There is a protocol for phone numbers E.g. ‘ tel: ‘ then the phone number appears as mobile number on the device that the user can link to and then call

Be prepared to invest some time or hire an IA to (make clickstream diagrams) for you.  – more time on clickstream diagrams than design.  – Brian Fling, Blue Flower

‘ .mobi domain were smokin’ crack ‘ – Tantec Celik – violates a purest standard on the web

bare in mind that users don’t all have qwerty keyboards

case study:  www.america.htc.com/mobile

List driven navigation that lands user to desired content. Low graphics, numbered list items, priorities changed

• Ended up making two separate sites.
• Explored and rejected CSS magic
• Research and adopted mobile savvy-cms vendor
• Reduced content on most pages
• minimized images in terms of size and weight
• stripped out sidebar content
• rendered nav as vertical lists

Could you have 4 options from spash (English, Francais, Mobile English, Mobile Francais)

See presentation materials for samples of documentation and flows

Wrapping above fold, conisders narrowist possible form factor but also provides rich ux for wider form factors.

You are dealing with lower resolution but the pixels are smaller ….. so images are smaller

 Also see Brian Fling Presentation >  http://blueflavor.com/sxsw2007