AM Design

Does your organization need a mobile website or app?

Since the release of the iPhone­­­®, the use of mobile phones for internet browsing has exploded. Everywhere you go people are utilizing their unused seconds to find out what’s going on or where something is happening. Organizations can no longer ignore the fact that the future of the web will require content delivery through mobile devices. We thought it would be useful to break down the differences and options you have to joining the ranks of the mobile invasion.

There are two obvious options for getting into the mobile scene:

1. Doing Nothing

Many websites are already viewable from many mobile browsers. As long as you don’t mind your users having to scroll around to find the content they are after then this is a perfectly acceptable solution. However, here are some limitations to keep in mind:

Flash
Most browser-friendly phones don’t support flash yet. This means if you have any major content (such as navigation) in flash, your website might be not usable to many phone users. You can, however, make a site fully functional for mobile users and allow flash for non-mobile users. I won’t go into this because Boots already has here.  Also, a good deal of video on the web is delivered using flash – so you will have to utilize different means of delivery for mobile users.

File Size/Page Loading
If your website is graphic intensive, then you may be asking someone with a screen size of 480px or smaller to download and view an image that is over 1024px. That means that you are making your visitors wait longer and view un-needed image sizes to see your website.

User Experience
Your current website is most likely tailored for an experience that is 1024 x 768 or larger screen size.  This means that most mobile phone users will have to scroll around to get to content on your site. If your site uses drop down menus in your navigation, that may not work perfectly on phone browsers. Since most drop downs require you to rollover them and mobile browsers don’t have a method to rollover it ends up being a little weird (sometimes it shows the dropdown, sometimes you have to click the link).

2. Doing Something

If you are ready to make things work better for mobile users, then you have two main options. You can choose to do one or both of these methods.

Mobile Formatted Website (option 1)

Option 1 is to get yourself a mobile website. Most mobile websites are a streamlined representation of your website, featuring just the necessary information for your users. Here’s how that solves some of the problems listed above in “doing nothing.”

Flash
In short, don’t use it. Most of the uses of flash can be accomplished using other methods for mobile phone browsers. The exception to this is fonts. If you want dynamic custom fonts there currently isn’t an easy way to accomplish this.

File size/Page Loading
Since images and content are scaled to fit the mobile browser, it doesn’t take as long to load and you don’t waste un-needed pixels. Faster content = happy site visitors.

User Experience
The interface design would be sized to fit the phone screen, which means menu items and text are easy to read and easy to navigate. No more constant scrolling. Content would be simplified to just the core items since the screen size doesn’t work well with lots of buttons or text.

Mobile Application (option 2)

Mobile Apps are becoming increasingly more popular every day. They allow you to deliver media in a different way than a mobile formatted website. With apps, you can make use of the technologies that are built in to the phone’s interface allowing you to deliver the same or better experience than a website.

Flash
You wouldn’t use Flash because it is not supported on phones even inside apps. However, anything that you would have done using Flash can be done with OpenGL or other graphics engines that come standard on Mobile Versions. Most animated games on mobile devices use OpenGL or another engine to produce any animations.  The learning curve for OpenGL from flash is pretty steep so cost usually goes up when looking for a animated interface for a mobile device. No worries, Adobe (the makers of Flash) is coming out with a newer version soon  that will allow a developer to convert flash to mobile applications. Rumor is that it will be released by the end of 2010 (fingers crossed).

File Size/Page Loading
Since your content is not being viewed directly online, you have a little more freedom with applications. You can still pull in content from the internet and display it, but you can also store some data/cache on the device to help loading times. However, this is not a desktop so you are limited on how much you can store on a user’s device.

User Experience
Mobile phone interfaces use a lot of the same design elements among the different apps. This means that users are pretty familiar with where buttons are and how they work in moving users through apps. This also saves time because you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you design an app interface.

Offline Access
With an application you can store information offline for the user. The user can choose to store a picture on their phone or save an audio track to listen to later. This provides a way for users to still connect when they aren’t on the internet.

Downside
So why don’t I just get an Application? Well you can, but realize that every mobile phone has a different application type which means you would have to build an app for every phone that you want it to display on. Since this is still a fairly new market, the cost of development can still be higher than you may want to invest at this time. I’m sure as things get standardized and easier, the cost will go down.

So where to start?

Look at your current site traffic to see how many mobile browsers are trying to access your site. If you see that a significant amount of people are trying to access your site from a mobile phone, then it’s time to do something.  Give us a call and let’s talk through what the best option is for you.