15th
Mobile Web Best Practices
I’ve been reading the W3C’s W3C mobileOK Basic Tests and Mobile Web Best Practices, and they’re giving me some great ideas on how to improve my mobile applications.
Mobile Web Best Practices almost reminds me of 37signals’ Defensive Design book: it clearly lays out everyday problems designers and developers miss and explains how to solve them.
You can easily produce your own recommendations for your projects by reading through Mobile Web Best Practices, since it’s concise enough. Perhaps someone will produce a Defensive Design book for the mobile web?
Here’s a few ideas I picked up after reading through the recommendations.
Navigation
While many modern devices provide back buttons, some do not, and in some cases, where back functionality exists, users may not know how to invoke it. This means that it is often very hard to recover from errors, broken links and so on.
I’ve found myself getting confused how to go “back” when using Nokia’s recent Symbian browser, and reading this made me realise that my applications should provide more visual clues. The problem I’ve often had with this is making navigational elements visually distinct from other page content.
W3C’s recommendation is:
Provide the basic links on a single line.
Mobile users typically have different interests to users of fixed or desktop devices. They are likely to have more immediate and goal-directed intentions than desktop Web users
Goals
Section 2.4 discusses “User Goals.” The mobile applications I’ve developed have always been different from their web counterparts: they provide a subset of functionality suited to people on the move. The W3C’s recommendations made me realise that most of my applications would benefit from a search form on the homepage, or every page if possible. Google’s “search, don’t sort” adage comes into play here, as people are encouraged to search for their data rather than look through lists or paginated pages.
Speed
Section 2.6 discusses device limitations, in which several pointers are revealed on what takes up CPU time on mobile devices. Some devices don’t display a page until it’s been rendered in memory, but I’d never realised until reading this that tables take more processing horsepower to render. Time to benchmark my applications!
