Designing for the Mobile Web

I have high hopes that the browser wars on the desktop will soon be over (yes, I’m an optimist). The power of web standards is becoming so clear it is impossible to resist. Whew, now we can all focus on quality design based on web standards and be more productive. Right?

Castle drawbridge creaks open to reveal thousands of different mobile devices each running a different mobile browser. Wait, before you faint, let’s practice this breath prayer (breathing in: “Web”, breathing out: “Standards”). Repeat breath prayer at least five times.

Don’t fear those mobile devices, and for heaven’s sake, don’t pretend like they aren’t there! It is a brave new world, let’s get started on our mobile adventures.

To keep from getting too dizzy, I focus my first rounds of testing on these devices and their pre-installed browsers:

Palm
Windows Mobile (Pocket PC)
Blackberry

I recommend purchasing at least one palm, one ppc and one blackberry for your team and assigning one person to each device. Their mission? To become an expert on their mobile device. They should become addicted to their device, carrying it with them every where they go and using the hell out of it! Why do I think this is important? Because, honestly, until you’ve got someone inside your team truly using mobile devices to consume the web, I don’t think you can design well for this experience.

5 comments

  1. >I recommend purchasing at least one palm, one ppc and one blackberry for your team and assigning one person to each device.

    That would give me three mobile devices! Kick ass! ;)

  2. Well, if you promise to use all three every day and not show any favoritism…but I bet you can find two other guinea pigs to take on this mobile mission with you. I think it is easier to explore the edges of a device if you are in an almost exclusive relationship with it. But hey, that is just my opinion!

  3. I’m sure you’re right… That was just my way of subtly bitching about my lack of team and resources. I need to get out more.

  4. Hi Glenda (we met at the UT System Developer’s Meeting in Galveston). I just started blogging, which means I just started *following* blogs, and yours seemed like a good place to start!

    Anyway. I just wanted to comment and say hello. I think you do have an excellent point about ‘specializing’ in a certain kind of mobile device – it reminds me a bit of programming languages. You want to have one person familiar with all the ‘quirks’ of each major one – because it never works quite like it says in the books.

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