Phoenix Research and Designs

"Internet Corner" Articles

Reaching the Mobile Audience

Society of Georgia Archivists Newsletter, Volume 42, Issue 2, Summer 2010

An interesting article appeared on Hothardware.com in April 2010 that the total mobile data traffic exceeded mobile voice traffic for the very first time. In fact, a leading strategist company released a report that globally, data traffic exceeded an exabyte (one billion gigabytes) in 2009, and in 2010 just North America and Western Europe will exceed an exabyte alone. Data traffic includes SMS text messaging, music, television, and video streaming, voice navigation, games, web surfing, etc. There are citizens of many countries whose only link to the Internet is through their mobile device.

This means that patrons are becoming increasingly more comfortable in reaching out via the web or email rather than via telephone. Blackberries, created primarily for fast messaging (think beefed-up pagers), would be considered Smartphone 1.0. iPhones, Androids, and more recent Blackberries would be considered Smartphone 2.0, as they are successful convergence devices. They are able to handle voice traffic, music, streaming videos, and have relatively quick access to the Internet.

Websites designed for larger screens are virtually unreadable in a 2x2" or 2x4” window. The text can be enlarged, but it is cumbersome to keep moving the window around in the screen to read the full text. Download times can also be discouraging. Large files or pictures take much longer to download onto a mobile device, and often users will cancel that action and move on to something else. Most flash files will not even work on mobile devices. Even a well-formed site can take up to 30 seconds to download. This may not seem like much, but if you are waiting for information while someone is standing there, it can seem very long indeed.

Creating a mobile site would be the best option for your institution (in an ideal world). Mobile sites are specifically created to render faster, in a streamlined format. However, most institutions these days barely have enough staff to cover the reference desk, much less create a mirrored mobile site. There are suggestions, however, to clean up your site so that no matter what device your patron is using, your site will invite the user in and provide the information needed. Keep in mind that there are hundreds of mobile device manufacturers creating multiple devices, so simplify the website structure as much as possible.

A few tips on making your site more mobile-friendly:

1. Remove large photos. Use thumbnails with the option of selecting the photo to see a larger version.
2. Remove flash and javascript. Most mobile devices won't support them, or if they do, it makes the user's experience so painfully slow as to be almost unusable. There are only a small handful of smartphones, developed within the last six months, that can handle these applications.
3. Don't place too information on one page. Remember that on a mobile device, the user is seeing the information in a straight list, one item after another, so be sure to put the most important information at the top.
4. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). These will separate your institution's content from the formatting. If the mobile device can strip off the formatting and your information is still easily readable, your patron will be very thankful.
5. Use User Agent String detection (if possible). These will help your institution's website recognize the incoming mobile device request and render the website in an optimized format for that device. A list of user agent strings for mobile phones can be found on Wikipedia.

Mobile Web Best Practices (February 2010)

As always, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3) is the “go-to” place for standards on the Internet. These best practices come from the Mobile Web Initiative, which addresses issues such as interoperability and usability problems. This document specifies best practices for delivering Web content to mobile devices. The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the Web when accessed from such devices. recommendations refer to delivered content and not to the processes by which it is created, nor to the devices or user agents to which it is delivered. It is primarily directed at creators, maintainers and operators of Web sites. Readers of this document are expected to be familiar with the creation of Web sites, and to have a general familiarity with the technologies involved, such as Web servers and HTTP. Readers are not expected to have a background in mobile-specific technologies. The User Goals section of this document is especially important to keep in mind:

“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. Their intentions are often to find out specific pieces of information that are relevant to their context. An example of such a goal-directed application might be the user requiring specific information about schedules for a journey they are currently undertaking. Equally, mobile users are typically less interested in lengthy documents or in browsing. The ergonomics of the device are frequently unsuitable for reading lengthy documents, and users will often only access such information from mobile devices as a last resort, because more convenient access is not available.”

Emulators

Many of the mobile device emulator programs available online were created so that developers could test their new mobile applications. Assuming that your IT department will not let you download “unapproved” programs, there are a couple of ways to test the look of your site on a mobile device. The first would be to simply test your site on as many devices as you are able. Use your friends, family, colleagues, and patrons to give you feedback on accessing your site “on-the-go.”

The other option is to spoof a mobile device using a User Agent Switcher. Here is a link for the Mozilla Firefox User Agent Switcher Add-On. The User Agent Switcher extension adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser. Once downloaded to Firefox, simply go to the “Tools” menu, select the “Default User Agent,” and then select the mobile device of choice. If you are interested in testing a particular device that is not listed, select “Edit User Agent,” and click on “New.” In order to get the information, visit www.user-agents.org and copy the string information. Paste this into the "User Agent" field, and save. Go to the website of choice, select the User Agent, and then click on the "Refresh" button. This will give you an idea of how the content and format renders in a mobile environment. There will still be a large screen when you spoof a device, but you can get a sense of how information on your site might look on a smaller screen.

Smartphone Information Websites

If you have the time or inclination, you can visit websites that will let you know what is happening in the mobile device community, which devices have been discontinued, which ones are forthcoming, join in discussions, or read the reviews. These two websites are a few of the ones that are heavily used by the mobile device community.

• Phone Arena
• Howard Forum