Making mobile websites

Designing for any context

While technologies are adapting, the simple fact is keypads are small, screens are small and mobile is used in an infinite variety of environments or contexts. Many of these contexts are far less conducive to a pleasant web user experience than traditional desktop computers afford. The usability score for web site interactions is over 80% while mobile interactions score about 40% or lower.

However, if you look at the positives, mobile presents a variety of new ways for users to interact with and otherwise use information. Designing specifically for mobile allows designers to begin to explore the new worlds of experience that are opened up. They can deal with and overcome the basic problems of mobile usability by making those interactions simplest and most compelling.

Mobile has the ability to be sympathetic to context, if it is done right

For all of the gains that have been made in making the web usable, we can't forget that at first, web usability was a huge issue that held back many websites and companies from being successful ; in many cases, inattention to usability killed companies and expect this to happen in the mobile revolution as well. Usability experts generally feel that usability of the mobile web is at about the same place usability for the web was in the early 1990's.

While that opens up a whole new world for usability specialists, it also opens up a new sphere for designers looking to find a specialized niche they can leverage.

The biggest problem facing mobile design is the same problem faced by early web designers, namely drafting a set of older media assumptions onto a markedly different customer interaction. Put another way, in the same way that companies thought an online brochure was the way to go online, people today think that a website template is the way to go mobile. The direct translation from one media to another is a horrible mistake. Mobile is a profoundly different media from the desktop. Design and usability considerations for mobile interactions must take this into account.

That said, mobile shares at least one thing with first generation websites: it is still certainly about creating the killer app. In any case, read more in our guide to designing for mobile, including the following:

• Mobile-web-design-theory
• Mobile-vs-other-design
• mobile-design-metaphor-card
• Mobile-usability-essentials

As an alternative, you can inquire about out ability to our expertise in designing for mobile.