Website: Mobile Design - Coursework Example

? WEBSITE: MOBILE DESIGN ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ ------------ Mobile phone usage of the web has grown and evolved since its inception. It continues to gain a lot of interest from all Information Technology stakeholders because of its versatility and ease of access. In the recent years, critics have declared each coming year as “mobile web year”; they endeavor to sound more convincing each succeeding year. Nonetheless, it is an undeniable fact that mobile internet usage popularity has grown. “Mobile web” is a term often criticized and is generally used to describe internet access using a mobile device. The term has been criticized because it gives the notion that there are “different” webs is incorrect. For instance, desktop web is not used to define accessing internet using a workstation. It makes much more sense, in a manner of speaking, to say mobile designed websites are for those accessing those using mobile devices The mobile user experience is driven by the broken ground in mobile device technology- from the rudimentary browsers on basic mobile phones to the increased and continued use of tablets and smart phones (Neil 2011). Deciding the best approach and the timeliness of going mobile is a major milestone for any company that wishes to automate its online presence. It may be a mobile application or a mobile website. Mobile websites are globally accessible, easy to maintain and less expensive to develop. They can be searched by most mobile phones and as such the accessibility is high. Designing user experience for mobile accessed websites focuses on mobile phones with small sized screens as well as building apps. To the technical team and development panel, the process is similar to designing websites for desktop access. However, there are some additional mobile-specific considerations that come along with the small sized screens, constraints and device features as well as connectivity issues. The mobile design life cycle centered on user experience can be viewed as a continued process as illustrated: Fig. 1 User centered mobile design lifecycle Assessing the current state of your organization is a critical step in starting the mobile technology design. The question is “do you actually need a mobile accessed website now?”. As trivial as this question sounds it is important to initially determine with conviction that you really need a mobile website. Statistics may give impressive numbers of mobile internet users in your location and actually indicate a positive rise in popularity. This may obscure the bigger issue of how many of them comprise your target audience. The number of users accessing your website using mobile devices is a more relevant statistic to rely on. Digging deeper to understand the reasons the visitors use mobile devices to access your site and the tasks they try to do is essential. In addition, the functionality they are using and the content they access should interest you. The next step, in determining the importance of going web, is thinking about the additional function points that are relevant to the mobile users and for some competitive insight taking a look at what similar websites do with their mobile presence is helpful. The existing desktop website may have been created to give an organization an online presence or achieve a more complex goal of automating service delivery including revenue generation. At this juncture it is important to identify functionality and content that may be useful to the mobile users while simultaneously supporting the business process and goals. At the end of the exercise you may realize that you have a handful of mobile users who occasionally use a couple of features, such as, finding your hours of operation or phone contacts. In this case, it may be better to optimize your desktop website by making information more easily accessible by the mobile device users in place of putting up and maintaining a separate mobile website. There are plug-ins for websites that are built using content management systems, for example, word press and JOOMLA, that can easily mobile-enable a website with minimal effort. The actual design as mentioned herein this report follows the basic design principles and steps of desktop web design. It has the addition of a few essential mobile design considerations to make the website tailored for the mobile devices Mobile users are not confined like desktop users are. An internet user on the desktop may be sitting comfortably, and in some extreme cases, may be intermittently tweeting while listening to music. The user is not able to do all those activities in one hand and walking around. In a similar scenario, a mobile user could be trying to find directions using a small mobile phone with slow and intermittent connectivity, while walking in the street or in a sub way with sub-optimal lighting. The two contexts of use are about the environment and usage conditions, they include multitasking, distractions, motion and lighting conditions. In ‘Designing the mobile user experience’ the author , Ballard, boils down the mobile user’s mind frame to one of the three possibilities. Local: Finding out what surrounds the user Micro tasking: using the mobile service for short bursts of activities. Bored: using the mobile device for entertainment/distraction. Considering this factors, it leads to specific mobile web design considerations to concentrate on while designing for the mobile device web. Mobile users desire to use their personal devices while they move to accomplish desired tasks. Consequently, access time is critical and the chosen specific website by the mobile user is predominantly influenced by just how quickly the website fulfills their tasks. When using mobile internet, a slow connection and intermittent connection, it is therefore important to optimize the mobile website to load as quickly as possible. An important concept is minimizing load time for a faster and more efficient user experience. This is so, since mobile devices capability to send and receive data is at low transmission speeds. In addition, technician designing should input the fact that speeds change while the user expectation is constant. A few years ago the largest chunk of web traffic was caused by plain images and text, in this day, it has dramatically changed since the online traffic is now dominated by videos, photos and other downloads. Serving the same detailed user experience to mobile devices that is a requirement in large-bandwidth devices may cause long waiting and load times- this will result in unresponsive websites. A practical demonstration of the potential decline in satisfying user experience is observed in the following websites and their estimated loading times given a 256 Kilobytes per second down link. Load times comparison Website Reuters.com CNN.com YouTube.com BBC.co.uk Facebook.com Page Size 264.37KB 1.07MB 400.42KB 193.49 KB 360 KB 4mbps (512kbps) download rate .5 seconds 2.1 seconds .8 seconds 4 seconds 7 seconds 256kbps(32kbps) download rate 8.2 seconds 34.2seconds 12.5 seconds 6 seconds 11.3 seconds Mobile version of the websites comparison table Website Mobile.Reuters.com m.CNN.com m.YouTube.com BBC.co.uk/mobile m.Facebook.com Page Size in KB 36KB 77.95KB 21.76KB 31.14KB 17.4KB 4mbps (512kbps) download rate .3 seconds .6 seconds .2 seconds .3 seconds .1 second 256kbps(32kbps) download rate 1.2 seconds 34.2seconds .7 seconds 1 Second .6 seconds Fig 3 and 4, Adopted from Novarum Inc and PCWorld study conducted in 2009-2010. The tabulated average download speed is between Verizon 3G, T-Mobile AT&T and Sprint is was 987Kbps. The tables show a comparison between two websites and how the mobile design strives to limit load time on mobile devices. They have achieved this by reducing the website weight by a large margin. Comparing the obtained results to the default alternative website on a simple broadband connection gives a small difference. Facebook.com in this comparison has the largest page size. If, you consider the load time if they did not have a mobile version of the website, it is significantly long and accompanied by poor graphics resolution. Security issues in mobile web design cannot be overlooked for any reasons. First, to understand the gravity of the issue it’s important to examine how a mobile device works. When a user visits a homepage with an applet, the mobile code is executed on the user’s machine after download. In a manner of speaking the code is moved from the server machine to the mobile device and runs on that device. In this scenario, it is important to make sure that the downloaded code does not harm the user’s device. In the mobile design process, following a security policy pattern on either the server side or mobile device side is a means of alleviating this possible security breach. The design considers that a single user may use a range of devices, mobile, to access the same content and this constitutes to a distributed environment where security is a major concern (Fling 2009). References Fling, B 2009, Mobile Design and Development: Practical concepts and techniques for creating mobile sites and web apps, O'Reilly Media, New York. Ballard, B 2007, Designing the mobile user experience, Wiley, New York. Neil, T 2011, Mobile design pattern gallery: UI Patterns for mobile applications, O'Reilly Media, New York. Read More