• James Rosenberg
• 17 Oct 2008
• No Comments

As the Internet approaches it’s 26th birthday both the frequency and types of interaction we have with it continue to grow and develop. One of the areas in which the Internet is currently growing rapidly is mobile computing. This is being fueled by a raft of low cost and high powered mobile technologies. Laptops, iPhones and smart phones are all allowing us to stay connected, whenever… wherever. So what does all this mean for usable mobile web design?

Less is more

When people are on the move they don’t want to be bothered with lots of questions and reading. They generally want the answer to a very specific and time sensitive question, straight away. We could guess what this answer might be and serve it up and, if we make an intelligent guess, that’s a good start.

Intelligent guessing

For instance, if the user is checking train times and is using a GPS enabled mobile device then we might present them with the departures board for their nearest station. Even if this is not what they had in mind, we haven’t really lost anything. As long as we give them all the same options they would have had on a standard homepage we’ve simply exchanged a default page load with an intelligent page load. But it’s still just one page load.

Anticipation

Each time a user has a journey through a mobile site we can pick apart their behavior and attempt to anticipate their future actions. For instance, we might start to map a user’s queries against time. If they requested a train time from Bristol to London on Friday afternoon and they return to the site Saturday morning, we might anticipate that they are still in London and are looking to return to Bristol.

It’s a kind of magic

Magic tricks often work because the audience can not conceive how much effort goes into it. Usable mobile websites should work in a similar way, delighting users with their ability to pertinently anticipate questions and provide all the answers, straight away.