Main conference presentation

Mobile information architecture: designing experiences for the mobile web

Christian Crumlish

Sunday March 25 2007, 9:00 - 9:45AM

The mobile interface is coming into its own. Smartphones and PocketPCs and Blackberries and Treos are sprouting everywhere. Mobile web access is becoming more affordable and mobile web browsers are coming out of their infancy.

But the mobile interface is still profoundly different from the desktop/laptop interface. It's not just a matter of size and space limitations. The context is different. The mobile web browser is seeking information (often), yes, but most likely this person is looking for the answers to questions and not for a long involved reading experience. Mobile users may prefer to send text messages when possible and when they do visit the mobile web they may expect to have a similar experience.

Mobile applications are also establishing some expectations among users. Menu choices are often presented as vertical lists, usually with numberical accesskeys to provide shortcuts from the device's keypad. Working with these emerging standards makes sense when possible.

When designing a website that must function optimally on the "traditional" web and the mobile web a number of decision junctions must be navigated. Do you build one site and have it present itself differently in the two contexts, or do you design two separate parallel sites? If the former, do you try to manage the presentation differences entirely with CSS and the DOM, or do you use browser-sniffing to serve up different content as well? Will the same content suffice for both experiences or must it be modified for one or the other? What do you do with sidebars and how do you make the design degrade gracefully to support the jumble of form factors, mobile operating systems, and browsers that support different subsets of the prevailing standards. (Does any of this sound familiar?)

Also, what about .mobi?

This session will present a single case study: a combined web/mobile site for a company that manufactures 80% of the devices running the Windows Mobile operating system in the US today.I will discuss how we addressed the inflection points listed above, among others, and show the IA design documents we developed and delivered as well as the visual comps and prototype sites. I'll also discuss the usability testing we did on both the website and mobile version of the site.