Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet?

aws910 writes "Reuters is running an article on how flashy web design is impacting the usability of internet-enabled mobile devices, with quotes from Tim Berners-Lee. Although the article is sparse on details, it is an interesting topic for discussion. Having recently bought an internet-enabled cellphone, I can honestly say that most websites are painful to view on a 240x320 screen over a GPRS connection(EVDO is expensive/US-only). Have we moved away from 56K-modem-oriented design, only to be pulled back in that direction?"

Re:Useless...

[garcia]

IMO, broswing website using some silly little contraption is silly. Just view the sites on a regualr computer when it's more convenient. Or, every web designer should use CSS and have a handheld-friendly CSS option.

Or webdesigners can take the time to make websites that have slimmed down versions (text only Google News, Slashdot's lite (or completely customizable version, various sites that offer WAP detection).

I have a little utility that I wrote for geocachers to convert words to numbers via the "dollar word method". A guy I know complained that it wouldn't render on his WAP phone. I spent the 10 minutes using Google to figure out how to write it to work w/WAP and how to get Apache to detect WAP and rewrite the URLs.

Is it really that hard to do? Do we really need Flash and 100k page loads for a simple website?

No, we don't and it's not silly when you are sitting on the bus or train or in the mall waiting for your SO to shop.

Be serious.

Re:Mobile Internet is way oversold

[winkydink]

Actually, the biggest reason SMS is so popular is cost. In most of Europe and Asia, the cost of a text message is a fraction of the per-minute charge for a voice call.

Re:Useless...

[kahei]

You're right. Using silly little contraptions is just plain silly. Well argued.

Anyway, I note that in Japan lots of sites, even personal 'me and my dog' pages, have mobile versions. Not surprising since there have been a lot of web-capable phones there for a long time. It's just a matter of market forces -- maybe a big enough pool of people with browser-equipped phones will build up in the US, maybe not.

2 1/2 words: Standards-based design

[condour75]

If you're using best practices -- stylesheets, semantic markup, alternative stylesheets where necessary, it shouldn't be a huge problem to have your site display well on a mobile device.

The one exception is that some of the more ambitious effects on sites like alistapart.org may be garbled on a reader that attempts to interpret css rules.

I'd also be concerned with the oncoming popularity of ajax effects on sites.

Makers of mobile browsers shouldn't be let off the hook either though -- each mobile browser should have an easily accessible stylesheet toggle so that the site information can be seen in lynxlike clarity if necessary.

Re:Simple solutions

[garcia]

Use Weather Underground Mobile [wunderground.com] then and vote w/your "feet".

IIRC one of the guys from WU has a hiptop (T-mobile sidekick) and even went so far as to create a rocking WU client for it (which I use daily).

mode. or /pda

[ThumperByTrade]

I've had a Treo 600 for a year and half, and have built a library of PDA friendly sites. Most of the big sites offer an alternative view through either a mobile. prefix on the domain or a /pda suffix to the main site.
Here are my most used sites from my phone:
http://www.mapquest.com/pda/maps.adp [mapquest.com]
http://wap.espn.com/ [espn.com]
http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/ [yahoo.com]
http://mobile.wunderground.com/ [wunderground.com]

First we need more capable devices.

[seanbry]

Well, in the states, we have very slow mobile internet. EDGE should help a bit. I do know verizon offers highspeed mobile internet but its way too damn expensive. For now mobiles will be limited because of their lackluster support of what many deem standard web practices. Flash and other multimedia won't be going away anytime soon. Mobiles even have a hard time with javascript at least the ones I've used. Ever try to pull up local.google.com
and get directions? Well it just doesn't work. Google forcibly tries to redirect to a WAP site because its better suited for less capable devices. For now that sadly includes mobile phones. Though I will jump for joy when we will be able to sustain broadband speeds from a phone. Then i'll be one of those people who uses their cell phone as a modem in remote locations. But even then it may be a futile attem considering the way Wi-Max may turn out.

Re:Useless...

[Misch]

Actually, a CSS redesign of Slashdot has been offered, although there would be lots of heavy lifting to get it into slashcode [slashcode.com]. This part 2 [alistapart.com] of an article on /. redesign shows how /. renders on a mobile device currently (well, at least when the article was written), and how a CSS version would gracefully degrade in a portable browser.

(Part 1 [alistapart.com])

Re:Tell that to the clients and PHBs

[PxM]

It's not (primarily) the web designers' fault that they use flashy designs. The people who get design contracts aren't the ones who use well-formed, W3C compliant XHTML that is functional even in text-based browsers. The people who get the contracts are the ones who have a 500KB Flash animation on every page and poorly coded Javascript rollovers because clients and PHBs see these things and go "Ooo! Shiny!"

The whole point of modern XHTML and CSS is so that web designers can seperate the function of the webpage (deliver content via XHTML) from the form (the particular layout using CSS) and let end users choose the CSS that they want. In theory this should have a minimal XHTML with just pure text and all the glitz should be added in via CSS. FF and similar browsers support switching between multiple stylesheets by defaul, but IE requires webdesigners to allow it via a Javascript widget. Thus, the designers just stick with the flash. Maybe IE7 will help change this if it doesn't suck as much as the previous versions or maybe not given the amount of glitz in Longhorn.

In an ideal world, one CSS would have the glitzy flash animation and postneoantimodernismdeco-that-will-win-art-contest s design for when I first visit the page and am sucked in by beauty. Another CSS would have a minimalist UI that allows me to find the information on that site as fast as possible. Then handheld users would just use this latter lowbandwith UI by default instead of the flash hog. The web designers can just show the PHBs both versions so it is their fault that modern websites suck. They're making websites with 5 year old technology and the users are suffering for that.

If you really want to see the power of proper XHTML+CSS, look at the CSS Zen Garden [csszengarden.com]. The entire site uses a single XHTML file but each version of the main page has a different CSS file. If you didn't know this, you would think that each page was individually coded. And the site is still usable if you strip out the CSS and view just the plain XHTML file.

--
Want a free iPod? [freeipods.com]
Or try a free Nintendo DS, GC, PS2, Xbox. [freegamingsystems.com] (you only need 4 referrals)
Wired article as proof [wired.com]

Re:Try to /. on a palm.

[skidde]

http://slashdot.org/palm [slashdot.org]

Where's the Desktop WAP Client?

[rawyin]

I suspect more developers would be coding their pages for wireless devices if it were a simple task. CSS makes it fairly straight-forward, but there are very few nice WAP browsers for the desktop. There's a project called Mobilizer [sourceforge.net] but it's development activity is slow if anything. More work in this area will be necessary before any real progress will be seen.

Re:Try to /. on a palm.

[Matt1313]

Try http://wap.slashdot.org/palm
You might find it somewhat usefull in easing your pain.

Re:Useless...

[Total_Wimp]

...to develop all that for a ridiculously small percentage of people hitting the site with a cellphone.

Of course if you designed it to work well on a phone, maybe that ridiculously small percentage would grow. The horrible experience browsing on the phone is why most people dont pop out their mobile browsers, not because they don't want to surf on a phone.

I know I'm saying egg and you're saying chicken, but I've seen too many people excited and subsequantly annoyed by their mobile web browsers. My boss is one of these guys. He never surfs on his phone except to one site, our corporate Outlook Web Access site. No, he'd never go to the full size one, but he loves the Outlook Mobile Access version. Why? It's light, it loads fast and it gives him the info he needs (it's plain text for those not familiar).

If you designed your sites like this, people would flock to them. I regularly use several small sites but avoid the big ones like the plague. Slashdot happens to have a pretty good small site that I visit often (add the ability to view more comments!) but the regular site is a pain.

TW

Try pdaportal.com

[spanielrage]

Have a look at www.pdaportal.com for a great list of mobile-friendly web sites.

You can even customize it.

Use Opera

[UpnAtom]

Opera scales both text & images (even Flash) through its unique Zoom function.

It's also the best browser out there anyway. And if you're too cheap to pay a few $$ to use the web the way you want when you've coughed up $hundreds on a monitor, quit complaining. ;)

Re:Useless...

[Mr_Silver]

This part 2 of an article on /. redesign shows how /. renders on a mobile device currently (well, at least when the article was written), and how a CSS version would gracefully degrade in a portable browser.

Until then, we're stuck using something like AvantSlash [fourteenminutes.com] which actually formats the page in a way that is not only readable on an offline client but on a PDA and WAP browser.

The quicker Slashdot moves to XHTML+CSS, the quicker we can get away from crufty hacks like this to get handheld friendly content.

Turn off image loading!

[spreer]

I spend *a lot* of time on the web on my Treo 600. The only way to make it useable is to turn off image loading. The text (which is usually what I want anyway) comes up quickly, and is quite readable even on a 160x160 screen.

Yeah

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

As someone who actually reads (and posts on) Slashdot from a mobile device, including right now, let me tell you this:

1: You need a device with a keyboard. The Treo and iPaq are OK, the Blackberry is better, and the Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick) is perfect.

2: You need a big screen.

3: You need a good browser. This leaves the Treo with Blazer (kind of - it's not the fastest) and the Hiptop. The iPaq is OK if you load NetFront (Pocket IE sucks). The Blackberry just doesn't cut it.

So, we're left with the Sidekick / Hiptop. It's the only mobile device that I will carry. It's what I just wrote this post on.

Most pages work great. Some don't. But *every* page is unusable unless you have a large screen and a good browser.

Slashdot, by the way, works ideally on my Sidekick.

bloated web design is, alas, eternal

[ummit]

Every web user knows, along with Jakob Nielsen [useit.com], that clean and simple web page design is best. However, every corporate web page designer knows that flashy and graphics-laden is the only way to go. Ever since the <img> tag was invented, these two worldviews have been for all intents and purposes irreconciliable. It'd be truly lovely if something could persuade the corporate designers of the www to KIS,S, but I'm not holding my breath...

Re:Useless...

[supremebob]

Viewing Slashdot on a PDA works great if you login with an account that has the display set to "light" display mode. With that mode turned on, even Pocket IE can render the pages correctly. And that's saying a LOT, too, because Pocket IE doesn't render most web sites correctly.

use web standards, dang-it

[asapien]

The answer is to use web standards, you can have a seperate style sheet for handhelds. The real problem is that too many sites still use tables to lay out their content, so when you look at it in a handheld, you can't strip the text easily from all the other crud that takes up all the screen real-estate. But with style sheets, the content can be easily repurposed, and I've even simply turned off the style sheet for hand-helds, so that they just get the meat of the site in the text. Handhelds work great for reading text, but most sites are designed for visual impact. Also doing sites "all in flash" can be a problem. The typical gui's people build for navigation will just show up too small on a hand-held, but if you use style sheets instead of tables to create naviagtion, you can use a simple list of links

1. that will be usable on a handheld when its styled for it. When most sites are using web standards, they will be more usable for handhelds. I just believe strongly that table based layout is the biggest culprit.

Re:If everyone would code to standards.

[hillg3]

Unfortunatly, you can also code to standards and make a completely unsuable site that doesn't scale on any screen and browser. Standards are great, but just because you use them wont make you a usability expert.

Re:If everyone would code to standards.

[Narchie Troll]

The point of CSS is graceful degradation. It helps you design sites that are still readable and usable even on browsers that don't support CSS, Javascript, etc.

jwz has a very interesting article on the shift to CSS [jwz.org] somehow encouraging obsessive-compulsive design types to start designing pixel-perfect sites again. That isn't the point of CSS and it never has been.