Web Design Hampers Mobile Internet? 434
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?"
to answer your question... (Score:1, Interesting)
Market (Score:4, Interesting)
I wrote a portal (Score:5, Interesting)
It screen scrapes the sites I'm interested in and just returns the stuff I *want* to know : local cinema showings, a few RSS feeds, my current bank balance - that sort of stuff
More work than most people will do but makes me happy
Light-formatted news content (Score:3, Interesting)
Market or Technology? (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, do you think that Amazon will move to a simpler website design to accomodate relatively few mobile users? Or would they go to the trouble to create an alternate 'mobile-only' website?
The answer?
Yes, if the market demands for such a headache merit doing so.
Otherwise, I think the technology of mobile Internet will have to conform to the current market situation of flashy website designs.
Re:Useless... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a full time web designer - I have made my services for developing websites for web enabled devices a high priority. With proper research and proper web design skills, developing websites for slow connections without Macromedia Flush is pretty straight forward.
What is really needed right now, especially for the Pocket PC platform (Which I feel is superior in every aspect compared to the kludge that is Palm OS)is Minimo development to progress at a faster rate. PPC IE browser is blech, and the only viable option for efficiency on the PPC platform right now is NetFront v3.1 for Pocket PC. Multimedia delivery via PPC Windows Media Player or Real Player is already in place and developing content for that format is pretty straight forward.
I only wish Qualcomm would get off its dead ass and develop Eudora for PPC instead of just Palm OS. I don't like the idea of using Outlook, but I will if it is necessary to do my work.
Re:Useless... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm at the very low end of access speed; I've just started using my Palm T3 with a bluetooth phone to access web sites, with mixed results. To my surprise, the sites I have used (/., Y!News, Y!Quotes, dictionary.com, NE Journal of Medicine, google.com, etc.) have been pretty "format-friendly" so far. Vonage.com--forget it; the whole site's Flash.
I have found that by far the fastest way to browse is to ssh to my linux account and run lynx. This relieves the handheld of the responsibility to download tons of html formatting and graphics placeholders. Now if only this bluetooth phone-dialup ISP connection weren't so godawful slow it would be more useful. But, it's better than nothing.
Anyway, clearly there needs to be some more consciousness on the part of web site designers as to different screen sizes, but my experience has been not too bad.
56k modem? (Score:3, Interesting)
The permeation of flash-based advertising, unnecessarily-bloated UI design, and lack of consideration towards lower-resolution displays have put a damper on mobile web access.
I know it's at the point where I've recently canceled my unlimited data access on my Sony Ericsson S710a. Why? There just isn't anything to do with it.
Mobile web, right now, is basically about IM, sports scores, news, and very limited email and document handling, and that is the fault of the devices themselves, not web designers.
Re:Useless... (Score:3, Interesting)
Just for example, last night I was about to order chicken on the internet. The restaurant's site insisted to show me an animated introduction, then open a multi-frames colorful page with ads on specials and how good is their chickens. Not only it requires Flash to order chicken, but you need also a fast connection for all the images. It crashed twice during the process, I decided to go out and bring some sushis. Should it be so complicated to order chicken?
Of course, I may used phone, however, in this specific case, I was using my phone line to surf from a location having only a 56Kbps connection.
Re:Useless... (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea of walking home to look up a bit of info is (or "can be" and "should be") as retarded in today's society as needing to find a phone box to tell someone you'll be a bit late.
Re:Useless... (Score:3, Interesting)
The internal HR web site for my company isn't even usable in Mozilla; the major navigation "tabs" near the top of the screen are visible only in IE. In any other browser they appear sunken, like gravestones after a flood, so you can see only a few rows of pixels at the very top edge of each tab. You have to keep waiting while the page convulsively realigns itself as the flashy images load. If I see one more stock photo of people smiling at computers, I'm going to vomit.
As for my phone (mMode), forget it. You can enter an arbitrary URL but I have yet to find one that doesn't give an error message. It can't load even something simple like a blog. If there's a column at the left, right, or top with images from adservers, it always chokes on those. By default the phone dumps you into a menu-based structure where you can browse news, sports, or "what's hot", and from what I can tell, if you're looking for news, sports, or "what's hot" it's great. That's never what I've needed it for though. I tried doing a white pages search on the road once- surely that must be possible- and gave up after 20 minutes after getting errors from both Yahoo and MSN. I ended up using a "low tech solution": calling my wife at home and asking her to do the white pages search for me from her PC.
Re:Useless... (Score:5, Interesting)
Are we getting so wired that we can't just sit still with a bound book and read for half an hour?
Re:The SDK (Score:3, Interesting)
here's an example [maht0x0r.net]
Re:Useless... HARDLY (Score:2, Interesting)
I was in a Karaoke bar, gearing up to sing "Wildflower" by Skylark, so I surfed onto google to review the lyrics. Worked great.
Mini-browsers are like swiss army kives. If you have one, you will find legit uses for them... <BLINK>IF</BLINK> the pages are NOT choked with crap.
PS: No, I didn't REALLY try to use blink tags
Heavyweight web sites and alternate views... (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been thinking about how to best design a web site to solve this problem. For dynamic web sites, alternate "views" of the site could be automatically selected for different web browsers -- as long as there is sufficient separation between the content and the presentation. Maybe CSS could help, too.
Re:This is why RSS is important (Score:2, Interesting)
With RSS, I expect it to be a lot better and be much easier to get a non-kludge working. That's my next addition planned after some speech input.
Re:Useless... (Score:2, Interesting)
There is something almost spiritual about the printed word. You get a better feel for the content when you can feel the paper, the binding, even the ink across the page if you try hard enough.
Samuel T. Cogley in the ST:TOS episode "Court Martial" said it best:
"Don't you like books?"
"Oh, I like them fine, but a computer takes less space."
"A computer, huh? I got one of these in my office. Contains all the precedents, a synthesis of all the great legal decisions written throughout time. - I never use it."
"Why not?"
"I've got my own system. Books, young man, books. Thousands of them. If time wasn't so important, I'd show you something-- my library. Thousands of books."
"What would be the point?"
"This is where the law is, not in that homogenized, pasteurized, synthesized - Do you want to know the law, the ancient concepts in their own language, Learn the intent of the men who wrote them, from Moses to the tribunal of Alpha 3? Books."