Mobile Web Strategies Blog

I am constantly hearing people to ask what is really the difference between UX designer and UI Designer. Into words is really hard to answer this questions because people just are not able to grasp all the small differences between what UX designer do and the skills it has to have to do what he or she does compared with what are requested from UI designers. I found this infographic in the internet by Anna Harris and it is so well explained with picture that anyone can really understand. So here it is:

With the boom of mobile that has surpassed the number of PC at a 1000 times, mobile first is a need that unfortunately still many companies don't get it. Here an OLD, keynote from Adobe Max 2010 where,  Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch made the case for designing Web products for mobile first: Another one from Eric Schmidt about Mobile First: Mobile First at FACEBOOK! How to design component for mobile first by LukeW: Mobile First by LinkedIN talks with LukeW: IBM -> Mobile First: Intel Software Interview - "Mobile First" - Luke Wroblewski wrote the Book Just to complete the MOBILE FIRST thought, just get a look on Luke Wroblewski slide on the statistics about the use PCs and the use of MOBILE: Just pay attention in the graphic that in 2011 PCs and Mobile had the same amount and from that point on, it sky rocket at the point that there is no deny that if companies don't start to pay attention about mobile first they will be fade to a sl...

I have been pitching about how mobile mindset and user experience is important for any digital marketing and branding already for some time in earlier posts. Here are some questions you can actually ask yourself before start your digital business plan: 1. Who is/are our target user(s) for each of the segment(s) we work on and the features we need to deliver to them in order to secure the customers we have and accquire much more customers? 2. What is/are the problem(s) we are trying to solve for the segement(s) we are working on? 3. What are the business needes we are tying to fulfill? 3. How can we measure while the project is ongoing? Are we are doing the right things? and not only when the project is done. 4. How to constant measure the new features implemented in order to know when something is working or not? Once the critical points for the digital strategy are in place we should be able to answer the following questions: 1. The problem we are trying to solve is ..... 2...

I came across today a website that explain with responsive man face what I have been pitching about responsive design since the beginning of this blog. I took screenshots of the flash site just to demonstrate how easy is to understand why responsive design doesn't work for all types of sites. This is how the site look in the desktop size a normal man with his eyes moving. See the desktop big screen in black in the top. As soon as I resize the window at the brake point for the tablet the image distort. You can still recognise a man's face, however it is clearly  distorted. See the tablet indicator in the top of the page. Continuing resizing the window to the break point of a mini-tablet, I get the same image of the tablet, in a minimal proportion. See the space above the head, it wasn't there when the window size was a little bigger. Now is when the black magic happens. When it comes to the size of the smartphone, we do not have a man a...

I have been very busy end of the year with a lot of projects including a thesis for Information Business degree at Jyväskylä University of Applied Sciences. Besides all the ups and downs of study, family and work I have decided that I will commit myself to write at least 1000 words per day in order to have all my projects including the blog taken care. Let’s see how it comes up. The topic of the day is the title of the post that is: What to consider when designing or purchasing a mobile site or app? 1. Who will use your site or app? Without knowing who is your target group and knowing basic things about them you won’t go too far.  That is what in UX (User Experience) term means building PERSONAS. Personas should be real users with their complete profiles. Ok, now you might think – you lost me in this one, how do I do that? Well, that is easy. You have the mobile app and site idea.  Who is the first person that comes to your mind that you see using your app...

This time I am sharing with a practical example of the power of UX and the user-centered-design when re-inventing from the ground up a website that resulted in increase of knowledge about cancer and its prevention. It describes in details the goal for the Norwegian cancer society online, its strategy, what were the primarily questions it should answer and how the campaings should be organized. The results were the impressive make over of the website with + 20% more people contacting the cancer line. The one time donations increase + 70%, donations total +73% and montly donations + 88%. That is the power of UX and the user-centered-design, so before think twice if is worthing investing on UX, think if is worthing knowing well your customers and what they need to know and do on your site before you build extremely fancy sites that don't pay off. Take you time and see Ida Aalen's presentation on the Content Against Cancer.  

Most of IT companies don’t see UX (User Experience) should be at the heart of everything they do which leads to their inability to present and sell UX as the starting point of any project. UX in most case is sold as an “extra” service while they should be seen as the starting point of any IT business strategy. UX is everything - it starts with the customers, go deeper to their customers and it should end with them in mind! What UX really is? UX is a business and digital field in itself. The misconception here is that most people think of UX as just usability. Usability though is simply how easy to use and simple the website functionalities are to the end user. For usability we have plenty of best practices already in place and even standardized. Bear  in mind that usability is only part of UX! UX is a continuous work that starts by what customers want to accomplish with their site, and not how they want the site to be , unless they are the ultimate end user of the site...

Lessons To Be Learned From Facebook Mobile User Growth To 54% From Last Year Today one of the headlines in the -> Online Media Daily was that advertisement on Facebook social network's mobile business rose to 30% of its sales this year compared to almost nothing last year which was responsible for the 39% overall raise of Facebook revenues . The lesson to be learned here is clear MOBILE USE is rising significantly and Facebook knows that because their monthly active mobile users is 751 million in the end of March. What that means? It means that Facebook mobile monthly active users have grew 54% from last year. Let's compare a bit The numbers above show how mobile users has double this year compared to the last one, but the same Facebook has announced that their monthly active users grew 23% compared to last year. This is  a real bomb news for the Mobile World It means that mobile is growing so fast that any company that try to blind itself...

REAL USABILITY MATTERS - Usability is one of the single most important thing you can do to ensure success and money. Any design should have the user in mind, however when we talk about small screens this is a must. The Google presentations  What is a mobile site and why do you need one?  try to give business people and even developers the awareness that mobile sites nowadays is a must - but if they are build without the user in mind there is not use to have it. Their case studies are interesting. Mobile-friendly web apps help businesses: To connect with their customers Increase Revenues Reduce Costs because when sites are optimised and user-friendly you give your customers means to get what they want instead of wonder around, get tired and go to your competitor. The catch is that the only way to accomplish that is to invest in Usability. IT IS ALL ABOUT USABILITY. Improved usability makes you INCREASE YOUR MARKET SHARE - the like effect...

Mobile Friendly Contact Forms The way to go for mobile friendly contact forms is the touch-friendly CSS styling in order to make the buttons, controls and inputs with touchscreen experience. 1. Large touch target areas will definitely improve the form input fields 2. Other forms of input can also greatly benefit from input controls with CSS styling 3. HTML5 input types should be use to trigger keyboard events to aid the user on having  a great experience. Depending on the input type selected mobile browsers have different on-screen keyboards for different froms of data that should be taken into account. Just by including in the label the type="" and inside the quotes tel for phone numbers, url for websites, time for time, date for the date, e-mail for email we can make the keyboard behave accordingly with is very useful. I constantly came across mobile websites that make me look for the @ when I have to enter my e-mail, or any other type of data that is n...

GREAT FREE WEBSITE EMULATORS FOR TESTING HOW YOUR SITE LOOKS IN THE MOBILE The single most important thing you can do to make a website mobile-friendly is to test it on multiple smartphone and tablet platforms. Mobile Emulators lets you check how responsive and if all the functionalities it should have works well across different mobile platforms such as iPhone, iPad, Android and Blacberry without have to make the investment in all those devices. Mobile emulators are not perfect but they can help you to check the issues your website might have allowing you to take the corrective measures. Here are some great websites with emulators: 1. iPad Peek   ( http://ipadpeek.com/ ) - let you check if your website is compatible with iPad. 2. iPhone Tester ( http://iphonetester.com/ ) - A popular choice of web emulator for iPhone. Just enter the URL of your website and in real-time you can see how your site looks like on iPhone. 3. Mobile Phone Emulator ( http://www.mobilephone...

Do you know what is XAMARIN? If work with C# and design/build for mobile web and apps this is the tools for you. Much like PhoneGap, XAMARIN is a cross paltform tool for developers who works with C#. They also have a XAMARIN studio (like Aptana and Titanium Studio) and will make your life a lot easier. It also come with a limited free edition that can be used. Check it out...  xamarin.com

Case SharePoint 2010   Ariensco This is a SharePoint 2010 site that is built to be responsive. For desktop is fine, when you shrink the site to the tablet mode the site is responsive but the navigation disappears and instead you only have "View Navigation." From the user experience point of view, the navigation should be at reach without the user having to click on it, or at least with a JavaScript or custom CSS that when hover up the navigation bar appears.  For tablet it is a good design that it is not optimized with the user experience in mind. For tablet the design would have been optimized if the huge picture have been shrank in order to show off their navigation. When we go to mobile is even worst (you only can fully realize that when looking it from your smartphone). Mobile sites should not be picture heavy; otherwise it makes the site for a tiny screen too crowded, difficult to find our way around and battery drained.  For Ariensco example of mobile ver...

THE REALITY OF RESPONSIVE DESIGN TO THE MOBILE SCREEN (The mobile analysis was done based on the sites presented on  mediaqueri.es .) Here you can see how responsive design are great for some desktop and tablets but might be a bad choice to communicate what your business is and what the user can do in the tine mobile screen. Check for yourself snl.no the big picture with the search in my Nokia Lumia gets the whole screen just for search, to see the rest, what the site is about and what it offers me as a user I have to scroll down. It could be better design for mobile, but this is a good responsive design for desktop and tablets. Another one is Suffandnonsense.co.uk the image when you open is the whole screen, to see what the site is about I have to scroll down. It could be better done for mobile but it is very good for desktop and tablets. You can check for yourself on your mobile all of the sites - this is good exercise to see that pictures might speak m...

This is a Slideshow RETHINKING THE MOBILE WEB by by Yiibu Author: Bryan Rieger (September 10, 2010)

I came across a very interesting website quirksmode.org in the Mobile section that explain beatifully in many parts what I believe that is the problem with mobile web design nowadays. I will be copying what I think is the most important points here. Some I might discuss but you will understand the probem when you read it. MOBILE WEB DEVELOPERS DOING THEIR JOB? The unique selling point of the web is that it runs on all devices; and not just on one platform. But it seems mobile web developers aren’t much interested in reaching out beyond one or two specific platforms. Developers should reach out to as many paltforms as humanly possible instead of confining themselves to the best ones. WHY ARE WEB DEVELOPERS INTERESTED IN MOBILE SO RELUCTANT TO VENTURE OUT BEYOUND THEIR iPHONE CONFORT ZONE? Mobile web projects for large companies are based on requirements written last year, during the height of the iPhone obsession. In addition, the iPhone’s share of mobile web traffic remains...

In my earlier post about the differences between Responsive Design and Mobile Web App I have talked about two of the three approaches for mobile web app: The second that is Responsive Design and the third that is Mobile-Specific , but what about the first? Here is the first approach that is not recommended but depending on the website, its design, its content and its purpose, it might be ok. 1. "Do nothing" approach This approach is the one which desktop content is served to the mobile device unaltered. This is unfortunately the most used approach for mobile around the world, however it is changing fast. The good side of this approach is that it is less work to do and no need to maintain, however it is not an optimal choice regarding user experience and nurturing your customers. This approach is good for lightweight pages that have flexible content and that is arrange in such a way that it is not totally zoomed out and is easy to read when tabbing twice the text. ...

Mobile design is about context and speed. Have a great native app is good only if users already have it installed because ask to the users to go to an app marketplace and download our app can be too much to expect. By provoding a version of our site to mobile users is important no matter if we have native app or not. What are the approach you use to build your mobile Web app?