Planning the Structure of Your Mobile Web Site
While structuring a mobile website, we must spend enough time on information architecture design, if the user has to spend too much time to locate the information he/she wants, they may get bugged and go away, no businessman or even normal user would like that, all web site owners certainly not going to allow that, here is some guide lines we should follow them:
- Define user personas: Who is going to use the web site? What’s the target market? In what circumstances will they come to the site? What’s the context? List down typical users who would use the application.
- Define user goals: What tasks do they want to achieve on the web site? Is there a better way of achieving these goals than a typical website flow? Why would they want to do this task over a mobile? How does your mobile site help them accomplish their goals?
- Define target devices: Do you want to limit to a particular set of devices? Or use some device-specific feature? Do you want to use SMS/Phone capabilities?
- Do paper prototypes: Sketch out the workflow for accomplishing user goals on paper (yes, pen and paper are still useful!).
- Test with real users: Show the prototype to real users and get their feedback, Make modifications, accordingly.
- Make XHTML prototype and test again: After you’ve passed the paper prototyping round, convert the prototypes into XHTML MP. Now test them on target mobile devices. Test them also with real users and make modifications till you get things right.
Here are also a few tips you can keep in mind when you work on your mobile websites:
- Take a minimum approach, remove everything that you can.
- Respect the user’s time, money, and attention. Don’t frustrate them.
- Do task centered design and focus on user goals.
- Give less choice no long menus, no long options, and no long pages.
- Maximum 10 links on a page.
- Navigation should be drill down, and contextual. Customize navigation, according to the page, no more than 5 levels of drilling down.
- No pages with just links to drill down further, make sure each page has valuable content. Even the homepage should have actionable content.
- Prioritize links and content. What’s more important goes to the top.
- Always provide a way to exit to home, and step back in the footer.
- Break lengthy/complicated forms into a wizard like step-by-step process.
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Website Design Service for Mobile Devices
Accessing the Internet from mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular, for the past few years mobile devices (mobile phone, smart phone, tablets, PDA or palmtop) have rapidly become an integral part of our lives, We can talk and send messages or video streams by them, and with an internet connection we can have access to any kind of web content, Today there are over 1.1 billion web capable handsets in use worldwide which is 63% of the total handsets of the world, However, as can be read in mobile web access is hindered by the fact that the majority of web contents are tailored for desktop computers. Compared to desktop computers mobile devices have got some evidential drawbacks.
Web access from mobile devices presents its own unique challenges we have to severe resource constraints on the mobile devices, their performance is usually much lower processor memory, their screens are smaller, and generally their internet connections are much slower, power, form factor, bandwidth and battery, mobile web users face a big problem that the majority of web content are tailored for desktop computers which can have a large display area and high connection speed compared with mobile devices which have smaller display area and limited connection speed also, There was many trials to solve this problem or even enhance the existing model to have better results.
Hence in the majority of the cases it is impossible to display the original web content, which is customized to a desktop computer with a 17” monitor or higher, on the display of a handheld device in a usable and efficient way. Somehow we should adapt the original content to the capabilities of the client device. This problem led to create two versions from any web content one for desktop computer and other with special constrains for mobile web. There were some others contributions to solve this problem, Instead of having two versions for each web content one for normal users and the other for mobile users.
Also there is an important issue should take in consideration when you author any web content that we should optimize it we will list some best practices for delivering web content to mobile devices to save mobile resources like battery power and limited connection speed, The principal objective is to improve the user experience of the web when accessed from such devices, and also use some technique to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) request and improve the display of the same content to fit the mobile users.
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