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Improve Mobile Site Usability By Addressing Device And Browser Variability
Experience on the Mobile Web is poor. That’s no surprise given the confusing landscape of technologies, devices, and browsers that mobile site designers need to support. Every year hundreds of devices flood the market with different browsers, display capabilities, screen sizes, and keypads - making designing a consistently good experience both an expensive and time-consuming process. To approach the Mobile Web in a systematic fashion, Endeavour recommends one of the three basic approaches for companies considering a mobile website:
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Support
the lowest common denominator:
The
most sure-fire way of reaching the largest
mobile audience is to ensure that the site
works on the most basic phones. This means
developing the least complex site that renders
well on simple phones with the assumption
that more sophisticated phones will also
display your site. Endeavour recommends
choosing phones that are offered free with
a plan from the major carriers. Of those
devices, there might be several that behave
similarly, so it’s important to group
them by capability. We often recommend that
clients reduce the field to five different
browsers and ensure that the site works
well on all five. This strategy is good
for firms just starting on the mobile Web.
This way they can offer content for the
widest range of phones and then narrow the
testing as they begin to understand which
devices their customers are using.
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- Target
specific devices:
Companies
that have a better understanding of the
devices their customers are using can more
easily justify building a site, or in some
cases an application, targeted to specific
classes of devices. This does not mean preventing
users with more basic phones from accessing
your site, but rather narrowing the design
and testing to a specific set of phones
that are most popular among your largest
audience. It might be impossible to isolate
your audience to one or two phones, but
selecting a class of phones, or several
classes of phones with similar capabilities
might work. Again, Endeavour recommends
choosing five different phones, one or two
phones from each class, to make testing
manageable and focused.
- Adapt to the capabilities of
the devices:
Companies
looking for a robust mobile strategy
can choose to support a wide range of
devices all to the best of that device’s
capabilities. Some options: Use different
style sheets for different devices,
or detect the device that is trying
to access your site and dynamically
offer images and scripts that improve
the experience of your site for that
device. Many high-end devices now support
full HTML and JavaScript, so in addition
to creating a mobile site tailored to
that device’s capabilities, sites
should not restrict access to desktop
sites. The amount of adaptation required
to render a site optimized for a particular
device will vary widely depending on
the complexity of the site, but this
technique requires more extensive development
and testing across the appropriate range
of devices.
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Refer Case Studies for details of projects we have executed in this platform.
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