Last Friday I gave my Developing a Progressive Mobile Strategy talk at the M3 Conference. During my talk Jen Matson (@nstop) tweeted this about my “mobile web first” section of slides:
“Search + links = mobile web first.” That is the biggest gateway for users to your content.
After reading her tweet my first thought was that Jen had shown me a way to sharpen my talk. I could and should expand on why search and links were important and how they ended up paying-off for content creators. This seemed especially true since all but one person in my audience were non-higher ed. But reflecting on her tweet on my drive home I think I hit on a broader theme that is probably more important.
There’s No Mobile Web, There’s Only Content
Jen makes a very good and a very simple point. Search and links are the gateway for our users to our content. And you know what? They’re the gateway regardless if our users are using a mobile device or desktop. Platform doesn’t matter because both have the same opportunities to discover our content. As Stephen Hay (@stephenhay) tweeted earlier this year (and I went after him recently on it so mea culpa):
There is no Mobile Web. There is only The Web, which we view in different ways. There is also no Desktop Web. Or Tablet Web. Thank you.
I completely misunderstood his original intent but now I get where he’s coming from. The “mobile web” does exist but it’s from the standpoint of giving a name to the technical issues and techniques that help us deal with the numerous issues surrounding developing for small-screened mobile devices. That being said, from our users’ perspective they just want access to our content and they want it on their terms. Make sure you read his follow-up and explanation.
Discovering Our Content
The same channels that we use to market to our users and that our users use to find us on the desktop also exist on a mobile device:
- Browser? Check.
- Search box in said browser? Check.
- Ads on web pages that appear in said browser? Check.
- Email client that handles links? Check.
- Social networking tools that, again, handle links? Check.
And you know what? Users are using these channels on their mobile devices. Do you have a website that features information about your institution, volunteer information for your non-profit, or products for your business? 77% of smartphone users use search. Do you send out emails about products or events? 87% of smartphone users check personal email at least daily from their smartphone. Use tweets or Facebook posts to spread the word about your organizations’ goings on? 65% of smartphone users visit social networking websites (this number doesn’t include the use of apps).
By the way, that notion of “on the go?” Well, that’s out the window. 93% of smartphone owners use their smartphones while at home. 29% use a smartphone in front of the TV and 39% admit to using it on the toilet. The mobile device is becoming the information discovery tool of choice no matter the location or need. It’s just that it has a smaller screen than we’re used to designing for. I would also argue that many of us don’t have content that is mobile-only so “on the go” doesn’t matter much anyway.
By making this content available on the web and advertising it we hope users take some action. Those actions could be applying to our school, donating money, buying a product, or simply visiting our store. We shouldn’t ignore how that content is rendered and made available to users on mobile devices. At the end of the day we want to target as broad a population as possible with our content and advertising.
Next Step: Optimizing Content for Mobile Devices
We’re already putting our content out there to be indexed by search engines. We’re already trying to market that content to folks via email, social media, and web and print ads in the hopes that they access it. And we’re already working to make our content perform optimally on various desktop browsers. The trick now is to make sure our users can get the best experience for that content on their mobile browsers too. Optimizing our content for mobile devices, including tappable phone numbers and links to Google Maps, is a natural extension of what we’ve been doing for ages. There is no separate mobile strategy. There is only an existing content strategy and working to make sure that that content is best presented to everyone.
I understand “content first”, but I am currently having a problem reconciling mobile recommendations and a content strategy across devices. Jakob Nielsen doesn’t seem to agree with “content across devices” in his latest mobile UX study and actually delineates desktop content and mobile content. So, as a web developer, I’m confused. How do we sell ourselves when short is too long on mobile and we’re told to use singular content that works across all devices?
Additionally, if you have any examples of large sites that use a great content first strategy that works across devices, I’d love to take a look at them. We’re currently starting a responsive design project and are having problems finding good examples of complete sites that prioritize content that is responsive.
Couple quick thoughts:
- Just because “on the go” isn’t the only way people interact with the web doesn’t mean that we should ignore that context altogether.
- There are lots of opportunities to exploit the mobile context to enhance the user experience
- We need to make assumptions about the *hierarchy* of content when dealing with multiple contexts, not the content itself.
- Universal access to content is something to strive towards, but we need to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions for multiple (oftentimes disparate) contexts
- People view the same content in different ways and at different times http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1451 How does this impact our content strategies?
- Some studies show really high percentages of smartphone usage during TV watching (68%) http://www.androidauthority.com/nielsen-report-americans-use-tablets-smartphones-as-tv-buddies-14564/
http://bostonglobe.com is one example
@aaron-
i’m not necessarily advocating singular content across all outlets. That being said, the reality is that in a fair number of cases, for example departments on our campus, maintainers of content aren’t going to care about modifying their content for mobile devices. The best we can do as developers and designers is to try to help them make that content at least somewhat mobile-friendly via layout changes like RWD. And is that a bad thing? Again, for the vast majority of small businesses and other similar outlets, no, it’s not. Their content is indexed, they can advertise it like they’re used to, and anyone can get the content in, at least, a fairly usable way. Even Jakob’s results showed that a mobile-friendly layout as opposed to a desktop-only layout mattered.
This is not a one size fits all situation. In the case of larger ecomm sites or organizations every effort should be made to link regular content and their marketing efforts to truly mobile-optimized and targeted content (e.g. layouts served up via device detection). APIs are going to become increasingly important if they aren’t already. Granular control of content and knowing what little bits of content truly are is going to matter… a lot. That’s the kind of stuff we’re playing with. For large companies doing this I would check out NPR (Google “Create Once, Publish Everywhere”), Boston Globe and their new responsive design, or the work of Best Buy.
The main concern I have is that folks are missing the link between existing content and, maybe more importantly, processes for advertising that content and delivering that to mobile users so that they can act upon it. At least that has been my experience in talking to people.
Thanks much for the comment. I really appreciate it.
I have a website where I teach guitar. With mobile I’m trying to organize it better and make the UI easier to use than a regular website. So basically a navigation ui leading to a video and other content. Maybe some examples of before after, or compare web to mobile using the same content would be helpful. The nice thing is it’s making me streamline and organize my thinking which should also improve the original website, as over time we tend to add a lot of extraneous things.
@brad-
in no way was i suggesting ignoring “on the go” or the like. i was merely highlighting that our content can be accessed and useful outside of that.
on context… i’ll go back to an old blog post of mine and say that we, as developers and designers, cannot be clairvoyant about context and plan content accordingly. outside of feeling comfortable that the individual accessing content from a particular device is the same one as always so we can tailor our offerings in a personal way as well as address the technical issues of a device in our layout (e.g. screen size) i’m not sure context gives us much. but that’s something where I seem to have a differing view than most anyone else.
but to the core of my argument, most content creators really don’t give a shit about mobile. they’re going to spout content, link to it, etc. without thinking about any sort of context or properties. for these folks that stuff doesn’t matter and it is very “one size fits all”. i see it every day. that being said, if they want users of the future to act on what they spout they better damn well make sure it’s mobile-friendly. not perfect, just mobile-friendly. for the more enlightened among us, we’ll create the best possible experiences. that doesn’t mean the others should just give up and not do anything.
Dave
Thanks a lot for this post: I found it quite balanced in this world of manicheism between “one web” and “mobIle/desktop/tablet web” supporters.
The problem I have with the “one web” approach, thou, is that it seems to be quite skewed toward the “desktop web” – that is, the idea is that we already have a bunch of desktop websites, let’s see how to make them work with mobile phones.
I obviously understand that this kinda makes sense (the status quo always makes some sense) but it’s not an approach I like.
Rather than talking about “one web”, then, I like much more the idea of “one content”. In the spirit of separating content from presentation (it looks like we often forget this) I imagine a “database” of our content that exposes a set of API’s and the front-end will show the best presentation for the device. Because “experts” can say what they want but, sorry, a mobile phone is *very* different than a desktop or laptop computer in hardware, software, context, user and needs.
Very interesting read. I think context definitely needs to be considered, however, your point is essentially that mobile is part of your content strategy, not something off in it’s own container. It’s also helpful to have a CMS underneath that can help support these content strategies.
Thanks, Dave, for the expansion on your thoughts about dealing with that content at the other end of those mobile links. As @bryanrieger mentioned on Twitter, the issue of users coming into our sites via search and links — and how best to serve them — has been with us for a long time. I remember back in the late 90s, when I managed the Village Voice web site, trying to socialize around the newsroom the idea of “not everyone is reading the entire newspaper” (as much as the editors would have liked that to be true!). Because in examining our web traffic logs, I was seeing large numbers of people heading directly to specific articles linked from then-fledgling sites like MetaFilter and Slashdot. Or the massive number of users who never read ANY of our articles — they were just there for the real-estate listings, posted every Tuesday afternoon to our site in advance of the paper hitting the streets. Again, I’m happy to see the rise of mobile help re-ignite some of these valuable, and necessary, conversations about how we think of content in a world (finally!) untethered from the desktop.
I think it depends on the type of content that a website has. Using the WVU Libraries as an example, with our redesign we originally wanted to do a fully responsive site, but soon figured out that what the “full” site needed upfront differed from the mobile site. The mobile user will be more interested in hours, available computers, and other “information” topics than they will be about searching journal databases and downloading journal articles.
Of course, that also depends on the type of mobile platform. Tablets are excellent devices to assist in real research, much more so than a phone.
That’s why i am also not a fan of the “Mobile site first” mantra. On many sites, that is a good place to start. But it just doesn’t work all the time. Its important to look at the content that you offer and who is more likely to use that content where.
Even just using different templates for different devices won’t cut it in the long run. Ultimately i think we will end up with a responsive home page (for desktops and tablets) that pushes smaller screen mobile devices (phones, ipods, etc) over to the mobile site, which will be fed content from the main site via database pulls and rss (so that content is maintained in a single place). The CMS will allow any page to be pulled as RSS and will allow authors to tag the break(s) (ultimately, i’d like to use that to take advantage of swipe and other gestures).
But, i also think for many sites out there the popular mantras work well. But there isn’t one that always works. you have to know and understand your content and your user base to form a really successful strategy.
@silvio-
thanks for the comment and i think we’re on the same page. while i did quote stephen’s “one web” tweet i purposefully titled the section, “there’s no mobile web, there’s only content” because, like you, i much prefer focusing on content. APIs are the future. we’ve already started making our apps API-only and then layering presentation on top of that.
@jen-
and thank you for getting me to think about it in more depth
@mike-
first off, i love the feedback of another dev thinking about mobile at WVU
second… i guess where i’m coming from is that i have a problem with “separate.” from my standpoint having m.wvu.edu is fine but it shouldn’t be seen as a replacement for http://www.wvu.edu or, frankly, any of the services that it happens to offer (e.g. calendar). in the past that’s sort of what we were trying to do but it’s neither sustainable nor realistic. m.wvu.edu just happens to be a nice central mobile portal but the concept breaks down if someone wants to search for, for example, calendar content or share a calendar link from the desktop version with their friends who may be on a mobile device (tho our new calendar is mobile-optimized).
another example… the available computers feature of your libraries site is one of the best mobile features on campus. if a user googles “available computers wvu” they get the desktop version. admittedly i’ve just switched the user agent in safari but it’s not like there was a redirect or anything to see a better optimized version. do we just track these kinds of things and punt people or do we just endeavour to make things mobile-optimized (with templates or RWD) from the get-go?
i think we can do a responsive version of www and point users to select content. the university of notre dame is playing around with this. the beauty of responsive design is that you can show & hide divs as well as, hopefully, move them around some. separate mobile sites like m.wvu.edu are going to be dinosaurs/dead-ends unless we treat them more as the ultimate in personalized content as opposed to simply windows onto existing content. the value add as it were.
but obviously “mobile first” and the like break down in the face of the politics & bureaucracy we deal with day in and day out
all of these things, even my post, are about some sort of ideal. those ideals tend not to last much beyond the first contact with the enemy 
thanks for the comment. we really should meet-up at some point and share experiences.