5 Best Practices for Developing a Mobile Strategy

Whether your company has already embraced mobile platforms as a business reality or just getting started, the "next big thing" is here. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when planning your approach to mobile.

1. Know "Why"
One of the first important questions to ask is "Why?" The mobile context is significantly different that the desktop world. What's driving your move to mobile? Simply porting your existing desktop content or creating miniature versions of existing websites for mobile is not a wise move. The content you are providing needs to be useful in the mobile setting. Your end consumer has different needs in the mobile context. As I outlined in previous blog, The 3 Cs of Mobile Website Design, visitor context is a huge factor when considering what to develop.

2. Decide what business functions should be mobilized
What functions will give you the biggest bang for your buck? When determining functionality to port into the mobile context, you want to pick something with a measurable ROI or something that gives your business a competitive advantage. Show value early to help build your business case for expanding into more mobile functionality.


Look at which applications are most important to your company, review your use cases, and re-define how those use cases look on the mobile context. How is the use case different for a mobile user? What's important in the mobile context? Keeping in mind that mobile users want to find not browse.

3. Deploy useful functionality incrementally
This isn't a 6 - 12 month initiative. You need to build and release quickly, solicit feedback, and refine. Think about how to chunk up functionality into small, agile releases. The sooner you get functionality out there the sooner you can start making it more useful. Consider piloting to a limited set of users on specific mobile devices. Start expanding audience and supported devices once it's been around the block a few times and you've had a chance to kick the tires.

4. Develop Standards
As an enterprise it's important to have technical standards in place before they get decided for you. Once the enterprise has momentum with mobile, it's not time to start figuring out what your standards are. Security standards, supported devices are all up for consideration when defining mobile guidelines.

Adopt and adhere to common body of knowledge development best practices. Organizations like the W3C have developed thought leadership and application development standards for mobile.


5. Decide How
App or Mobile website? The answer to this question is important and based on the device capabilities of your end users. If you are targeting an audience that will be using a common device than the robust offerings of a native device application may be the right answer. Native apps allow you to fully exploit the capabilities of the device for an optimal end-user experience. For supporting cross device compatibility a mobile website be the best approach. Although more testing time should be factored in, a mobile website offers widest range of possibilities for a broad user base.

In summary, Mobile is hot, but as with any emerging trend, don't implement technology for technologies sake. Know the audience you are serving, what they want, and what you expect to get out of it - your ROI. Strategic thinking and systematically rolling out mobile capabilities are the keys to success.

4 Point Plan for Testing Mobile Websites

When building a website targeted for mobile platforms, having a good testing strategy is one of the keys to ensuring end-user satisfaction. The mobile context is different than desktop. With so many different devices with varying capabilities it can be challenging to develop functionality that works well on all. Here's a 4 point strategy to use when determining how to test your mobile website:

1. Define testing scope
There are many variables at hand when considering the mobile context - device capabilities, operating system, propietary browsers, carrier network performance - it's difficult to test every aspect thoroughly. Mobile testing is about focusing your efforts. Hone in on your intended audience, do your homework on devices the majority of your end-user base will be using. Build a testing plan around your target audience's device hardware, operating system, browser, and network. Utilize alternatives to native device testing to cover other user populations (i.e. mobile test emulators, see below).

2. Test functionality first on a desktop
Get the functionality working first then focus on cross device, cross operating system compatibility. Dealing with all the possible issues at once - basic functionality, OS and browser specific graphic design issues - can be time consuming. Keeping your testing focused on functionality first then look and feel and navigation will avoid wasted energy.

3. Utilize mobile emulators

Once the functionality works as expected, test the user experience on emulators. Emulators exist to test specific operating systems, browsers, and devices. If you aren't familiar, emulators run on your desktop and emulate the mobile OS and mobile browser environment. Here are a few of the most popular:

• Android
• Palm
• Blackberry
• Windows Mobile

It's not always a slam dunk installing these so be sure to allocate time for installing all required components and configuration.

The W3C also has a great resource for validating the mobile friendliness of a website. As mentioned in my previous blog - 3 C's in Moble Website Design - The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is founded on the principles that the web should be accessible to all and on as many devices as possible. To realize this, the W3C body of knowledge has developed technical standards and best practices for the development, design, and content authoring. Simply enter your website URL into the W3C MobileOK checker and the checker validates your site against the mobile best practices as defined by the W3C.

4. Test on native devices
Finally, execute testing on the native devices, operating systems, and browsers outlined in your testing plan. At this point all functionality issues should be worked out and your testing is focused on user experience and useability on specific devices.

The basic principles of desktop application testing apply to the mobile web context as well. A good plan and focused execution will help reduce post-production issues and eliviate end-user frustration.

What are you doing to test your mobile websites? Comments and discussion welcome!

The 3 'C's in Mobile Website Design

One of the key movements in ensuring a consistent, meaningful, and overall enjoyable mobile website user experience is subscribing to the principles developed by the W3C - The World Wide Web Consortium - for mobile application development. The W3C is founded on the principles that the web should be accessible to all and on as many devices as possible. To realize this, the W3C body of knowledge has developed technical standards and best practices for the development, design, and content authoring. These standards are in the spirit of creating a "One Web" environment that is available on any device.

Creating mobile-friendly user experience can be challenging . The hardware and network capabilities of the end-user create constraints that should be considered when creating mobile content. The "One Web" principle attempts to level the playing field for all. Remember the 3 "C"s for mobile web development:

• Content - the page layout and information architecture
  
• Context - the reason a visitor is coming to the mobile site and their environment at the time of visit
  
• Capabilities - the functionality native to the device for viewing the mobile website

Here are a few best practices to consider before building your next mobile website:

The type of content relevant to the desktop user may not be as applicable to the user on-the-go. Visitors on a mobile device aren't interested in browsing. Forget the notion of the "web browser" and think "web finder". Page layout, information architecture, and content syntax are the pillars of keeping a mobile website relevant and accessible for the mobile user.

Minimal navigation (preferably a top nav bar) is a best practice, so is keeping content as accessible with as few clicks as possible. Don't bury content too deep in the site. Keeping in mind that the mobile visitor has a very specific goal (i.e. an address, account information,traffic reports) put that content up front and make it easy to navigate. Less really is more when navigating a mobile website.

What is the mobile site visitor's goal? Understanding who the visitor is, why they are coming to the site, and the context in which they are arriving at the site is critical. Even the best mobile user experience fails if the content and context aren't spot on. For example, a bank cusomter accessing their bank account from a mobile device are probably not interested in learning about new product offerings. But rather, quickly locating a balance, performing a funds transfer, or paying a bill on-line. Keeping the content layout goal oriented and specific to the goals of a mobile user will create a useful web property for your customers.

Keep the site entry point URIs (Universal Resource Identifier) short. Typing a long string can be cumbersome on a mobile device. And it's important to consider that entry points may be from an email or text received on the mobile device.

Device capabilities are a huge consideration in mobile web development. While the W3C guidelines are based on device-neutral practices they also recognize the importance of checking for device capabilities (whenever possible) and fully exploiting them to enhance the end-user experience. Just as in the desktop world where all sites don't function the same in all browsers, the device a mobile site is accessed on can have a huge impact on the quality of the end-user experience if not handled programmatically. A few things to consider:

• Not all devices support style sheets. Organize content so that it can be rendered in a an easy to navigate way without style sheets


• Graphics and scripting capabilities- create text based alternatives for all embedded images and plug-ins


• Color contrasting capabilities- information should be able to be conveyed with or without color.


• Bandwidth is another consideration. The more graphically rich and content intense the longer it may take to render the site (and quite possibly,the more it will cost the end-user).

Limit user input requirements as input mechanisms on mobile devices can be small and cumbersome to use. Tabbing and creating pre-selected values are best. Where possible avoid free-text fields.

I've been in web development for most of my career and though the mobile outlet creates new challenges and opportunities, the basic planning and due dilligence required to make a site successful are the same no matter the outlet. Would love to hear about the challenges you've overcome launching your mobile website. Please add your comments below.