Mobile User Experience

July 23, 2007 by Keith Robinson

One of the most exciting things, to me anyway, about Leaflets is that we can really showcase how great a mobile user experience can be. Let's be honest, until recently and even now, for many, the experience you can get on a mobile device isn't all that great.

There are many reasons why and they're not limited to to technology available, although it's true that iPhones offer us technology in Safari that go a long way to help developers and content providers provide an awesome experience.

Regardless off those issues, we're entering a time where we can finally show how great a mobile experience can be. Leaflets are shooting for that, it's one of our primary goals with this project. I think, for the most part, what we're showing is very compelling.

True, right now you can only get that experience on an iPhone. However, we did built Leaflets with standards and with a bit of an eye for the future in mind. It's our goal to be able to bring that experience to other devices moving forward.

At the end of the day the Leaflets are standard-based web applications. Sure they're built on standards that aren't yet supported on other mobile devices and every desktop browser, but assuming the people making the devices and the browsers stick to supporting standards, this kind of experience can be had elsewhere.

I think that's pretty damn exciting and it bodes well for the future of the mobile web.

So, how did we get to this great experience? Well, that's a good, if somewhat loaded question. We designed these Leaflets with a mobile experience in mind. And, to be honest, we also targeted iPhones and some of our design decisions were made to support those at the cost of fully supporting other mobile devices. Keep in mind, we're shooting to showcase the best possible mobile experience here and Safari offers us some things the other mobile browsers don't, namely:

• Support for multiple background images, and
• Support for non-graphical rounded corners.

The first one is especially important because it allowed us to greatly reduce the load time of the applications. A key factor to providing a great mobile experience.

As well, we made lots of decisions that are essential to any mobile experience, regardless of device and supported browser. There is a lot of talk about mobile-specific designs breaking the "one web" and while those, theoretically make sense, when we're talking about a best-in-class mobile experience the "one web" argument kind of falls apart. Why? Context.

People don't use mobile devices the same way they do via the desktop. I'm all for providing an "out" so that a user isn't forced into a mobile experience and to be honest I'm not 100% sure where I stand when it comes to device detection. On one hand it can be frustrating to be forced down a particular path, but on the other hand, for the majority of people removing the choice is part of a better overall experience.

When it comes to content we made lots of choices on how and what would be displayed. Again, thinking long and hard about the best possible mobile experience.

Presenting a "miniaturized" version of a desktop Web site or application is not usually going to get your users a great experience. Worse, depending on the content being served it can severely hamper load times and even cost your users money.

Mobile-specific stylesheets are great for some things, but in our case we also wanted to make sure the content being served fit the context. We didn't want to pull in anything that didn't fit with our optimized mobile experience. The same could be said for many applications, sites and services wanting to go mobile, regardless of if they're targeting iPhones or not.

The best experience is one that addresses context. Leaflets, we think, do that.