Designing Mobile Websites
- Atlanta: Tuesday, February 23
- New York: Wednesday, March 24
- Chicago: Friday, April 23
- London: Sunday, May 16
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial
Mobile Web use is exploding with new generations of exciting devices, but how do we create a satisfactory user experience when limited to a small screen and awkward input?
This seminar answers that question based on expert reviews and our international studies, which
included a range of participants—from students to early technology adopters to business
people—using websites on a variety of mobile devices.
We’ll discuss design issues for a range of devices, including feature phones, smartphones, and
touchphones from several different vendors. We’ll also report the latest findings from articles published
by prestigious journals and conferences.
What You’ll Learn
- How users behave when using mobile devices
- Guidelines and best practices for making your website mobile-friendly, emphasizing:
- Usable features
- Easy navigation
- Writing and producing mobile-device content
Course Outline
Mobile user behaviors:
- Navigation to websites on mobile devices
- Search
- Portals
- Bookmarks
- Direct access
- Browsing for news, entertainment, sports
- Finding specific information (weather, movie times, etc.)
- Transactions (such as online banking and other financial operations)
- Using maps and location information
- Integrating email and contact information with browsing and fact-finding
- Monitoring and communication
- Shopping
- Finding product information
- Comparing online and in-store costs
- Purchasing
Design strategy considerations:
- Creating a dedicated mobile site vs. having mobile users access your regular website
- Integrating mobile services with your regular website (if you have two separate designs)
- When to use mobile websites, phone-native apps, or both
- Designing for high-end models vs. the lowest common denominator
- Direct manipulation UI for touchphones (such as iPhone and BlackBerry Storm)
- Indirect manipulation for low-end devices
- Creating a mobile application vs. a mobile website
Specific design guidelines for mobile sites and services:
- What to include on a mobile site
- Basic interaction
- Typing
- Dropdown boxes, buttons, and links
- Lists and scrolling
- Menus
- Carousels
- Forms
- Logging in and registering
- Search
- Navigation and information architecture (IA)
- Errors
- Page layout
- Search
- Homepages
- Images, animation, and videos
- Content usability
- How users read on mobile devices
- Writing for mobile use
- Presenting text: legibility and readability
- How to perform usability testing with mobile devices
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, video highlights from user testing, and some exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
Anybody who designs websites, intranets, or online services that have mobile users. People in charge of mobile strategy, including the question of whether to develop dedicated mobile services.
See Also:
This seminar is about the usability of websites accessed through a browser on a mobile device as well as the design of mobile-specific sites. It does not cover applications that run directly on the phone. A companion seminar, iPhone Apps Design, focuses on the usability of native applications.
Instructor
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group, where she presents
tutorials on academic research findings, mobile usability, and cognitive psychology for designers, and conducts
research worldwide on usability for mobile websites and children’s websites. She coauthored the
NN/g report on mobile usability. Previously, Budiu worked at
Xerox PARC, doing HCI research. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in
visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted
research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu was also a
user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations
for incorporating user-generated content and social Web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20
articles and conference presentations on HCI, psychology, and cognitive science. She has a PhD from Carnegie
Mellon University.
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