Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

The W3C's Best Practices Working Group has published a working draft of its Mobile Web Best Practices document.

Alas, both the group and the document are mis-named. They do not target "mobile web best practices", but "best practices if you have already made the limiting decision to write one web site that will work on desktop and mobile devices".

The recommendations in the document are general and only somewhat useful. For example, consider:

The service should be designed with a broadly balanced navigation tree where numbers of links on pages is balanced against depth of navigation.

Is this possible in a situation where you do not know how many links are on the page because it is dynamically generated based on device capability?

Or: "Group related links, identify the group and provide a way to bypass the group". This is great if you assume that browsers treat within-page links consistently. They do not. You could have a "skip" link that does nothing, causing major user confusion.

Or: "Do not create periodically auto-refreshing pages". That's exactly what I'd do if I had an email application or a stock tracking application. I might provide a way to turn off the auto-refresh, but when it is important that content be up to date, the content should be up to date.

Or: "Do not embed objects or script in pages unless you know the device supports them" This one makes sense, except that it should instead exhort designers to ensure that the page works with and without the script.

There is a lot of stuff in the document with which I agree. For hints on what those are, look at my basic style guide recommendations. There is quite a bit of overlap. Of course, I haven't updated my web style guide in a couple years, so some of these recommendations are out of date in a world where people are downloading songs and television shows. And my style guide is even referenced as the last item on the page, so that is pretty nice (an actual link would be better, as that would enhance my search engine results, but I'm not going to be picky).

Oh yeah - on top of that, the authors oversimplify what makes a site usable or not on a mobile device. Sure, as they point out, browser, site, and device usability all play a role - but equally important are the interactions between the user interfaces of the three as well as how well the site maches user goals in a mobile environment.

A site could be extremely easy to use on a small device, as long as the user completes the desired task before doing something else (like answering a call, receiving a text message, or getting off the train) but completely unusable when other things interfere. Factors affecting this difference include cookie use, transaction lengths, browser design (whether the last viewed page is available when re-starting the browser), screen design, and site information architecture.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Business, Design, Design Tips, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.