Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

The good folks over at The New York Times have put a lot of research-intensive work into their mobile version, at least for the Blackberry. My chief complaint with the Blackberry version is that it regularly forgets where I am and instead gives me New York weather. Useful for the not quite once a year I visit the city, less useful most of the time. But one of the challenges in mobile is managing cookies, so I'm somewhat forgiving.

The Blackberry version has lots of good features: pretty good use of screen real estate, good use of pictures, good use of white space, pretty good internal navigation.

Alas, the site for some other devices does not fare so well. On my Sanyo MM-7500 (NetFront 3.0 browser, Openwave transcoder pass-through, Sprint network), the design is just... wrong.

The biggest problem is the use of white space. Every page has a 30 pixel gutter down each side. This doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that 34% of the available space on the screen is devoted to these gutters. The logo and advertising banner are even shrunken. Below the banner is yet more white space.

This white space does not achieve what it would visually achieve on the desktop. On the desktop, or the printed page, it provides a restful place to separate the page from the remainder of the screen, and provides content framing. On the mobile, the physical hardware provides that function quite nicely. Only enough gutter is needed to avoid bezel parallax from covering content (say, 5 pixels).

White space overwhelms the content	Page 2 of 17! I don't have that much patience.	I'm not even sure I'm on page 2. Was there a new page, or did I just move to the top of this one?

My next problem is how the article is distributed across pages. Yes, it is important to ensure that the phone can load the entire web page. But dividing a story into one-paragraph chunks is awkward at best. And the experience is not "as best": all of the header information, from category to banners to titles, are on the later pages. Combined with the white space problem, the later pages have no new content on the first screen (so-called "above the fold") at all.

Content-wise, the smaller site skips the blurb and the photo, but preserves the category (e.g., "U.S.") and pseudo-category (e.g., "SUPREME COURT MEMO"). I call this a pseudo-category because it looks like one, but you can not navigate with it (except via search engines).

My recommendations:

1. Kill the gutters. They aren't helping, and they are definitely hurting.
2. Remove pseudo-categories
3. Truncate titles on later screens in a story
4. Remove the white space below the banner
5. Provide more of the story on a single page
6. Provide category navigation below the story on later pages
7. Keep the first page author and other meta-data
8. Reduce the bottom-of-the page navigation, relegating the majority of the links to a different page. For example, a privacy policy link really is not necessary on every page.

One final note: As a mobile designer, I try to keep at least one older feature phone hanging around so I can understand feature phone experience, not just expensive device experience. While the smart phone market is growing (and probably will skyrocket over the next few years), many people still have smaller devices. As interest in mobile access to the web increases, these folks will try to go online. Indeed, this is the sales pitch of the transcoding companies. Give these folks a bad experience at the industry's peril.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Design, Mobile web, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.