A newly released global study shows users’ overwhelming dissatisfaction with their mobile web user experience. In fact, the study shows that “Nearly 50 percent of respondents said that a poor experience on their initial use of the mobile Web made them “reluctant to access” either the site – or the Internet in general – on their mobile phones again.” The study was conducted by AKQA and dotMobi, who is the registrar for the .mobi top level domains. The primary reasons cited for poor mobile web experiences are poor site display and layout.
There are really 2 factors at work here:
- Poor or no consideration for mobile web layout
- Lack of web standards support from mobile browsers
Major sites are beginning to pay attention to designing for the mobile web, but it’s still very inconsistent. This can be a disaster for mobile web users who do a search and click through to a site without mobile support that crashes their browser. Or their phone.
Mobile browsers are beginning to improve, especially Safari and Opera Mobile. These two browsers dramatically improve mobile web browsing experiences. They’re also about to include Flash support, but don’t support the same web standards and are both a long way from supporting AJAX.
These findings raise some interesting questions. How long it will be before the mobile web becomes a design consideration for most web designers? Will the mobile web win back the hearts of the overwhelming number of disappointed users? And when?
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I'm Dave and I like to share news about gadgets, gear, careers and design for a mobile world.
theregoesdave
Browsing on any of the win mobile and BB platforms is painful. The web on the iPhone is absolutely great. Users will be “won back” to the mobile web when they don’t have to do ridiculous up/down on a scroll wheel to move between links, it’s just way too painful!
Hopefully devices like the iP and android powered touchscreen handsets can increase web usage. Web devs will take notice when the usage numbers increase.
[...] that aren’t very well suited to browsing on a handset and that poor experience can really turn people off from the mobile web altogether. Other critical factors include increased performance, Javascript handling including the [...]