Nothing ventured, nothing gained

From a talk I gave at RefreshPhoenix on January 5th, 2009.

From 1999 to 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped from 7.5 to 76.8 million¹, an average annual increase of 58 percent. Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of 34 percent in that period.

In the first half of 2006, Nokia delivered 153 million mobile devices² to consumers, out-shipping the entire PC industry by a factor of close to three.

By the end of 2006, there were almost 50 device makers churning out Windows Mobile devices³. The really small and compact ones ones with full QWERTY keyboards.

Apple launched the iPhone on June 29th, 2007 and sold 270,000 iPhones in the first 30 hours⁴ alone. By the end of Q4 2007, they sold 1,389,000 iPhones⁵. In 2008, they sold over 10 million⁶.

Google launched the G1 on October 22nd, 2008. As of this writing, neither Google nor T-Mobile have released any official numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve activated close to a million devices.

Both Apple and Google phones ship with browsers based on Webkit, which is the popular rendering engine used by all the cool kids these days⁷. According to Android’s roadmap, they’ve added support for an optimized JavaScript engine (Squirrelfish–also used in Safari) and synced up with a Nov 2008 Webkit release, which likely means better support for the -webkit-transition family of properties.

So it looks like your mobile device will run the same stack of web technologies as your personal computer.

This is great news, right? There’s just one small problem.

Just because there are 900 gajillion Internet-powered mobile devices running around, doesn’t mean that people are using it to surf the web, especially the JavaScript-intense, round-corner powered, 2.0 web.

M-Metrics, mobile research firm, released a report on mobile content consumption. 85% of iPhone users browse the web on their phones vs. 58% of Smartphone (Windows, Symbian, Blackberry) vs. 13% of the overall US mobile market. Download.

Why is that? Because designing for the mobile web isn’t just about designing your existing website around form factor constraints. It’s convenient to think that building a mobile website means taking what you have, and making it work on a smaller form factor. This is frustrating for users because they don’t need or want the full blown experience.

Users on mobile devices are moving around. They’re environment is constantly changing. They’re eating at restaurants, walking through customs, working out at the gym, getting a hair cut, bargain hunting, checking up on the latest movie times while their date is in the restroom, or checking up on movie times while in the restroom.

A user behind a personal computer with 24 tabs open on their browser behaves differently than a user on a hot date. Your users are hard real-time systems that need information extracted with surgical precision.

When designing for mobility, design for users on the move. Design for their context. That’s the key to building a successful mobile application.

The W3C has a Mobile web best practice document which suggests that the mobile experience should be specifically designed in mind for your end users.