However, these are easily spoofed in browsers, so they can’t be relied upon, and they don’t tell the truth, anyways. Most people attempt to do this with browser sniffing-checking the User Agent string that the browser sends to the server with every request.
#T mobile join together full#
The problem with this approach is Nielsen’s suggestion: “If mobile users arrive at your full website’s URL, auto-redirect them to your mobile website.” The question here is how can you reliably detect mobile browsers in order to redirect them? The fact is: you can’t. If the website is powered by a CMS, it’s often cheaper and easier to leave the “desktop website” alone, and implement a parallel URL structure so that is mirrored by m./foo, and is mirrored by m./bar (with the CMS simply outputting the information into a highly simplified template for the mobile website). And changing a production website with all the attendant risks, then testing the whole website to ensure it works on mobile devices (while introducing no regressions in the desktop website)-all this is a huge task. Re-factoring a whole website with responsive design requires auditing content. I believe that this is not ideal, but for many it’s a reality. Sometimes teams don’t have another option but creating a separate website due to factors beyond their control. Two designs, two websites, and cross-linking to make it all work.”įrom talking to people in the industry, and from my own experience of leading a dev team, I’ve found that building a separate mobile website is considered to be a cheaper option in some circumstances-there may be time or budgetary constraints. Nielsen writes: “Build a separate mobile-optimized site (or mobile site) if you can afford it … Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. As part of this work we have had to retire the old Access website.” “We have completely redesigned Access so that it is no longer separate from our main website but is now right at the center of it, enabling our Access customers to enjoy the same features and functionality available on the standard grocery website. When Nielsen writes that mobile websites should “cut features, to eliminate things that are not core to the mobile use case cut content, to reduce word count and defer secondary information to secondary pages,” he forgets this fact.
The vital point is that you never know better than your users what content they want. There were advertisements that were similarly unavailable-which was a surprise whereas most people hate advertisements, here was a community complaining that it wasn’t getting them. There were special offers on the “normal” Tesco website that weren’t available on the access website. One design goal was “to allow customers to purchase an average of 30 items in just 15 minutes from login to checkout.” In fact, from a contemporary report, (cited by Mike Davis), “many non-disabled customers are switching from the main Tesco site to the Tesco Access site, because they find it easier and faster to use!” It also made Tesco a lot of money: “Work undertaken by to make their home grocery service more accessible to blind customers has resulted in revenue in excess of £13m per annum, revenue that simply wasn’t available to the company when the website was inaccessible to blind customers.” It was a great success-heavily stripped down, all server-generated (as in, those days screen readers couldn’t handle much JavaScript) and it was highly usable. The (Not So) Secret Powers Of The Mobile Browser.Around 2002, the huge UK supermarket chain Tesco launched Tesco Access-a website that was designed so that disabled people could browse the Tesco website and buy groceries that would be delivered to their homes. I disagree (mostly) with the idea that people need different content because they’re using different types of devices.įirstly, because we’ve been here before, in the early years of this century. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.” He summarizes: “Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users.
Jakob Nielsen, the usability expert, recently published his latest mobile usability guidelines. There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices? Acclaimed usability pundit Jakob Nielsen thinks that you should make separate mobile websites.
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