In designing websites, you can try to produce the best website you can or instead you can try to produce the website that visitors will find works best for them. Most designers have grown up with desktop browsers on screens that are growing in size all the time. Although they may feel they have done a great job of simplifying and cutting their web pages back to the essentials, they are rating their efforts through desktop 'glasses' (perceptions) that have built up over the years. If they ask their colleagues who have the same background experience whether they have done a good job in this process, then they may well get a positive response.
It can be quite a different picture if they talk to visitors to their websites on mobile devices. Unfortunately such usability tests are rarely done with representatives of their various audiences. The designers will never be aware of how difficult a challenge they have given to some of their visitors.
Delivering Satisfactory Mobile User Experiences
What should a mobile user expect in browsing the Internet with their smartphone. If that smartphone is a Windows Phone 7, then Microsoft is promising them Easier sharing, smarter applications and a better web.
However Tony Bradley of PCWorld has pointed out that there is a flaw in the Microsoft thinking.
When it comes to smartphones, Windows Phone 7 should arguably be the de facto platform for business professionals, but Microsoft may be delivering too little, too late.
The problem with Microsoft's attempts at a mobile platform for smartphones is that Microsoft sees the world through the eyes of a desktop. Windows Mobile treats smartphones as if they are just much smaller notebook computers and tries to apply the same principles and technologies as it does for Windows desktops.
That is exactly the argument we have been presenting here.
A reasonable expectation for that mobile user might well be that browsing the Internet should be as satisfying as using the basic functions of the smart phone. Since most visitors have larger fingers and are trying to use a small screen, factors such as Fitts Law come into play. Any important button you might wish to click (swipe), should be closer and bigger. This is much less important in thinking about working with a large desktop screen and pointing with a mouse.
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