dessalles

Just noticed that I unwittingly linked to the SXSW mobile site in my last three posts. During the conference, I grew so comfortable navigating the mobile site from my phone that I eventually started accessing it from my laptop as well. The URLs to the panels were still in my browser history, so without much thought I ended up using the sxsw.mobi addresses instead of sxsw.com. And I’m sorta glad I did:

As I find myself accessing certain sites more frequently from my phone than my laptop, I’m also finding myself preferring the minimal, ad-free, mobile sites to their overloaded, full-screen counterparts.

That’s not a wealth of possibilities, it’s a tyranny of information…and punch-monkey flash ads. I’m not resolving any sort of paradox of choice as much as I’m reacting to a dilution of value. And as the movement towards hyper-personalization continues, I suspect our web experiences will need to start to looking more like these mobile sites. Because, personalization is just as much a matter of generating personally relevant information as it’s one of filtering out the majority of irrelevant crap. In fact, if I had to choose between one or the other, I’d most certainly opt for the later.

A common talking point in mobile design folklore is that there’s a continent of people accessing the internet for the first time through mobile phones. I wonder if these users will demand the simplicity of the mobile web once they transition to more fully-functional web browsers. Similar to the concept of digital natives, I suppose it might be useful to think of these users as mobile natives - people who’ve grown up only with mobile computing and understand interactive experiences as being simple and efficient. How will they react to the onslaught on their attention? What will they think when someone pushes an unnecessarily dense web portal in their faces and then encourages them to “customize” it?

In high school I had a writing instructor who used to tell me to write my essay as I normally would, and then when I think I’m done, delete the introduction, replace it with the conclusion and rewrite everything else. Sounds like pretty good design advice: Design a website; then design the mobile version. Replace the front page of the full-scale website with the front page of the mobile site, and then redesign everything else.