ForumOxford - Next Generation Mobile Applications Panel

Hi all following the "mobile internet" vs "real internet" debate

Please go watch this video by John Pettengill of Razorfish in New York City. He goes through the assumptions, gives brilliant real world evidence, and arrives at conclusion that mobile web goes beyond the legacy internet - that we should indeed go beyond the existing internet (and why and how) and ends on the thought, mobile can be magical where the internet cannot. Very deep, thought-provoking, and indeed provocative presentation. And you may want to bookmark that page, you'll probably refer to that presentation often when convincing colleagues, partners, clients etc. See Pettengill on saving mobile web:

http://www.slideshare.net/johnep/an-internet-watered-down-or-how-to-save-the-mobile-web?from=email&type=share_slideshow&subtype=slideshow

And what do you think? Clued-in or clueless?

Tomi Ahonen / HatRat  

Hi William, Mark and Ajit

Thank you for the comments. I trust we have a truce between William and Mark, eh?

I would hope William that inspite of your feelings about Razorfish, if you read look through those slides you'll find a very good up-beat but very factual presentation about mobile, perhaps most importantly for us, helping break up some of the widely-held misconceptions and myths about mobile?

Tomi Ahonen / HatRat    

Hi Dean, welcome to the stream.

Ok. I hear you. All four ganging up on me, eh, ha-ha.. (and I thought you guys were my friends ha-ha)..  No, seriously..

So your view is that the presentation has poor content, but is very well made. The design of the presentation is far better than its content, eh? I can appreciate that view. And yes, its very well made for a presentation about the mobile internet, and tells a story well. But is the story really that bad? I beg to differ.

Please tell me, which of these of Pettengill's conclusion points about mobile you think is more untrue than true (slide 123 out of 128)

1 - Don't assume a 1:1 relationship between a site and its mobile extension (Tomi thinks this point is 100% correct)

2 - Users are in 2 completely different states at home or outside it (Tomi thinks 100% true)

3 - Making content available for mobile is baseline. Lets strive to perform above it (Tomi agrees 100%)

4 - Do one thing and do it well (Tomi mostly agrees)

5 - Combine tasks that are separate but shouldn't be (Tomi totally agrees)

6 - Find opportunities outside the dead time in pain points a user faces every day (Tomi agrees 100%)

7 - Mobile extensions can have nothing to do with your business yet still fit your brand (Tomi mostly agrees)

8 - Brand extensions can add much needed serendipity to a static world (Tomi mostly agrees)

So, that is the conclusion of Pettengill's presentation. His previous slides pretty well establish those points with plenty of examples. I ask you guys, William, Mark, Ajit and Dean - where is Pettengill WRONG in his conlusions? Which of his 8 points are faulty?

Am happy to debate them, but I do personally feel very strongly that he is more correct than not on all of them, and on most of them, I personally think he is 100% correct. So, lets continue the debate?

Tomi Ahonen / HatRat  

I'll jump in here at Tomi's post so as not to add more fuel to the fire on the now smoldering Razorfish.

My perception from the slides is that the author is coming from a typical agency mentality and that is, how to make more money by pushing a newly created cardboard bandwagon to potential customers. I’m hearing the same marketing hype as we had back in the 1990s with web sites.

I do not believe in two different webs. There is only one content resource and it is called the Internet. How we access that content is the core of the discussion here. (for the sake of this discussion I am using content to encompass everything the internet has to offer)

Mobile access to content completes the Internet, as it gives us a wireless window into this familiar world. For decades we have been slaves to specific time and place to access the internet, this was the wired world and mobile now frees us from these restraints.

The slides highlight that the problem with this wireless mobile window is that, it is an afterthought and this, I agree with. Too often we come across poorly designed mobile websites that are an afterthought and again this is following the same path we had with the Internet in the 1990s.

Companies who have “content” on the Internet need to structure their sites so that content can be effectively accessed by whatever device accesses it. The core of the site should be the same content, not different.

Remember that the Internet has an incredible amount of windows that view the content. There needs to be more time invested into a better system of how information is delivered to all these windows, not just mobile and PC.

Mobile gives us a new opportunity to access content on the Internet in a relative, contextual and personalized way by adding the dimensions of time and space shifting.

Shane Williamson
Co-Founder Mobile Monday Sydney
Sydney, Australia
http://twitter.com/shanewilliamson
http://shanewilliamson.spaces.live.com

Hi Dean (and welcome to new contributors, Zigurd, Shane and JT)

Ok. Thank you very much Dean for the considered and detailed point-by-point reply. I really appreciate it.

(incidentially, I wrote a long detailed reply on Tuesday, and posted it, and thought it was here, and found that my reply didn't appear. So sorry. I will try to re-create my "clever" arguments ha-ha)

I do think, Dean, that you've hit a bit below the belt on the first reply, but let me explain.

1 - Don't assume a 1:1 relationship between a site and its mobile extension
(This assumes that it *has* a "mobile extension". Classic piece of sales technique on the Pettergill's part. There are plenty of sites that neither have nor need it)

Dean - the slide set was entitled "saving the mobile web" so the guy is expressly talking about mobile, and obviously only to those who have an active interest in a mobile web version, either having launched it, or considering doing so. It is quite unfair for you to then reply "plenty of sites that dont' need it". If its a slide set for car mechanics, and you own a bicycle, you wou'dnt bother to read the slides. That I think was a reply not worthy of you, Dean. And obviously practically all major mass-market internet brands from Google to YouTube to Yahoo to CNN to Amazon to Wikipedia to BBC to Twitter have separate, mobile optimized sites (as does Flirtomatic, am not sure about you William, does PlaySreen?).

So you cleverly side-step the actual point, by hiding under the Long Tail. Fine, there are tons of websites, all of our blogs included, that are not worth mobilizing. Fine. But Dean, the point was that what if there is a legitimate interest in a mobile web version. Is it really your professional guidance, and Distruptive Wireless's considered view, that brands can safely take a 1:1 relationship with their existing web content, when creating a mobile variant. Please also bear in mind, the guy is New York based, not talking to techies, but talking to advertisers and brands. Is this REALLY, in your mind bad advice, Dean, or is this actually the same advice YOU would give. I recall that Mark (Curtis) was expressly saying this very point when speaking to us about Flirtomatic, that it has optimized pages, different for the web, different for mobile. Dean, are you seriously suggesting that is a BAD strategy?

I agree with this guy 100% on this point. I think it is excellent advice to tell web designers, that they should not try to make a 1:1 copy of their website when designing for mobile.

2 - Users are in 2 completely different states at home or outside it (So does that mean that mobile versions of websites need two sub-versions depending on whether I'm using the iPhone on the sofa vs. in the pub? Also this is a very pre-netbook/smartbook view of the PC - increasingly, small PCs are also context-aware, and have very different display and I/O capabilities to a desktop.)

Again, Dean, irrespective of can we actually design for such changes, are you suggesting this is NOT TRUE? When outside of the home, we tend to have something imprtant to do, we are in a hurry, we tend to have something to carry or something to hold - inside the bus or train we hold the grab-rails to stay standing etc - so we need the ability to use the phone single-handed, and we are in a hurry and we are multi-tasking. Meanwhile, at home, we sit comfrotably at the sofa or our desk, we don't carry anything in the other hand (other than perhaps a drink) and we have all the time in the world to do browsing and search, and we can concentrate.

Do you Dean really mean that this distinction is not relevant? I think this is very valuable. Not all services need it, but in many cases it can yield great benefits. I do love it that the mobile version of Twitter and Google and YouTube etc recognize the limitations of "mobile browsing" and offer me an optimized version, suitable for single-handed operation in a hurry..

And as to the netbooks, they tend to be designed ("intended") to be operated not while walking. Ie we are assumed to be seated, or else, to use two-handedly (one hand holding the netbook). Most phones can easily be operated single-handedly and good apps do that. Not to mention that the total population of netbooks is two percent of all PCs and under one percent of all moblie data users on all forms of mobile phones not just smartphones (yes, counting SMS and WAP users, obviously)

3 - Making content available for mobile is baseline. Lets strive to perform above it (No, it's not baseline, depends on the specific site. Sales pitch again)

What do you mean Dean "is not baseline"? So you mean that there are plenty of mass-market services which can "safely" leave all mobile access to be ignored? That their service need NOT be accessable on mobile? If Yahoo is available on mobile, shouldn't Google's be too? if Facebook is available on mobile, shouldn't MySpace also be? If BBC is on mobile, shouldn't Sky aslo be? What service do you mean is of the type that it does not need to be on mobile (and am talking of mass-market services). Yes, it is baseline. And then the point you ignore (but many commented on in the discussion) - yes, the services SHOULD strive to offer MORE on mobile, or be better on mobile, like the examples in the slide set about real-time mobile commerce.

4 - Do one thing and do it well (Yes, generally fair enough. Although often I want something full-featured when I'm mobile and resent having to make do with a cut-down version)

We Agree (also we agree on the access to the full-featured version)

5 - Combine tasks that are separate but shouldn't be (Makes a good soundbite, but I'd need more examples to be convinced that it's true generally. Sort-of contradicts point 4)

No contradition. Airline ticket sales and airline check-in were done separately in the "analogue" world, ie even at Heathrow for BA, you have to go to a different desk physically to buy your ticket and to do your check-in. If you are at the check-in desk and have your credit card and they see the available seat (like an upgrade) they still insist you walk all the way over to the sales desk to get the ticket. But on mobile airline services like pioneered by Finnair, you can do your ticket purchase and your check-in in the one service. No contradiction with point 4, and a brilliant improvement in our service. There are tons of such examples in the marketing/CRM and customer services area (just-in-time dentist for example)

6 - Find opportunities outside the dead time in pain points a user faces every day (Seems reasonable)

We agree

7 - Mobile extensions can have nothing to do with your business yet still fit your brand (Trite. Any website, more or otherwise, can have tangential add-ons which have nothing to do with the core business)

We agree

8 - Brand extensions can add much needed serendipity to a static world (Having recently coined the term "serendipity vector", I agree with this, although it's neither new nor mobile-specific. Try Google's "I'm feeling lucky" as a very easy example of this)

We agree. And Dean, the benefits need not be mobile-specific as long as they do apply to mobile, and I'd argue this is not well communicated to the industry in general (about mobile), so it is useful in this slide set.

To me, it's feels like a sales pitch, not a piece of analysis.

Fine. I say potato you say potato. I say it is persuasive, you say it is sales. I'm sure you'd also say that about every one of my presentations ha-ha, they tend to be very sales-y.

Put it this way, I reckon I could create similar "straw man" documents about why:
- laptop versions of websites should be different to desktop ones
- Mac versions vs. PC ones
- Websites that change depending on whether you're looking at them in daytime or during the evening/night
- Websites that sense your nationality via IP address, and configure themselves differently
- Websites that behave differently based on capacity/congestion of your broadband
- and so on.....

Even if this is true - and we know at least some of those already exist - national variations based on IP we all see when we travel and access our Google from the hotel broadband and get greeted with weird language editions etc..  - even if its true that such arguments can be constructed, does not invalidate this one.

So Dean, to start with, you agree with half of his conclusions and you mis-analyzed one more (contradiction).

My question, on the most important first three points - do you really Dean suggest that modern mobile web design (in America, so the owner almost always already has a PC based internet website) can safely assume a 1:1 relationship between PC based internet and mobile (item 1)? Do you feel it is bad advice to suggest that mobile phone users behave differently when they access mobile services away from the home (item 2); and when designing mobile services (item 3) do you think it is bad advice to suggest the developer could try to offer more on mobile than on the PC based website?

Good discussion. But I still think all 8 points were good, I rarely see them discussed in a slide set like this and I think it is great value to communicate this, even more so, in America today; and even more so, to advertisers and brands today (similar to what Ajit said)

So, Dean, rebuttal?

Tomi Ahonen / HatRat  

Hi William

That is a separate discussion, is an app for mobile better than a website. I would guess that there are very distinct areas where one is better than the other. In games apps seem very suitable, but what of truly mass-market services for people like our parents (and grandparents) who wont' have smartphones for years to come, who have a hard time adjisting to the digital age, and still need to do their banking or their travel planning or access the weather channel or BBC etc. Do you suggest William that these major mass-market brands and services should NOT develop a mobile website (WAP site) and rather force consumers (today in 2009) to download and install an app for the mobile? I think not.

So if you William can look beyond apps - that is a separate discussion not particularly discussed in the Pettengill slide set - of is an app better than a web service - and consider guidance for those mass-market brands who already own a webstie in America, and are considering a mobile website, then in that case, are these 8 suggestions actually all very good advice today (or at least msot of them)? And is this honestly a set of advice that we see every day by every McKinsyist, Bostonconsultant, KPMG'er, PWCooper, Deloitteist) or is this honestly pretty useful still today, in 2009 (for an American non-geeky advertising/branding readership)?

Haha, William, I really did think you'd agree wtih those 8 recommendations, more or less.. (when advising mobile web design)?

Tomi Ahonen / HatRat  

• Do you want to plan how your brand is perceived on mobile, or leave it to the vagaries of mobile rendering and have it not work on some devices?
• Do you want to use a technological subset of your current web experience, or do you want to leverage the capabilities of mobile for greater interactivity and value?
• Design content, brand, and interaction for user context.
  

1. Consider your user's needs, brand needs, user goals, contexts, target devices, technology capabilities, and so forth. Design 1 or more versions of your content and interaction.
   
2. Design for progressive enhancement (good experience for most devices, better for those with more capabilities) for each version.
3. Build a set of page tweaks (extra padding/size for touch screens, different image sizes, different layouts for horizontal screens, don't display access keys on smartphones, etc.) to automatically re-render each version appropriate to the device requesting it.