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Best Practices in Mobile Web Design

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Abstract
Businesses know their customers are using mobile devices, but many businesses don't realize how many and just how extraordinary the usage trend is. Savvy businesses want to connect with customers through new mobile channels and will take the time to develop a mobile strategy before doing so. The best practices anddesign patterns present in traditional web sites are mature and often repeatable across industries, whereas the best practices and design patterns for mobile experiences, web and otherwise, are in their infancy and patterns are only beginning to emerge. The mobile strategy will need to be executed by product designers and developers that understand the business objectives, user goals and context ofuse. This paper encourages discovering business and user needs, then applying common interaction design principles when creating a mobile experience.

Mobile Facts
The number of web-enabled mobile phone owners in the United States has grown faster than many mobile enterprises had anticipated. Some quick facts: • More Smartphones than desktops will be sold in 2011. • More people have web-enabledmobile phones than PC internet access • People expect to access key services and content via their phones • Lower socio-economic mobile phone owners are moving away from land lines • Lower socio-economic mobile phone owners have SMS, MMS and web plans rather than internet access at home • People living in rural areas have easier access to mobile networks than traditional broadband

Going MobileEvery organization needs to develop a mobile strategy that defines the business goals of mobileenabled content and features. By analyzing the target market/audience and its need for mobile
Best Practices in Mobile Web Design
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service offerings, the mobile strategy can be crafted to ensure the most gratifying user experience by supporting the customer’s needs for mobile content andtasks while respecting their expectation of privacy and security.

Understand the business purpose
Many companies make the mistake of trying to come up with new and novel mobile offerings before they’ve fully explored these offerings as a business. Experience has shown that businesses are more successful with a mobile offering that has already been web-tested, even if it’s not the entire webexperience that’s being offered on mobile. Tested offerings can be brought to market quicker and with a service offering that better supports the organization’s return on investment. Rather than building an entirely new stack, companies should take advantage of their existing web platform investments and find ways to extend that platform into the mobile space. As the mobile space matures, it will beeasier to share, support and maintain security, content management and web services. Organizations should also take advantage of business process rules, rule engines, web services, integrations and portal technologies to provide a new front-end design to mobile devices while keeping in mind that privacy and security are crucial on devices used in public and that are easily lost. Displaying...