Designing Interfaces, 2nd Edition

Chapter 10. Going Mobile

If you have ever designed anything for the Web, you are already a mobile designer. Congratulations!

That’s the reality of a world full of iPhones, other kinds of smartphones, ebook readers, tablet computers, and entire countries where people reach the Internet primarily through their phones. All these users will see your sites through browsers that are small, slow, quirky, and hard to interact with. They will use your sites in environmental conditions—and mindsets—that are entirely different from what they would experience if they were sitting quietly at a comfortable desk, in front of a large screen.

Even if you don’t choose to become an expert at mobile design, you can still treat mobile design consciously and thoughtfully. A relatively small investment of knowledge, design work, and time can go a long way toward improving the mobile experience of the sites you design.

For many sites, it will make sense for you to create a separate version of the site aimed at mobile users (or, at least, users of small screens). You would present a scaled-down, focused version of your site that answers the needs of users who are out moving around. In this chapter, we won’t go into the technical details of platform detection and how to present the correct design for the user’s situation (e.g., different CSS stylesheets)—but the knowledge is out there and fairly easy to find.

Other sites will want to supply all of their functionality via the mobile site, but all of it would ...