Programming the Mobile Web

Chapter 3. Architecture and Design

While this is not a book about design, understanding some architectural and usability concepts is critical to creating useful mobile services. Many common desktop web design patterns and usability concepts do not apply in a mobile environment.

Website Architecture

Yes, a mobile website is still a website. The details are very different, however.

Navigation

When creating your mobile web concept, before you do any coding you should define what will be in the navigation tree for the user. To do that, you need to understand what services and information will be available for the mobile user. Always remember the 80/20 law: 80% of your desktop site will not be useful to mobile users. Therefore, you need to research the 20% you should be focusing on.

Note

You can decide that you won’t have a mobile website and just want to allow access to your desktop site to full HTML smartphones. If you’re sure you will have mobile users I don’t recommend you leave the desktop website as-is, but if you do decide not to create a separate mobile site, you will see later in this book how to optimize your desktop website for better visualization in smartphones.

Here are some tips you will need to follow:

• Define the use cases (for example, find a product price, find a store near you, call us, or perform a search).

• Order the use cases by the most frequent for a mobile user. Use your best guess, statistical information, and usability tests to keep this order updated.

• Do your best to ...