Yesterday, Gomez and dotMobi published a second set of mobile Web benchmarks. The metrics are taken across three key industries: banking, airlines, and search, each of which represents an exciting and important slice of the mobile Web.
I don’t want to analyse the results here (the mobile Web is getting slower apparently!) – instead, I’ll take a brief look at what these benchmarks might mean for you as a developer.
First, the metrics:
- Discoverability – how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site using different URLs.
- Readiness – how well the mobile Web site renders on popular mobile devices.
- Availability – the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.
- Response time – how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.
- Consistency – how well the mobile Web site performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.
What does it mean to you if you are developing a mobile site? There are some things that you can do to improve how you would rate against these benchmarks, with the goal of ultimately improving the user experience you provide.
Discoverability
Make sure that people can find your mobile site. A very good way to achieve this is to get a .mobi domain and put your mobile content on this domain. This will remove the guess-work for your users (is it m. or wap. or mobile. or /m or /mobile or /wap etc.?).
If you have mobile and desktop versions of your site then you should also consider adding an auto-detection script, or switcher, which will automatically redirect users to the correct version of the site depending on whether they are on a mobile or desktop (see switching article here). As mentioned in this article, it is also a good idea to provide a link on your site allowing the user to override the switcher’s decision. This is a good practice, with big brands and industry leaders such as Google and Facebook doing as much.
Readiness
The Gomez-dotMobi benchmarks test your site as a number of different devices in an effort to determine if your mobile site delivers a suitable experience on a variety of devices.
If really care about user experience, you should adapt your content to suit your users’ devices where appropriate. You can resize images to fit the user’s screen, and you can progressively enhance the experience where you can. For instance you can add AJAX to make the experience smoother. But you should only use technologies such as AJAX where you know they are supported. (Products like Device Atlas do a good job of letting you know what content you can or can’t send to a device).
And finally, you should test your site, during development, and during production if your content changes, on the mobiReady tester (http://mobiReady.com). This tool tests that you have implemented W3C Mobile Web Best Practices, as well as dotMobi best practices.
Availability
This is a no-brainer. Do your best to make sure your site is hosted reliably. If your web-presence is critical to you, you will never want any downtime. The scale of your application will dictate your hosting needs. For low volume non-critical services, shared hosting is probably fine. As your requirements get more critical you should be thinking about dedicated and load-balanced servers on high-speed network links. Of course reliability and speed come at a price. The question is, can you afford to not have down-time? Or put another way, can you afford to have down-time?
Response time
This metric reflects the time required to download each page in an entire multi-step transaction (including all embedded objects, javascript, and CSS).
You can do your bit here too:
- optimize images – make sure that you are sending the smallest images files you can. Resize your images before sending them to the browser i.e. don’t rely on the browser to resize your images for you
- keep your markup small – optimize your markup: don’t add unnecessary comments, whitespace, or other unnecessary bloat. This applies to your stylesheets and script files too. Re-use CSS classes and Javascript functions where you can.
- keep the number of resources you use to a minimum – each unique resource in your page requires an extra HTTP request, which take time and potentially costs your users. Combine your stylesheets where possible.
Just because a high-end device can handle badly written markup and lots of images, css, and script files doesn’t mean that the user wants to wait (and pay for) all this stuff to download.
Consistency
This is probably one of the hardest of the benchmarks for you to address as the site developer. Consistency in this sense measures the standard deviation of the response time of completed transactions. This is measured across different geographical locations and network providers, and at different times of day.
Geography might not be important for you if you know your target audience is localised to one place, and your webserver is right next door. But for more global applications it is important to that all your users have a good experience, and this might involve distributing your servers geographically, and ensuring that you have enough network bandwidth to provide a similar experience during peak and off-peak times.
These are some of the things that the sites mentioned in the Gomez-dotMobi benchmarks can do to improve their rating. But they also represent good practices that you as a mobile web site developer can exercise to ensure that you provide your users with the best mobile experience you can. To find out more about developing mobile websites please read our Developer’s guide, and our beginner’s guide to mobile Web development.
