Understanding & Benchmarking the Mobile Web Experience

The purpose of this study was to identify best practices in design for mobile web browsing user experiences, analyzing the newest strategies for optimizing efficient and pleasurable interfaces in a mobile device context. This involved understanding the history of mobile device communications, basic web design principles, and modeling how businesses project their mobile web experiences to end users. The research includes current design trends, thought processes to consider, and expert advice from industry professionals. In addition, user experience survey’s supplement the analysis, scoring industry leaders on how they present their mobile web experiences (viewed from iPad2 & iPhone 4). The test results and advice pooled from this study can be used to better strategize, prepare, and execute rewarding user experiences and interaction designs for a mobile device context. In its simplest form, the process of delivering rewarding mobile web experiences means focusing on speed, mobile constraints, and understanding behaviors of the user. Making sure to continually check back into these three categories as a mobile strategy evolves from prototype to product is fundamental to ensuring all aspects of a mobile web user are addressed. The best way to validate the planning of this interaction is to incorporate multiple different angles and backgrounds of thought from a business, not just that of the designers. Sure designers are responsible for understanding color theory fundamentals, typography implementation, and spatial layouts, but this shouldn’t qualify them in holding the sole decision process for what capabilities to provide or prevent users. Counter to traditional thought, the best way of transmitting a satisfactory and unique mobile web user experience is to expand the original brainstorming of mobile strategies to a wider sum of individuals, incorporating people who understand the company and business from a different perspective than that of the designers. This report digs into unraveling the big picture of mobile web user experiences and leads into deciphering which pieces of the interaction are most vital to ensuring pleasurable usability and encounters between all parties involved. Table of