PixelMEDIA Inc.

PixelMEDIA veteran and Art Director Eric Wyman takes a wry look at the realities of mobile design and how mobility expands our ability to be productive in (nearly) any setting. (Read More…)

In today’s economy, we all want to make sure that our businesses are spending money wisely and effectively.  The websites we invest in are no exception.  With all of the planning, design, development, and user testing that we do based on our business drivers, how can we be certain that our time was spent wisely, and that our CEO will give us a pat on the back instead of a pink slip once the project is complete?  The answer: Analytics.

The practice of web analytics has been around for quite some time, and has evolved over the years to offer more and more insight into the user behavior on our websites.  Major players in today’s analytics market include Google Analytics, WebTrends, Omniture, and Urchin.  They allow us to measure the traffic to our site, user demographics, and browser statistics, as well as to track specific campaigns and their impact on lead generation and ultimately, our bottom line.
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At PixelMEDIA, we’re starting to see more of our clients inquiring about how to get started on the mobile web. I thought I’d share some of the lessons we’ve learned. These are five things to keep in mind when starting a new mobile project.

1) Decide which content to put on your mobile site

One of the first challenges when starting a new mobile project is deciding exactly what content to offer your mobile visitors. There are a few differing opinions in the industry right now; some people strongly believe in the One Web, while others believe that the experience should be re-shaped for the medium. This could mean a new website, new content, and a new information architecture as well as a design optimized for mobile.

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Clearly, the biggest challenge that we face in creating any successful mobile experience from a visual design perspective is the display and hierarchy of content. You’re dealing with a drastically smaller resolution so it’s painfully obvious that we can’t just re-engineer existing content and expect great results. There need to be tradeoffs. How do we begin to determine them? Mobile users have different needs and motivations than desktop users. What pieces of information will they be trying to access given the fact that they are in a mobile environment? Can we prioritize information based on the conclusions there?

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Mobile users tend to be focused on quickly finding answers to burning questions as opposed to simply ‘surfing’ the Web as they do on a PC or laptop. Given the smaller resolution and disparate browser capabilities across mobile devices, designing the navigation becomes more difficult.

Not everyone has an iPhone or Blackberry Storm. A lot of users have simple smart phones, requiring careful thought into how deep content lies within the Mobile Experience and how many clicks it takes to get to it. (Read More…)