Is Mobile Web Design Redundant?

This morning I tested out Shiny Toy Robots on my Droid. It loaded quickly, was completely functional, and generally offered a pretty solid user experience. Mobile technology has advanced a long way, with smartphones now the norm, and mobile web browsing from such devices becoming increasingly commonplace. The browser platforms that mobile devices offer are becoming almost identical to what we’d expect from a desktop experience. Mobile web design is still considered almost a specialized discipline, but with technology advancing to the point at which your phone can render a website nearly identically to your laptop, and with increasingly similar loading times, is it also becoming a redundant one?

Flexibility is an important part of any web design

It’s not a case of there being simply two different types of website; those to view on a computer and those to view on a phone. Even a website that has no interest in targeting mobile users still has to account for a wide variation of browsers and screen resolutions. Solid web design requires in-built flexibility, good semantic coding, and the acknowledgement that different users will want to experience the website in different ways.

Adding mobile devices simply means a greater acknowledgement of the need for flexibility. Your site might now be viewed on an iPhone, Droid, iPad or other tablet; different resolutions and different user interfaces. Yet the flexibility of mobile browsers means that they are relatively capable of rendering a “standard” fixed width website initially designed for desktop users. So how important is incorporating design specific to mobile technology?

Is there a need for dedicated mobile site?

Many sites have a mobile specific design which users are redirected to. Most often this simplifies the site, removes images, and highlights the most common activities and navigation. It’s a pared down version of the main site, that’s more easily readable on a smaller screen. It can definitely improve performance and give mobile users a smoother browsing experience.

But that’s the case now, and some of the factors that have made mobile specific sites popular are perhaps not as relevant now. 4G technology means that loading times have significantly decreased, which reduces the importance of simplifying mobile sites for fast loading. The flexibility of touch screen interfaces with zooming and scrolling means that it’s not so vital that a mobile site easily fits into a small screen space.

There’s an app for that!

Native apps provide the advantages of a dedicated mobile site, with additional functionality too. They’re very well suited for sites that have a very specific user goal; e.g. Amazon really just wants you to be able to buy stuff easily. They provide a very streamlined experience for the user, and a well designed app can be a pleasure to use. As technology advances, apps are providing much greater flexibility and different user options. Facebook, for example, doesn’t really have a specific user goal, but the Facebook app for Droid provides a very pleasurable user experience that lets me interact with all aspects of my profile and feeds.

Of course, apps require bespoke development, and a web designer can’t necessarily design an app. They require approval before they can be made available in stores, and they add an additional layer of maintenance because as mobile operating systems update, so the apps need to too.

Moving away from the middle ground

I think there’s an argument that the mobile specific website is becoming a less important web discipline. That might seem counterintuitive given the continued advancement in mobile technology. Yet the increased capability of mobile devices to effectively render a desktop focused website, combined with the opportunities in developing native apps, means that the halfway measure is becoming less necessary. Very goal focused websites, or larger scale sites with additional development resources, can focus on developing native apps. Smaller websites can be relatively confident that mobile browser technology will make even their desktop web design relatively usable and attractive when viewed on the latest iPhone.

This is not to say that mobile specific websites don’t have their place. But to some extent they are becoming more of a “nice to have” rather than a “must have” in terms of enabling a mobile web presence, and I wonder if this will become increasingly the case. Catering for mobile browsers will, I think, either become more integrated into the overall discipline of web design, or more completely separate into the app development field.

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