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Nov. 29, 2008

The Yankee Group just completed an evaluation of thirty-two consumer-facing mobile Web sites and has come to the conclusion that the Mobile Web needs some serious work if it wants to compete directly with the traditional Web as we know it today.

Yankee scored the Web sites on a scale of one to one-hundred, grading them on 25 criteria including effectiveness, overall design and ease of use.

Yankee's top score was a disappointing 67. The average score was a low 54.

At a Webinar presenting his numbers, Carl Howe, director of Yankee Group’s research department said “I would make the argument that today’s mobile Web is very similar to where the World Wide Web was in 1994 or 1995.”

“If we think of mobile Web sites the way we look at an average seventh-grade class, unfortunately, everyone appears to be failing miserably, and that's something that needs to be addressed rapidly,” added Howe.

And such failures come as the wireless Web expands beyond early adopters to mainstream users. More than 40 million U.S. consumers actively accessed the Internet from a mobile phone in May 2008, according to Nielsen Mobile, nearly doubling the number of mobile Internet users in July 2006.

“It underscores the attention you have to pay when building an Internet site for wireless devices, according to Andy Sullivan, vice president of account management for Crisp Wireless, a New York-based firm that develops mobile Web destinations.

“You’re not optimizing for what that browser can support. There’s a huge range of browser functionality out there from low-end browsers that can just support images to high-end browsers that can support JavaScript, tables and other things. Which is why we feel you need to develop five or six versions of a mobile site” to really address the market.

Howe’s findings echo a recent study from Bango that found that about 50 percent of Nielsen Mobile’s twenty most-visited online destinations didn't work well on such popular handsets as Motorola’s Razr V-3 and Nokia’s 6300 model, both working on AT&T Mobility’s network.

AT&T Mobility users visiting sites from Fox, Microsoft and Apple were greeted with the error message “Page cannot be displayed” for instance, indicating mobile users may not have been redirected to a made-for-mobile page. Vodafone U.K. users visiting Wikipedia’s website were forced to scroll down at length to retrieve any kind of information, which is totally unacceptable.

There are countless other problems on the wireless Web, from a lack of a standardized URL format (.mobi or .com) to an inability to support many desktop features to the small screens and limited processing power inherent in wireless phones.

While surfers may appreciate eye-popping graphics and endless menus on their desktops, those features usually cause more headaches than their worth on a phone.

Of course, that’s a sure way to reach as many devices as possible, offering bare-bones content for cheap mobile handsets and more sophisticated stuff for users with iPhones or other tricked-out gadgets.

However, building a half-dozen sites doesn’t just require additional investment, it doesn’t guarantee that users will still be directed to the correct destination.

Mobile browsers with transcoding technology sometimes route users to PC-centric sites, as Sprint Nextel discovered earlier in 2008, automatically formatting content for the device and then bypassing made-for-mobile sites altogether.

In wireless, less is a lot better, Howe urged.

“Too many websites actually try to give you too much information and all at the same time, and the challenge on the Mobile Web is that you really need to express yourself in somewhere between 30 and 50 words."

"This is not an environment that encourages long, detailed explanations, and unfortunately too many companies don’t really have the skill of boiling things down to just a few words and just a few links,” said Howe.

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Source: The Yankee Group.