Mobile Website Features

[Luke Wertz]

Hey all --

We're going to start looking at making a mobile version of our college's website. I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on mobile higher ed sites.

What features are a must and what are must nots?

Being a college within a university, what features do you think we should provide our mobile viewers (our university doesn't really have a mobile-targeted website)?

What have your users responded to (both internal and external audiences)?

I'm hoping to send out a survey next month to our faculty/staff and students to see what features they want, but I'd love to have some foresight going into this, so please, share your horror stories and any advice!

Thanks,
Luke

[Patrick Powers]

As with any website development, I think a large part of the decision is determining your target audience. If you're designing it for current students, or faculty/staff, the content and design will be different than for prospective students. I've been researching mobile versions for highered for a couple of months and find it completely overwhelming.

[Keren T]

Thank you for the question. I am interested to see the survey and/or the results.
SPC has a mobile site for the library - http://www.spcollege.edu/central/libonline/mobile/index.html

I work for their grants division and we have two informational mobile sites:
http://terrorism.spcollege.edu/ntpi/iPhone/index.html
http://terrorism.spcollege.edu/ntpi/mobile/index.html

There are many conversations about mobile but we don't have consensus yet.
Have a good day and good luck with the project.

K-

[E. James Ford]

Was just checking out this website and saw that you use iWebKit... How was your experience working with this framework?

[E. James Ford]

I'd say a prominent contact link and some sort of map/directions are extremely important. I think focusing on the "task-based" nature of your average web-user becomes in even more important in a mobile environment.

They probably aren't looking for curriculum details and they almost certainly aren't looking for a press release about the latest grant a faculty member received. They're probably looking for a way to call you or for directions to your campus... They're out and about. They aren't passively consuming information like they do at home.

Of course, all of your content should be accessible in a user friendly format.

We're about to embark on this ourselves... And we're probably going to create a mobile template that looks substantially different from our regular website. My sense is that we should attempt to build something that capitalizes more on the interface of the phone (especially a touch interface).

One thing to keep in mind that we learned the hard way: There's really no such thing as a mouseover/hover state in mobile/touch. Its possible, but it isn't intuitive.

(Topical: Will the release of Windows Phone 7 Series mean we have to create new IE specific display rules for their mobile platform? Has anyone seen what the browser experience is like?)

[Dave Olsen]

Regarding Windows Phone 7 Series, I'm taking a wait and see attitude. Our traffic is 60-75% iPhone/iPod Touch and maybe 20% "smartphone" which really is a very large collection of devices. I don't think there's necessarily a need to preemptively optimize for a device that may be a very small percentage of your userbase as long as you supply some sort of generic/basic view into your data.

[E. James Ford]

Agreed... And the nice thing was that Android and iPhoneOS were both using the same rendering engine for their browsers (WebKit), so you could reliably code a mobile website across two of the more dominant mobile platforms - the obvious exception being RIM/Blackberry.

But our goal with our mobile website is to make something so simple/optimized that it should render with no issues, regardless of platform.

(And then... I contemplate whether or not to serve up our mobile template to IE6 users)

[Dave Olsen]

From our experience with our mobile website (http://m.wvu.edu/) utility trumps content. For example, campus map, directory and calendar beat out, by a very wide margin, things like campus news and YouTube. So if you can focus on utilities that make sense in a mobile environment for your college you'll go a long way in delivering useful features for your college.

Some stats from our experience can be found in a talk I gave at Stamats SIMTech: http://bit.ly/1CEvyM

Also, if you're looking for a cross-device platform for delivering your mobile site check out the Mobile Web Open Source Project at http://mobiweb.pbworks.com/. Disclaimer: my project based on the original MIT Mobile Web code base.

One thing I'm curious about though, do you currently have mobile traffic to your current college website? I reviewed our college websites Google Analytics and found next to zero users on mobile devices using their content. Implementing at the university-level seemed to be the only way to get a decent amount of traffic/use.