Always Leave A Way Out
Jan 30, 06:21 PMI’m beginning to hate browser sniffing again. I mean, seriously — is it 1997?
I don’t know about you, but every time I visit a site on my iPhone that immediately redirects me to wap.domain.tld, I groan and know that I’m in for a crippled mobile web experience with no way out. I groan even louder when I see that it’s been optimized for the iPhone.
(nfl.com, I’m looking at you!)
The best part about getting trapped on a WAP site is that it loads fast. It’s designed to be read on a mobile phone, after all, and anyone who has developed for mobile devices knows that their browsers are a potpourri of varying broken implementations. It is a hard, hard task to make those sites work, and the only way to do it is to sniff the browser and display an optimized site for the particular device.
But now we have Mobile Safari.
So I don’t really have anything against browser sniffing per se. It’s a valid technique of optimizing content for different browsers and devices. To make many precise CSS layouts work, you have to sniff the browser. That’s fine. And providing optimized iPhone interfaces through browser sniffing is also fine.
What I object to is making your main website inaccessible to a mobile device. And most of them are.
Getting stuck in a WAP site is not just about the UI; they nearly always have less content than the main site, which is almost always the content you’re actually looking for. Attempting to find information about the NFL Network’s airing of the Texas Bowl (where my alma mater played this year) on the iPhone was an exercise in futility. The mobile website uses all the iPhone controls, but has a tenth of the content.
In the parlance of the internet kids these days: you’re doing it wrong.
You know it’s an iPhone reading the page. You’ve optimized for it. But if you’re limiting the content on your WAP site, let the user actually use the main site! Yahoo did this a year ago and thankfully realized what a mistake it was. Don’t force iPhone users to a different domain, even though they’re a mobile device. And give iPhone users a choice between your shiny new interface (which is very nice and easy to use) and your clunky old one (with all the juicy content.)
Unsurprisingly, Amazon gets this right.
It boils down to two good rules of thumb:
- Always leave your users a way out.
- When in doubt, copy Amazon.
Seriously.
I continue to be impressed by Amazon.com’s iPhone web interface. Calling it a web app doesn’t do it justice, because it’s more than just a one-trick pony. It’s a faster way to shop when you’re on your iPhone, and it’s accessible to all iPhone users, not just people who have downloaded their web application.
But, much like its web interface has done for years with ecommerce sites, Amazon does the little things right, like letting you go back to the full, non-optimized version if you want to browse comments or multiple entries. This is the right UI behavior — it’s okay to sacrifice some functionality for optimization gains, but not content.
It seems like a simple thing. But simple things are not always easy.
