Are mobile style sheets needed?

Mobile style sheets offer people viewing your website a different user experience than those viewing via more conventional means, but are they worthwhile?

In my view they are not.

Okay so someone comes to your site on their mobile: You have a dedicated mobile sub domain, images have been removed, all the content has been re arranged so it fits on the page. Navigation has been removed and/or simplified, it’s lightning to load, all the text is readable without squinting and you couldn’t be happier.

Your visitor hates it. Why? Here follows an example (or two).

I get an email on my ipod. Someone is following me on twitter! Woo! I check the link out, to see what they’re like. Bam! A completely different site. Is this even twitter? Have i been duped by a clever email?

Problem #1 Am i convinced I’m in the right place?

So I decide to follow this user back (a rare occurrence). There’s no immediate follow button, fair enough I need to login. There’s no login button.

Problem #2 Basic navigation has been removed.

Solution: I click the standard view. Everything is where i expect to find it.

I recently sold my motorbike via ebay. I was a little eager to check up on the sale, and my ipod was always close at hand… Oh but it wasn’t a quick check.

Problem #3 I wasn’t given enough information.

When i login in a normal browser, i have all the information there. I know where to find it and it’s one page load. On a mobile… every detail is given on one page. Two thousand page loads later and i’ve found out the info. #sucks. If it just loaded in the full page (it wouldn’t take any longer than my normal wifi connection) i could have then zoomed to the right section and I’d be done.

Solution: I click the standard view. Everything is where i expect to find it.

I have always stated that mobile web would never take off unless the experience matched what we expect from a desktop computer. Now surely this could never happen. Screen sizes alone could never match.

But i think we are almost there.

Here’s a stat for you:

Compared to other smartphone owners, iPhone users not only go on the Internet more often, but tend to browse for longer periods of time and download more mobile content in the process….the average iPhone user consumes upwards of 400 MB of data every month.  In comparison, most smartphone users only consume around 40-80 MB of data every month.

source

In my opinion, this says a lot about the iphone browser. It offers a nearer to true web experience.

With the iphone, a new mobile browsing experience has materialized. The speed is there. 3G, wifi, HSDPA (HyperSpeedyDownloadablePaperAlternative)… so there is no need to remove content. The webkit browser renders pages perfectly, everything is where i expect it to be.

So this is where everyone jumps in and says “yeah but it scales the page… you cant read the text…. don’t say you can zoom, ‘cos you shouldn’t have to” Yeah your right, I shouldn’t have to zoom… I shouldn’t have to click links either. It’s part of the navigation. I expect to zoom. It’s the best bloody thing about the iphone, if i cant zoom a site i get the hump.

Example: Flickr. A site dedicated to images. A site you might just want to zoom, to look at the finer details of an image. No go. Their mobile version: won’t let you zoom.

Solution: I left the site.

ps. Soon there will be mini projectors in our mobiles, so screen sizes won’t enter this argument.

Daisy creatively cropped

Space image

Spring in Thorndon Park with rotting log

Cudmore grove driftwood

poppy in the rain

Hover fly on red Dahlia

Light shining through clouds

a cosmos flower

Photo of a Geranium