What we loved: Looks nice and is consistent with Apple branding
What we’d love to see improved: Apple are currently only providing the desktop version of their website for their mobile consumers.  Let me repeat that.  Apple are currently only providing the desktop version of their website for their mobile consumers!!  This is bad form for any brand but Apple probably receive c.15% of their traffic from mobile users.  This is very bad for all the reasons we’ve discussed in other Mobile Friendly/Mobile Lazy posts.

The load size of their home page is nearly 400kb which makes for very frustrated consumers waiting for the page to load on mobile.   When it finally does load the consumer experiences the exasperation of zooming in for content and zooming out for context.  When they do zoom in they are then presented content that is completely irrelevant to their mobile needs. Additionally the videos they present on the homepage will not play on most mobile devices – including my mango-updated WP7.

With little analysis, it would probably take Apple marketers less than an hour to work out what their mobile web consumers want from them and then another hour to present an appropriate solution.  Apple make smartphones – they more than the majority of brands should understand mobile web.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of APPLE mobile is… and cast your vote below http://apple.com
Or see who else is Mobile Lazy

What we loved: The homepage wasn’t too heavy despite the content so loaded on a range of mobile devices…BUT this site was designed for desktop not mobile!
What we’d love to see improved: Everything! At the moment Play are delivering their desktop website to all mobile devices meaning a lot of zooming in for content and zooming out for context – a classic example of mobile laziness! The site will frustrate the mobile consumer and they simply won’t stick around for all of the unnecessary content loading on all of the internal pages. Play would likely report significant increases in turnover just like Gap did if they mobilized their website with technology like Architect.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of PLAY mobile is and cast your vote below… http://play.com

What we loved:The website is relatively uncluttered because of the nature of the service with great branding so it is not too badly presented to mobile devices but…
What we’d love to see improved: This is a desktop site!  118 is a huge directory service brand – they would benefit greatly from offering mobile-relevant experiences such as ‘Search near me’ and ‘click-to-call’.  The brand is perfect for mobile web and they must get way above average hits to this URL from mobile consumers currently but they simply are not maximising the opportunity.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of 118 mobile is and cast your vote below… http://www.118.com/

What we loved: Great design optimised across a broad range of devices with consistent style. Good usability and clickable links.
What we’d love to see improved: The site would benefit from a lighter load, 87.9kb is big and runs the risk of alienating consumers on older devices or pay as you go. Introducing some unique customer or location based experiences for customers would bring the mobile site alive for users and add to an otherwise great mobile experience.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of FORD mobile is and cast your vote below… http://ford.com

What we loved: An effort to create a mobile presence had been attempted with text set at a width to fit a number of phone screens.
What we’d love to see improved: Everything else! The navigation bar stretches full width of desktop site, and no other mobile usability has been implemented. The buttons/links have been reduced so significantly in size they are too small to use. This really is a very mobile lazy website but there really is no excuse for a publisher like Smashing Magazine given its web-dev knowledge-base and readership.  We’d love to work with these guys to make their website truly mobile friendly so that they can be seen as an authority on mobile as much as they are on web/platform development. I know our dev team here at Wapple would be delighted to work with them.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of Smashing Magazine mobile is and cast your vote below… http://smashingmagazine.com

What we loved: Presentable, easy to use, strongly branded experience on iPhone and Android.
What we’d love to see improved: Faster loading across all mobile devices and improved styling and layout on Windows and older phones.  There is an assumption that everyone has Android or iPhone, this is not the case as 36% of mobile web traffic is generated by Windows and other OS. By offering a mobile web version for all devices could increase mobile web usage by up to 1/3.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of PHOTOBUCKET mobile is and cast your vote below… http://photobucket.com/

What we loved: The site is optimised across a broad range of devices with consistent style. Simple navigation, good usability and clickable links, readable search results. In terms of functionality Argos ticks all the boxes.
What we’d love to see improved: Not all of the branding carries over from web to mobile – e.g. buttons. The store locator could be location-based e.g.”Nearest store to me now!” Perhaps additional location experiences such as location based promotions or local store updates.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of ARGOS mobile is and cast your vote below… http://argos.co.uk

What we loved: Offers users of a variety of devices a great mobile experience maintaining publisher branding. Layout and content is readble, useful and easy to consume with good size clickable links.
What we’d love to see improved: Shorter pages and less scrolling – better pagination! Inclusion of unique customer experiences/mobile promotions – e.g. more integration with the newspaper content such as QR codes from job pages.

Go mobile and tell us what your experience of THE GUARDIAN mobile is and cast your vote below… http://guardian.co.uk/

Mobile Lazy
Serving your PC website direct to mobile browsers is not friendly; it is ‘Mobile Lazy’! Your website will not recognise the mobile user’s real time location or their behaviour, you will not be able to consider the unique capabilities of the mobile device, you create barriers that prevent the consumer interacting easily with you and potentially a needlessly poor experience for your customer.

Neither should you assume that mobile friendly means dumbing down your website or brand and providing lowest-common-denominator output to cater for all devices. There are technologies out there, including Wapple’s, that allow you to present rich and dynamic content, whilst optimising the best experience possible for every single type of mobile phone and customer.

Mobile Friendly
A mobile-friendly website should present the same web company branding but one that is designed for small-screen display and browsing. It should take into account the mobility of the consumer and present only relevant information and content from the website for their ‘in-situ’ need.

It should interact with them for their unique device and provide mobile-specific opportunities such as location-based offerings. Interaction should be simple and easy with few clicks, forms should be low maintenance and contact numbers should display as click-to-call.

Here at Wapple we put a team together to visit a number of urls to determine exactly how friendly or lazy some of these big brand websites are across a spectrum of mobile devices.
There is clearly a lot of knowledge to impart but it is not rocket science and over the coming weeks I intend to demonstrate exactly how easy it is to become Mobile Friendly by publishing examples of websites that are Mobile Friendly and those that are utterly Mobile Lazy…you might be surprised by the results.

To get things kicked off, here is our first example Covergirl are…Mobile Friendly

1/10: Presented the PC website – site breaks/crashes the mobile browser so nothing displays

2 or 3/10: Presented the PC website – site takes too long to load and/or has key elements that are not supported by many devices. Mobile consumer compelled to leave

4: Presented the PC website – pages render on mobile device but the website does not present most relevant content for mobile users. Also zooming in for content and out for context is frustrating.

5/10: Redirected to a mobile site but the mobile experience is basic and the user experience poor which is not in line with digital branding of website. Lowest common denominator approach

6 or 7/10: Redirected to a great mobile site for smart phones but the experience is poor on older devices. And /or the content is not relevant for mobile users

8 or 9/10: Redirected to a great mobile site experience that accommodates consumers on the move no matter what device they have.

10/10: Served mobile relevant content from the website domain and underlying application with an experience catered for mobile users. The site is optimised for all mobile devices old and new. They included unique usability for the mobile customer eg instore experiences, scan QR codes or promotions, mobile campaigns.