Many websites automatically redirect iPhones to mobile versions of their sites. These mobile sites often deliver limited content, wasted space, and eliminate zooming. Below are mobile versions and the real version as seen on the iPhone.
As you can see, a lot of content has been removed for Amazon’s mobile site, and the navigation has been tremendously cut down. Instead of being able to browse through Amazon’s offerings, the user is taken to a landing page focused on a few book covers instead.
While most users may appreciate one headline instead of the option to read many, ESPN automatically directs you to the mobile site instead of the classic version.
The mobile site takes away categories completely.
All of the world’s headlines have managed to be shrunk into four headlines.
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32 Comments to “Mobile Optimized Websites, More Harm Than Good? 7 Sites Compared”
The CNN one is a friggin joke. It angers me to no end.
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@Referee
Completely agree. Auto-directing iPhone readers to dumbed down versions of their sites is an asinine practice.
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On the CNN page you can go to the bottom and click on a link that moves you to the normal CNN site.
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Not only does the idea of these mobile sites annoy me, but Apple has blatantly tried to squash this with the iPhone’s browser (As you mention) — and these companies/publications still do this ? I don’t get it. It’s backwards !
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I don’t know. Some of them aren’t bad. When I’m stuck in traffic they are a lot easier for me to load up.
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Would it be too difficult to ask the user one time upon arrival ? mobile or standard ?
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I can see the future people. Gizmodo is going to get rid of the forcing people to the mobile site. Just you wait and see.
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I go back and forth on this, most likely because I still use an Edge iPhone and there are times the slimmed down loading times are appreciated.
The best practice is probably to never auto-redirect, but perhaps offer an easy way to access the mobile version if the iPhone (or other mobile browser if appropriate) is detected (see Amazon screen shot). After all, users could easily just add a bookmark if they want to consistently access the site through the mobile interface.
And if a site *does* force the user to the mobile site, they really need to allow an easy way to get to the full site.
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Something like how myspace.com does. It asks you what the mobile version or the full version
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I hate to say it but this is yet another way Windows Mobile outshines the iPhone. There’s a setting available in Internet Explorer that makes the website see the phone browser as the desktop version so visitors aren’t pushed to the watered down mobile version of the site.
*sigh*
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@Ryan: Exactly ! Why can’t they land me on a page that allows me to choose?
1) I don’t want to have to search for a “go-to-mobile” or “go-to-standard” link
2) They could simply make the landing page a big iPhone optimized page that allows users to choose one time.
How difficult would this be?
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Google does this also with most of their applications (calendar, etc). There is no easy way to switch back to the ‘normal’ view and the ‘mobile’ view is extremely limited in functionality.
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I find it more interesting that they have labled the desktop versions of their website as “classic”. More evidence that Apple has changed our world with this damn iPhone.
[written on a 3g iPhone] ~f
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[and in the process of submitting my previous post, safari crashed]
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The reason that many of these sites have ‘light’ version of their sites is because for 90% of the users, they don’t use everything. Good web programmers (I don’t claim to be one) know that in order to design highly used sites, as little information should be presented to the user as possible while giving them access to as much as they can.
Amazon and eBay still have their searches which is the main feature, Yahoo’s spash page has the stocks (cause nobody ever uses the site anyways), Gizmodo and other news sites present headlines which users can drill down into.
I say: Good for these sites for taking the time to generate and write these lighter sites. If I want to see the main one, I should have the ability to but for the most part I wish the main loading sites in a lot of these cases were lighter than they currently are. I hate it when I have to wait for 30 seconds because somebody’s flash ad has a problem loading or my 17 tabs that I load at once take up most of my bandwidth and they take forever to load.
All these sites present users with enough information to do the basics of the site without having to load the type of content that is on their main landing page. If you want to load the main site, many of them have that ability (I said many, not all), but as you know, the 3g speeds that AT&T and Rogers provides is far from what they advertise.
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I have a feeling the majority of these pages are authored for Media types:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/media.html#media-types
The majority of devices in the world today are not iPhones, Androids, etc… The majority of phone plans today are not unlimited data. Pushing down ESPN or Amazon full page to a user who pays per kb downloaded is irresponsible.
The devices themselves could announce their identity as “Screen” not “Handheld” and be pushed the full page content.
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Is the point of modern digital life to simply bitch about everything, and then when we run out of things to bitch about, then we need to make up a full 2 page article bitching about nothing? This in turn forces me to bitch about your bitching. All quite unsavory if you ask me.
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Thank you for writing this article… ESPN’s iPhone site drives me completely bonkers. If I was only interested in sports scores, I would use the sportacular app. I go to ESPN.com for all the articles I can see at once on the main screen. Please stop redirecting me to this horrible iphone only site!
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There is a simple solution (at least for some sites, like CNN.) Instead of simply going to http://www.cnn.com, set a bookmark that goes to http://www.cnn.com/index.html explicitly.
P.
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These versions exist to provide UI elements that are big enough to click/touch with the iPhone’s touch screen and legible at the default size. For navigational purposes, they’re much easier to use than zooming in and out (and still having trouble clicking on a link with big fingers). The pages are also redesigned to match the iPhone’s UI.
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This is the stupidest f-ing thing I have ever seen. Why they would destroy a full-fleged browser by redirecting to these bull$hit sites is beyond me….
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fully agree…
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True, but you have to realize that EACH of these websites has their own application for iPhone App Store. So they are really just promoting more downloads for their apps. Which is normal. Besides the mobile sites do not have as much content so they can load faster.
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This latest trend to dumb down sites for my iPhone is driving me nuts. I bought it expressly for its ability to render “normal’ pages as they are seen on the desktop. Sadly sites are dumbing them down to satisfy the lowest common denominator; cell phones with crappy browsers. I just wish most would at least provide a link to the “classic” version. When they don’t, I send them an email requesting they do.
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I actually found a site that I thought did a pretty good job with their mobile version. Circuit City of all places…I know that sounds hard to believe since I think their in bankruptcy. Last weekend while standing in a long line at Best Buy I decided to see if I could find the same product online cheaper a Circuit City which was just around the corner. Sure enough when I entered the website I was redirected to the mobile version of their site. To my surprise I was able to easily search for and find the product I was looking for. Even better than this I was able to find a lot of good product info such as price, features, product rating scores and even customer reviews!
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I can see the future people. Gizmodo is going to get rid of the forcing people to the mobile site. Just you wait and see..
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Thank you for writing this article…
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I think mobile optimized sites are a great idea. This idea of pulling and pinching your fingers on an iPhone is cool, but to use it constantly on a site with a lot of content is annoying. By creating mobile optimized sites, these companies are making me do less work to get to their content. It’s a usability issue that I’m glad they’ve addressed.
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Is there any way of stopping the browser defaulting to the web-version? http://itn.co.uk always goes to mobile version no matter what suffix you add to the address… dammit!
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I came upon on this write upwhile searching for a JB apps that is able
to mask the mobile safari as the browser type. I’m also annoyed by all
the mobile specific websites. If anybody happens to find the app and
repository please post.
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I came upon on this write up while searching for a JB app that is able
to mask mobile safari as the browser type. I’m also annoyed by all
the mobile specific websites. If anybody happens to find the app and
repository please post the relevant information.
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Check out trekkertime.com. It’s pretty sweet if you like traveling.
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