1. with building
s
problem
compelling mobile services
Stefan Butlin CTO
November 3, 2008
Mobile Monday Mobile Search Mobile Monday Best search provider Commercial category
Global Winner 2008 Company of the 2008 UK Winner 2008 Winner 2008 Winner 2008
3. What’s so hard about mobile
websites?
Handset diversity
User identification Selling ads
Building audience Integrating SMS
Transcoders
Getting feedback
Testing
mobile search made social.
5. Handsets vary in every way
Markup language support
Browser vendor and version
Screen size and depth
Audio and video codecs
Input methods
mobile search made social.
6. Quirks we workaround
SonyEricssons oversize their text
some Nokias struggle with float
OperaMini used to centre images
some Samsungs display source CSS
Moto Razr has tiny page size limit
many browsers don’t know screen width
iPhone doesn’t always get display:none
mobile search made social.
7. Strategies
Lowest common denominator
Tough love
Conditional markup
Templating toolkits
Capability databases
WURFL
DeviceAtlas
Build your own
mobile search made social.
8. Taptu handset customisation
WURFL for the basics (screensize etc)
Augment with proprietary DB of browser
quirks
Group handsets into major classes
Invest detailed design per class
Parameters handle variation within class
mobile search made social.
9. The Taptu social divide
iPhone/iClone (touch, ajax, big display)
midPhone (Nokia S60, Windows Mobile)
loPhone (Motorolas, xHTML mobile 1.0 etc)
blackberry (in a class all of its own)
(and no support for WML1.0)
mobile search made social.
10. Transcoders
Novarra
get whitelisted where possible
try cache-control: no-transform
find real UA in x-Device-User-Agent
Google (GWT)
put meta tags in to specify mobile versions
Keep an eye on your logs
mobile search made social.
12. Indigestible Cookies
Cookie support is hard to read
First challenge is getting cookies
back at all
Then try getting cookies back after
users exit their browsers
Surprisingly few phones persist
cookies after rebooting
mobile search made social.
13. Carriers know who’s calling
Carriers proxy every request
Possible to have user ID added to
HTTP headers
200+ carriers worldwide is a lot of
deals
but not on WiFi
mobile search made social.
14. UserID - Some Taptu choices
URL session management
Cookies where they work
Optimistic user-account creation
Designed for massive churn in user
records
mobile search made social.
16. Testing Strategies
Setup in every country, buy every phone
Sample your home market and hope
Read your feedback forums
Enroll local mobile retailers
Check out DeviceAnywhere
mobile search made social.
17. Taptu Testing
growing collection of in-house handsets
DeviceAnywhere
test any handset, many markets
enables outsourcing
bulk screenshot collection
automated regression testing
can’t spot browser quirks, but
spots missing content, wrong pages, crashes
mobile search made social.
18. Give your users a voice
Host feedback forums
Brace for honesty!
Cultivate advocates
Surprising demand for just chat
Run mobile-friendly surveys
mobile search made social.
19. Measure Everything
mobile stats are an inaccurate science
filter on “detectably repeat users”
IP for country of origin only
Carriers proxy everything
Norway comes in high
3rd party analytics solutions available
review how unique users are identified
mobile search made social.
20. thank you
Stefan Butlin CTO
November 3, 2008
Mobile Monday Mobile Search Mobile Monday Best search provider Commercial category
Global Winner 2008 Company of the 2008 UK Winner 2008 Winner 2008 Winner 2008