The quest for more accessible Public Services - expectations of mobile Web!

[Scavenger]

One cannot underestimate the key role that the mobile Web is increasingly playing for businesses worldwide as they look for better channels to engage customers, provide services more efficiently and grow business. At the same time, growing consumer awareness of...

More... (http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/dotmobi/~3/Ufi3PHB1Bc0/the-quest-for-more-accessible-public-services-expectations-of-mobile-web.html)

[gogo]

this is really interesting !


...Our partner Interact Spa (http://www.interact.it/), an Italian company focusing on digital innovation and Web 3.0 applications, has studied the phenomenon and is now providing us with an interesting insight in the potential of Mobile Government, drawing some key learnings from the experience of the Italian Public Administration with the mobile Web. The dotMobi design guidelines and tools like mobiReady (http://ready.mobi/) are used extensively in the study to identify the best examples of good mobile experience and provide recommendations for improvement to the less fortunate experiments.

In a series of 3 articles that we will be publishing on mobiThinking over the next 3 weeks, Interact´s General Manager Andrea Volpini explains what m-Government is and what are the challenges associated with developing more accessible mobile sites and exploiting the mobile Web to provide better and more efficient services to the community.

The first introductory article is already online on MobiThinking (http://mobithinking.com/white-papers/mobile-government-forefront-public-services)...

continues...on a sour note, the style guides and ready.mobi scores are the very thing dotmobi abandoned when they cancelled the trustmark / compliance requirements for mobi domains.

[Vance Hedderel]

dotMobi hasn't abandoned the style guides or the mobiReady scores. The style guides and scores -- compliance -- are the basis of any good mobile experience and are built into how the dotMobi product suite operates. Any site constructed with the site.mobi builder or made mobile with Instant Mobilizer are done according to the dotMobi style guides and should score well on mobiReady

Also, the option for dotMobi to enforce compliance remains in place; nothing has been rewritten in the T&Cs for domain purchases to remove potential consequences for failure to adhere to compliance. Is dotMobi actively pursuing it right now? No. Could dotMobi actively pursue it at a later date? Yes.

[gogo]

dotMobi hasn't abandoned the style guides or the mobiReady scores. The style guides and scores -- compliance -- are the basis of any good mobile experience and are built into how the dotMobi product suite operates. Any site constructed with the site.mobi builder or made mobile with Instant Mobilizer are done according to the dotMobi style guides and should score well on mobiReady

Also, the option for dotMobi to enforce compliance remains in place; nothing has been rewritten in the T&Cs for domain purchases to remove potential consequences for failure to adhere to compliance. Is dotMobi actively pursuing it right now? No. Could dotMobi actively pursue it at a later date? Yes.

I believe the spec for the compliance says it may not be arbitrary. Any enforcement at this point would be arbitrary. In practice there are no standards for .mobi domains, and in the recent webinar - available to all to listen to on the web or download at http://www.domainerdeveloper.com/2009/08/mtld-conference-call.html- Dotmobi CEO Trey Harvin made the Dotmobi standards sound irrelevant if not an impediment to users who wanted to just target particular phones - the word he used was, as I recall, "fragmentation."

Vance, isn't it time your company issued a formal statement on this and emailed all .mobi registrants?

And could you also please inform us of the average ready score of the sites using Instant Mobilizer? There are reports on here of very low scores indeed.

[Vance Hedderel]

"And could you also please inform us of the average ready score of the sites using Instant Mobilizer? There are reports on here of very low scores indeed."

Instant Mobilizer uses DeviceAtlas to identify which handset is calling for data. The program will deliver larger pages when the handset can handle them, but the mobiReady score does not reflect that (which is part of what Trey was discussing on the call you referenced and I'll touch more on in a second). In other words, depending on what handset is being emulated, the same site can score very differently. If the site thinks you are using a low-end phone, it will likely score higher than if it thinks it's being viewed on a high-end Nokia because DeviceAtlas will indicate that the Nokia can handle larger data, like large photos, more efficiently.

In short, the issue is with mobiReady, not with Instant Mobilizer. From the time of the original mobiReady build three years ago, the handset world has changed significantly in how much data it can handle. mobiReady was designed to ensure sites met the most common possible criteria to work on practically any handset.

The mobiReady report reflects the three compliance rules: XHTML-MP programming, no frames and no "w-w-w"; those three items remain relevant in that they'll ensure a site is likely to work well, no matter the handset. However, if you're building sites to be seen specifically on an Android or iPhone platform, those compliance rules become irrelevant (which is what Trey was touching on re: fragmentation). This does not make the .mobi domain any different in its work of identifying mobile-ready content ... but if you're an eTrade and know via your proprietary research that the majority of your customers use an iPhone, your approach to programming your site is going to be different than a company sending out a site to the larger general public.

The mobiReady report (or even a generalized mobile crawl) can't address those kinds of issues currently but they are ones we have as part of our roadmap.

[gogo]

The mobiReady report reflects the three compliance rules: XHTML-MP programming, no frames and no "w-w-w"; those three items remain relevant in that they'll ensure a site is likely to work well, no matter the handset. However, if you're building sites to be seen specifically on an Android or iPhone platform, those compliance rules become irrelevant (which is what Trey was touching on re: fragmentation). This does not make the .mobi domain any different in its work of identifying mobile-ready content ... but if you're an eTrade and know via your proprietary research that the majority of your customers use an iPhone, your approach to programming your site is going to be different than a company sending out a site to the larger general public.
=.

Vance, thanks for the detailed information about Instant Mobilizer - clearly it functions in a way that is more nuanced than people might assume.

But I'm sure you realise - and intend ?- that your statement above about dotmobi's three core rules becoming irrelevant completely contradicts the entire basis of the mobi domain: that there should always be at least one page available for the lowest common denominator device. That does not stop anyone creating device-specific sites at all - in addition to the basic page, so no one is ignored. It's a bit weird from a business perspective to ignore customers, a bit like having no office answerphone.

Trey's statement sounded like a 180 degree Uturn. The point of dotmobi was to guarantee a decent basic experience for all mobile users so that people would trust - and expect - the domain. With no guarantee that mobile delivers mobi content what reason does it have to exist, except to keep paying the bills?