The Mobile Web: Is It Humpty Dumpty?
By: Barry Welford
Zec points to an interesting item by Information Week on Google’s Mobile User Experience Strategy, which was the subject at a meeting of the New York City chapter of the Usability Professionals Association.
Google user experience designer Leland Rechis said, bluntly, that the mobile Web is Balkanized, “The Pangaea of the Web is gone.” And don’t expect this to change anytime soon, either. Thanks to carrier portals and off portal applications, there is no one mobile standard to develop for.
In the mobile world developers have to be prepared to optimize for different devices, browsers, languages, carriers, countries and cultures.
For those who haven’t heard about Pangaea, that’s the view that all Earth’s continents were originally connected and have separated through tectonic plate action.
Perhaps that resonates with the other Google PhDs but for most of us I think Humpty Dumpty provides a better simile. You remember the rhyme:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Some may resist but just check out a New York Times item on Big Money in Little Screens:
“The biggest growth areas are clearly going to be in the mobile space,” Eric E. Schmidt, chief executive of Google, said when asked about new opportunities at a conference here this week. In case his point wasn’t clear, Mr. Schmidt drove it home: “Mobile, mobile, mobile.”
With everyone fighting over their piece of the egg, who cares about putting it back together?