Given the incredibly fast-growing number of people who own a smartphone -and of course browse the web through their devices- one could imagine that the mobile web provides amazing, good or at least decent experiences.
But that’s not true.
The latest devices are powerful enough to allow creative agencies and developers to draft astonishingly rich pages, to exploit the touch-screen capabilities and to surprise the users with brilliantly designed websites.
Mobile users are already looking for good stuff: in fact mobile sales (for those companies who jumped on the train) are a key driver for investment, the UK m-commerce market only worth £122 million in 2009 and growing…
Sadly, the reality is that if you do a quick search on the web with your mobile, you will find that many companies still don’t have a mobile-optimized version of their website, relying on their old desktop version to do the job, and missing a good opportunity to shine.
That is why, last summer, we decided to launch a tool to help the mobile users to discover good mobile websites and rate them: an application, currently available for free on the Android Market, called WorksOnMobile.
People can have their revenge on poorly-working websites by putting a “FAIL” stamp on the page, and at the same moment sending a tweet about this on the WorksOnMobile feed.
Similarly, websites which work on mobile will get a “WIN” vote.
But this wasn’t enough. In order to let people find easily the good websites we created a customized search engine: it shows the positively rated websites first, and puts the not-working-on-mobile ones at the bottom of the list.
Once one finds a good website, it’s easy to save it to bookmarks or open it in the default browser, and carry on the navigation.
We launched a website too, to share our experience in creating good mobile websites: tips about loading time, images optimizing and redirecting, and a few reviews of websites visited through common smartphones, to show everyone what browsing the mobile web is like: worksonmobile.com.
We hope we can help in raising the awareness that users deserve good mobile websites, and brands should hurry to catch the opportunity!