Differences between desktop and mobile web experiences and what it means for designers

One of the obvious differences between desktop and mobile pages is the size of the web pages. The most common desktop screen resolution is 1024x768 pixels while the most popular mobile screen resolution is 320x480 pixels. Therefore, some of the web sites’ features and assets have to be sacrificed in order to improve mobile usability. For example, most of the web adverts are off the mobile screen or some small adverts pop-up of the bottom of the screen. There are not any blank white spaces on both sides of the web content as the designers try to maximize the space of the mobile screens. Sidebar navigation links are replaced with expandable menus. Finger tapping differs from precising mouse clicking as it requires larger targets on the screen. Therefore, mobile designs incorporate large rectangular icons instead of active links. Some of the blank fields of the forms are filled automatically in order to ease the user not to finger type. Mobile designs encourage selection instead of typing. Radio buttons and check boxes are popular in mobile web pages. Web assets such as images, photos, videos and texts are shrunken in order to accommodate smaller screen. Pinch-zooming technique, employed in Smartphones, helps the user to enlarge mobile web information. Complex hierarchy of the web sites, which is consisted of many levels, is simplified in mobile web pages. Therefore, the most important information is displayed on the screen which guarantees that the user does not get lost. Designers usually use “em” or % font unit because of their scalability which is useful in mobile devices.

 Because of the differences in mobile and computer operating systems, some of the mobile and desktop web file formats are incompatible. For example, mobile video includes formats such as 3GP and MPEG-4. MPEG-4 is a video format supported by computer operating systems, too. 3GP file format is a multimedia container format. It can transfer data between the 3G mobile phones and the web. The video captured from the 3G mobile phone has .3gp file extension and can be shared over the Internet. Adobe Flash Lite is a lightweight version of Adobe Flash Player, developed Adobe Systems. This version is intended for mobile phones. Mobile audio includes formats such as MP3 and AAC.