# tagged: context, mobile9 Comments
Is ‘Mobile’ Doing More Harm Than Good?
For the last few months, I’ve been wondering if the term ‘mobile’ might be causing more trouble than it’s worth. Judging from this morning’s tweet from Mark Boulton, I’m not alone:
Thinking ‘mobile’ web is a big, fat red herring. Just like ‘apps’ was a few years ago. Next year, it’ll be something else.
While I’m not willing to go quite as far as that, I do think the term has become loaded with historical assumptions that are no longer true.
Originally, it worked out alright. ‘Mobile’ came to encompass both the device and the context of use in one fell swoop. It could do that, because their wasn’t a lot of diversity in the kinds of devices you could call ‘mobile’. In addition, those devices lacked the capability of offering a full-web experience. ‘Mobile’ use was pretty clearly defined because to be quite honest – the devices weren’t capable of offering much more.
Fast-forward to today. Now, using the historical definition of a ‘mobile’ device, we have smart phones, tablets, even netbooks – all of which are substantially more capable of providing a rich, full-web experience than their ‘mobile’ ancestors. As a result, there is much more variety in ‘mobile’ – both in terms of device type and use case. The device and the context no longer go hand-in-hand, they must be decoupled.
The problem, though, is that we can’t just eliminate the term. An earlier tweet by Aral Balkan is just as accurate:
I feel there’s a real danger that the “no mobile web” meme will translate to “we don’t have to rethink interactions for mobile”
There is a difference in how you use the web on these new devices and there is a ‘mobile’ context out there somewhere – it’s just not as clearly defined as it once was. We can’t ignore the differences in use. We owe our users the best browsing experience possible, regardless of context or device and that means that we have to find and embrace those differences.
So what term should we use? I have no idea. This is something I’ve been wrestling with for a few months now, and I have yet to find a term that I feel is sufficient – a term that accurately portrays this new medium without implying too much, or too little.
If this seems like I’m quibbling over semantics, well, I guess I am. As the saying goes though, “Words have meaning and names have power.”
9 Smart Things Were Said
So weird. I just attended Web Directions Unplugged and I came away with the exact same thought and blogged about it after my first day there. Personally, I like “Device Development”. That’s the feeling I came away with.
I have an awesome idea for the term: “mobile.”
All the devices have one thing in common, portability. How about the “Portable Web”?
Why don’t we just continue to call it ‘mobile’? That’s what it is. No need to overthink this. ;)
“Mobile”. It means people (and devices) that are on the move. That doesn’t necessarily tell you what the context IS, but it gives you a pretty good idea of what it usually ISN’T (ginormous 27″ screens, quiet backgrounds, full keyboards+numpad/mice, power from the wall, elbow room).
The problem comes in when it stops being mobile, but still doesn’t have a “desktop” experience. Watching people navigate YouTube via a Wii-mote is hilarious and painful. Wait til they put screens on those internet-ready refrigerators (which of course sync with your mobile so you can check what’s IN the fridge when you’re actually in the grocery store, and the recipe in another panel). Wait til those GPS thingies in our cars starts offering complete internet via spoken interface instead of just touch.
We’re in for hell of a ride, and we’ll look like crap whenever we get stop to get off.
I’ve been reading @Fling’s book and I see a similar issue with “context” in that it’s used to mean multiple, closely related things that are getting less closely related as the medium matures (and I think Brian would agree with that). There’s physical context such as lighting conditions or being bounced around on a bumpy bus ride. And there’s mental context which has been brilliantly addressed by Indi Young’s Mental Models. And there’s other stuff in between; is your bus ride is noisy in addition to bumpy that presents both a physical and a mental distraction to your overall context.
But we have to call these things something. And language functions on abstraction. What we call “love” is way more complex than can be truly summed up with a single word. Ditto for “mobile” and for “context”. In order to be able to speak of these things at all we’ve got to deal with a less than perfect representation of reality. The question then becomes what is acceptably imperfect.
To a large extent, that has a lot to do with the audience. Are we talking with clients or with fellow web professionals? It’s simply annoying when CNN uses “HTML5″ the way lay people once used “Web 2.0″ but when the W3C codified such usage in an official logo, people got up in arms about it. Given the importance of syntax and standards in our industry, we may get more worked up about these sorts of linguistic issues than is truly justified.
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