Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

CIL2010: Mobile Tips and Practices

I was part of this panel and presented a Mobile Services Primer for Public Libraries. You can see my slides below:

Jason Clark from Montana State University talked about Terra. This is a project from the MSU Libraries. You shouldn’t expect that you’re going to bring something into mobile and have the same presentation that you would on a desktop browser environment. LifeOnTerra to LifeOnTerra/m. You need to think long and hard about which pieces of the site would come down and work in a mobile setting. What is the essence of the site? We’re getting used to interface interaction too — pinch, drag, zoom, spin…these are things that we’re not used to doing for desktop design. Think about white space too. On a mobile site, white space works differently. You also need to consider the economy of language. Test the site across a couple of different browsers.. His favorite resources are cleanCSS, jQTouch, iUi, and Chad Haefele created a form that lets you generate a mobile website by typing in the different parts of your site and uses the iUi to create the site.

Kim Griggs and Laurie Bridges from Oregon State University talked about the OSU Mobile Library Team. Their site is http://m.library.orst.edu. They have a mobile page that shows current computer availability in the library. (!!!) Other countries are ahead of the U.S. in mobile penetration. 51% of their undergraduates have web-enabled phones. They looked at smart phones vs. feature phones. The difference is that smart phones (Android, Palm Pre, iPhone) have keypads/boards, web browsers, powerful processors, and large screens. Feature phones have constrained processors and less powerful browsers and processors. Their website is optimized for both of those options. Their mobile site gets 99 unique visitors a day. Only 4% of them are feature phones. Users of mobile devices and those using accessibility devices to access the web have the same issues and problems accessing sites and services. You can optimize your site for mobile devices, or you can miniaturize your site, both of which have problems. The other approach is to create a mobile version of your site, which takes more work but results in a better user experience. You an also design for device-specific phones — e.g. NYPL has a device optimized for the iPhone. She showed University of Arizona’s mobile site, using something called Adaptation (e.g. mobile serving), to create a mobile friendly site for their users of different devices. You can use media types to deliver content to a wide range of phones. Not all mobile browsers support all media types, which is a major problem (Flash, anyone?). You can use the handheld media type to link to a mobile-specific style sheet. You can also auto-detect the user agent (user’s device type) and redirect to an appropriate version or layout of your site. Any kind of device specific layout should absolutely provide a link back to the regular version of the site — don’t force them! NCSU uses an auto-detect tool called WURFL (wireless universal resource file). This is an XML file that contains the detection info for hundreds of wireless device types. It’s maintained by an open source community. There is the “viewport” tag, the “iPhone CSS” tag, and the “apple-touch icon” tag too. There’s no point in creating these mobile sites if your users can’t find them. Practice good search engine optimization. Tell people you have the site, redirect, and link the story to your local news to help spread the word.

cil2010, computers in libraries