A little mobile discipline, please!

W3C published a couple of months ago a set of best practices on how to improve the User Experience of mobile web content [via]. That is a relevant approach, since the mobile web content at the moment has a very varied quality especially from the usability and the accessibility point of view.

Users seem to be happy (and sometimes surprised) about being able to access any site from their mobiles, mostly because they are used to more limited access though a portal provided by their operators. But in the long run, this ‘happiness’ or ‘being surprised’ is not enough – when the mobile web is accessed by masses, the user experience of the content needs to be improved and more uniform.

The document includes altogether 60 practices that mainly address the accessibility and the usability of mobile web services. It’s a really good and detailed checklist for anyone who is developing web content also meant to be used on mobile phones. Thank you for bringing a little discipline and order to this jungle :). Marco Casario has summarized the main points of the document in his blog [via], so if you want a quick review of the content you may read it or the summary provided by W3C.

The Best Practices working group has also defined the Default Delivery Context. It is a definition that the designer can design for if (s)he does not know exactly on what kinds of devices her/his web content will be used, which is often the case with mobile web-content.

Finally all the web services that are designed to support the best practices defined in the document are planned to be mobileOK-certified. The mobileOK certificate would not necessarily be visible to the user, like the traditional web-certificates; it would be more like a technical certificate. I think a good idea would be to make it visible when the website is viewed from a normal web browser and invisible when the site is viewed from a mobile device.