TAG | mobile
Mobile is blowing up right now. The success of the iPhone and the Android operating system has forced educators and librarians to acknowledge this growing group of users. Now, suddenly, it seems that everyone is talking about it -on the list serves, in conference presentations, on online forums.
Mike and I started monitoring what sort of traffic was visiting the site last month. We weren’t surprised to find that we were being hit by lots of mobile devices. That is both good and bad. It is good in that students are using their handheld devices to find out more information on the library, and bad because we are ill equipped to deal with these users. Our current site isn’t mobile friendly. It is too link heavy and the print is too small. So, we started toying with a mobile redesign.
This is where we are right now. We are going for something with big buttons that are easy to press on a touch phone. We are also trying to feature services that users are most interested in up top, with those that are still in development on the bottom.
Mike and I attended an Illuminate session put on by Educause last week. In the session a group of mobile developers from North Carolina State University Library showed off their mobile site and shared some of the things that they learned. They said that known item searches were the most common -mainly books. They also said that students were interested in things like hours and computer availablity. They didn’t design anything new for the phone, rather they just optimized their current site for mobile users. What they kept saying was “mobilization, not microzation.” They said to focus on only essential relevant content, and to not bother with things like advanced search tools. They suggested that developers start with the services that make mobile sense, and limit the scope of information delivered. Lastly, they advised developers to talk to students and “get a reality check.”
This session was illuminating (see how I worked in the product name there?) because it confirmed that Mike and I were on the right track. We were already doing most of the things that they suggested. In our design scheme we tried to put things like hours right up front. We also made access to online help, via Libraryh3lp, one of the first things the user sees. Once we get Find Books going we will move it up too. Right now we are hampered by the fact that we can’t remove the CSS from the file, so we are not getting a good mobile display of our Find Books product. The site is hosted elsewhere, so we are stuck with the full version for now. Hopefully that will change soon.
In the meantime, I think that this thing is ready to go as a beta project. With just a few more tweaks here and there it should be ready for the public. As always, stay tuned….
Oh, and here are some of the links that the boys at North Carolina State University supplied us with:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mobilepress/ - a site that helps with blog mobilization
http://www.libsuccess.org/index.php?title=M-Libraries - the mobile libraries wiki
http://wurfl.sourceforge.net/ -an XML configuration file which contains information about capabilities and features of many mobile devices. It helps you tell what each phone is capable of handling. This is helpful when determining what to display.
http://journal.code4lib.org/articles/2055 -a useful article from code4lib on mobile development.
