We live in an era where internet has jumped down in the pyramid of needs from luxury to being a necessity. With the ever increasing need of access to information, the primitive communication device has been pushed to its limits. Smartphones have acquired a significantly important place in our day to day life.
All business units, small or large, are trying to reach the masses, anyplace, anytime through the World Wide Web. Since mobile devices have much smaller screens as compared to desktop devices, three solutions have now emerged.
Content on the web can be accessed through mobile devices via,
A. Responsive web: a relatively new trend that adapts to the available device screen size and behaves accordingly.
B. Mobile website: essentially a lighter version of the entire website with limited content.
C. App: installed on the smartphone and does the job within the device and all data sent to web in lesser amount of time.
With such options available, making a decision as to which handheld device you want to choose for making data available becomes crucial. ‘WHAT SUITS YOUR BUSINESS THE BEST???’ is a the question you need to answer first. Through this blog I’m making an effort to compare the three methods that might help the teams who want to propose the right solution to the clients based on their needs.
A. Responsive Site:
This is a relatively new methodology that has brought in a lot of fluidity to a website. Depending on the device the user has with him, the website rearranges, rescales itself to provide the best possible output and utilization of the screen. The beauty of this method is that you have to develop it only once. For adding a feature or another item in the navigation, you just have to make changes in one place, only once. Irrespective of which device the user utilizes to retrieve content, he will always receive the updated information. Since it is a website, the application stores do not come into picture. It’s a channel for direct communication.
The method offers a lot of plus points, but at the same time, requires a special skill set in designing and implementing it. The handheld devices offer gesture based interactions, which are utilized for a better user experience. Since the responsive site is opened through a browser, there are a few restrictions on the gestures that a person uses. As the data placed in the responsive website has to be accessed every time you need it, the bandwidth plays a major role in keeping the user on the site.
Now, the question arises as to what are the types of businesses that should use this method? And the answer is quite simple - Businesses that keep changing the data on their websites very rapidly and periodically should use this method. Since the entire website is just rearranged in the smaller device, for easy access, the navigation should be more wide than deep (i.e. Wide navigation has a menu, but there are no submenu items. Deep navigation on the other hand may have up to but not limited to six levels of navigation. Some examples may include blogs, facts sites and news portals.)
B. Mobile Site:
Before the dawn of the Responsive websites; Smartphones were relatively new and the screen sizes were relatively smaller as compared to what we have today. The mobile sites were a better option, than just squeezing the entire desktop website into a small screen. As the latest trend in the website design was called Web2.0, the mobile websites soon got a name Web3.0! Web 3.0 has served the surfers on mobile phones for approximately 7 years now.
This method offers control over the content of the website. These websites have a prefix 'm.' instead of 'www.'. Mobile sites are constructed separately with limited functionality. In today’s language, we can refer to the mobile sites as light versions of the original sites. Since they open in a browser, mobile sites offer direct communication between the supplier and the client. Updates can be handled in one place and they get replicated across the globe.
On the other hand, mobile sites require special designs and developments. Also these are unable to serve well with deep navigations. Mobile sites were initially developed for the phones without touch-screens and hence the use of gestures is quite limited. Again, even though limited, mobile sites are still 'websites' and hence to access the data, the site has to be accessed every time.
However, with the rise of HTML 5, there is hardly any difference between the experience offered by the Responsive site and Mobile site on a handheld device.
A Mobile site should be used where there is a need to alter or optimize the content for mobile viewing. Even though it requires development on two fronts; normal website and mobile website, we should remember that these two devices cater to two different user groups and hence can be optimized for those groups.
Form based interactions; mailing etc. can be built into mobile sites. Also as these offer the advantage of being a website, periodically changing data sites can be built in this method.
C. Mobile App:
Mobile apps are the programs that focus on the function and optimize the data usage. Mobile apps are available for a specific function or a group of similar functions. The Verve, reports app store for apple having 1 million apps on October 22, 2013! Since the apps are installed in the memory of the device, the best use of gestures can be utilized in building superior user experiences. Because they are focused on one task alone, they only fetch the information that has been requested by the user instead of loading the entire website. Apps make the process faster, efficient and quick.
Development of the applications on the other hand is a different ball game. It needs the knowledge of native programming language of the device to build the best possible experience. Hybrid apps utilize technology that is compatible with all devices but at the same time need connectivity to perform their function the best. One major downside of the app is that the addition of any feature, if needs to be introduced, has to go through the application store. It greatly depends on the user's will to re-download the entire app.
Apps, because of their ability to remain focused, can be used for high interaction web applications, huge data management and for the purpose where media based interaction is required. Apps serve a specific purpose and can handle any kind of navigation, but preferably apps should be built for wide navigation for confusion-less function.
To summarize all, here is a small handy card that we can have in front of us for quick reference.
