13 June 2011

The Slippery Finger Dance

Over a year ago NostraChuckus divined it:

Foretellings
My advertising/marketing predictions and not-technical-because-I’m-not-a-tech-guy recommendations:

  1. The visual power of the web will fade as more people use handheld devices.  Goodbye, fancy-schmancy web sites. People will get bored sifting through it all when they can find what they need with their smartphones.
  2. image How this will play out, I don’t know – but the ‘web’ needs to be rethought.  Accessing a page on a desktop or laptop is not the same as accessing it on a smartphone.  There will have to be two separate ‘webs’ for large screens, small screens. People will get very tired very fast clumsily negotiating bulky pages on handheld devices. Usability cannot be ignored.  Laptops and Desktops will only be utilized for deep research or visual treats. 

Google, of course, is on top of it.  I was goofing around with my blogspot settings, and found one giving you the option of reformatting your  blog for smartphones, making it simple to read (although I’d rather have darker fonts for older eyes).  It looks something like this:

image

Advertisers with unwieldy consumer-oriented websites (and 99% of websites are unwieldy on a smartphone) had better jump all over this.  Smartphone and Tablet users don’t like having to do the slippery sloppy finger dance when all they want is information.

More from that May 2010 post:

With the exception of the workplace, smartphones (along with iPads and Kindles or something like them) might just make desktops and laptops and the web as we know it obsolete.  If ‘being connected’ mostly means communicating with friends, doing simple search, reading the news - then all that’s really needed is a smartphone. 

And the more people use smartphones, the less they’ll tolerate silly graphical doodads mucking up their small  screens.

imageAnd this from Fast Company:

…The proportion of people who access the internet only through mobile devices will grow from 14 million in 2010 to 788 million by 2015. Meanwhile, the number of smart phones will rise from about 500 million today to 2.5 billion.

Now I’m off to see how this post looks on a smartphone.