Mobile Apps vs Mobile websites
With the proliferation of Smartphones around us, the perception margins between mobile websites and mobile Apps are becoming increasingly blur. As a User Experience (UX) professional, I happen to speak to several people everyday — including Business professionals, Designers, Software engineers, homemakers to students and kids. I often noticed that a majority of those people interchangeably starting to refer to mobile websites as “App”.
While speaking to industry partners, I observed a trend of reducing attention towards Usability testing of mobile websites. Thanks to abundance of vendors offering website development, the responsiveness of mobile websites is a given. User testing of mobile websites design is increasingly taking the back seat. In some organizations, designers are not designing the mobile websites anymore, it’s just the bug-fixing of broken views for some web pages. It’s either the user testing of the desktop websites or mobile apps which seems more important to the project teams. Thus the user testing of mobile websites has eclipsed.
However, there is an implicit user expectation, the mobile websites must be usable. In fact, users’ expectation from the mobile websites has gone higher than before. People expect app-like interaction from mobile websites i.e. large buttons, minimal text, etc. The links, drop-down menus etc. are being seen as things of the past. To support this by an example, I will quote a real-life incident. In my UX testing sessions for one of the mobile websites (a comparatively rare occurrence these days), some respondents were not happy with the drop-down hamburger menu. Some of them, expected the menu to slide out, just like it happens in the apps they used. They have a fair reason to not like the drop-down, as it almost completely overlays the website content which makes them feel like ‘loss of control’.
Therefore, from an implementation perspective, the responsive concept seems to be in some kind of an extinction mode. It is falling short of the users’ expectation, and I am expecting to see and hear more from people who participate in user studies at UXArmy.
Moving forward, one of the two things would happen — either the mobile websites would began to look more like Mobile Apps or, the Mobile Apps would become the default standard for mobile platforms. In my opinion, and taking into account of the cost and time challenges in projects, I see the possibility of the later being higher. Would this lead to elimination of mobile websites for Smartphones altogether? I don’t know, we would witness this only in the time to come.
I discovered that a couple of others have echoed similar views on this topic. For instance, Is Responsive Design Still Not Worth It? by Tom Ewer way back in 2012. Also another more recent one from July, 2014 You May Be Losing Users If Responsive Web Design Is Your Only Mobile Strategy by Maximiliano Firtman.
A bit off topic, for new UX Designers, I just listed few factors that need to be kept in mind when tasked with designing a Mobile Apps or a Mobile websites.
- Website is Content oriented while App is Task oriented.
- Understand the App Design Guideline of each platform. For websites the focus is more on the readability and ease of filling forms, etc. You can read Android App Design Guidelines and iOS App Design guidelines.
- App has lot more gestures to work with to which Smartphone users are used to compared to mobile websites.
- Use of extra devices and sensors (e.g. NFC, accelerometer, gyroscope, etc) is possible in a mobile App not in a mobile website.
- Branding aspects in app apply to many different UI controls beyond Text colors, Buttons & Logo.
