Last week we launched the first in a series of posts exploring the benefits of mobile websites. This second post dives into one such benefit: The Mobile Web Builds on Existing Habits.

One common decision that a business faces when deploying a mobile strategy is whether it should place a higher priority on developing a native smartphone application or on creating a mobile website. One of the key advantages of having a mobile website is that it allows you to capitalize on the existing behavior of your customers because of the similarities in user experience between the mobile and the tethered web.

For example, consumers are accustomed to opening their Firefox or Safari browsers and typing the URL to get to a website on the PC-based web. They are also accustomed to searching for information via a keyword within a search engine. Likewise, it is easy to enter a URL into a mobile browser or search by keyword using Google or Bing on a mobile device. In contrast, the process to search for and discover an application in the App Store, download it, sign up, and finally use the app is quite cumbersome.

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I’ve noticed a common usability problem appearing on a number of mobile web apps. These mobile optimized sites often utilize advanced technologies such as JavaScript and HTML5 to simulate  a rich, “near native” application experience, but often overlook the simplest usability matters, making the user experience very poor. The problem I am referring to is the insufficient accommodation of standard browser navigation methods.

With mobile web apps, the UI presents a browser frame overlay, generating a different set of expectations from a user compared to a native app. This is true even if the web app closely resembles a native app. The main difference is that the user intuitively expects to be able to use the browser’s embedded navigational controls rather than only the integrated navigational elements of the mobile web app. This is particularly true for the ‘back’ operation. I’ve seen a number of mobile web applications where a‘back’ operation took  the user outside of the web app to the previously visited site, even though the user was multiple clicks into the web app. In essence, such design provides a forced abandonment sequence, which is certainly not desirable for any brand. And it is an unexpected and annoying result for the user.

As such, any mobile web application must accommodate browser navigation controls to provide a good user experience. If the mobile web application uses a native code wrapper to hide the browser’s frame, then obviously this no longer applies. However, a native wrapper is often not the entry point to a mobile web application.  So unless the sole distribution is the app store with the native wrapper, this will be a problem for your mobile web app (though beware – many Android handsets permanently embed the ‘Back’ operation into the handset, so you will still need to accommodate for that).

The bottom line is, if you are building a site that heavily utilizes JavaScript/HTML5 to create an experience similar to a native application, make sure you are not requiring your users to change their mobile browser navigation behavior. If you do, you may find that users abandon your site rather than change their behavior to adopt your ‘cutting edge’ mobile web experience.

I had the privilege of being a human dart board recently, on a Mobile Monday panel debating Mobile Web vs. Native Applications. There was strong interest in the discussion, with the 400+ seat venue overbooked. Trilibis Mobile’s perspective – that the mobile web is the platform that will dominate moving forward – was probably overly represented on this panel. But it’s pretty hard to argue against the historical trend of more open systems eventually winning out over the more closed ones. See the debate for yourself here.