I have an amazon.com account and I buy Kindle books. I don’t have a Kindle, so I read those books on my iPhone or my iPad. And I share the account with my husband, so sometimes he buys Kindle books and reads them on his iPhone. Sometimes we want to read the same book, sometimes my daughter wants to read one of our books on her iPod Touch.
I don’t think we’re a particularly unusual tech family in this way. Now, bear with me for a moment while I explain my frustration with Amazon’s separate mobile site.
I buy a Kindle book with one-click. That means the book is sent to my default device which is my iPad because I can’t set the order of the list. It’s just alphabetical and I can’t rename my devices once I’ve put them in (another post topic perhaps).
So, the book goes to my iPad, but I read on my iPhone. I happen to be somewhere other than my computer when I fire up my Kindle app on my iPhone and see that my Kindle book isn’t there. No problem, I just need to go to amazon.com, to my account and send the book to my iPhone.
I open up safari, type in amazon.com and am redirected to Amazon’s mobile site. It does look nice on my small screen. I click on my account, log in and I can’t get to my digital downloads. They didn’t put that on the mobile site.
Now I have to click on the link to the real site, deal with the fact that it’s not designed for my device at all, and make my way down into my account to get my book on my iPhone.
The designers obviously forgot about all of us Kindle app owners (how many thousands of people is that?).
Why am I even talking about this? Because Jakob Nielsen recently posted his advice on mobile user experience. The summary is quoted below:
Good mobile user experience requires a different design than what’s needed to satisfy desktop users. Two designs, two sites, and cross-linking to make it all work.
I completely agree with the first sentence. You do need to serve a different design to different screen sizes. But I completely disagree with the second sentence. Two sites means that one will almost always be a cut down version of the other. There is barely enough time to keep one site for a business up to date and working, how are we going to find the time to do two?
Wait a minute, this is giving me a huge sense of deja vu. We web designers have been through this before, back in the bad old days when we wanted pixel perfect layout and we had to serve a different site for different browsers. How did that work out?
We decided that was a waste of time and went against the very nature of the web. The whole idea is that we can publish the information once (the HTML) and we can make it look like we want for different users (the CSS).
That’s what responsive design is all about. It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there.
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