The Mobile vs Desktop User Experience
Manoj kumar | 7th February 2018
Internet Experience over a mobile device might often feel compromising. On one hand, it offers portability and ease of access, but on the other hand, it limits the features that are available on the desktop version. Let’s discuss about such experiences.
One of the key factors is the low bandwidth for data transfer. Although 4G services seem to be competent with the high speed internet needs, but they still fail to provide wire-like lightning fast internet speed. Moreover, there is no type-input or keyboard and touch inputs are not as good as the keyboard inputs. Keyboards are probably more accurate with less error occurrence and provide better input experience.
Apart from these, mobile devices do not offer mouse input which is a very used-to feature for accessing internet.
Another big difficulty with the mobile devices is the lack of space in terms of display size. Although mobile devices offer high resolution displays, but it’s not often usable for so many purposes. This often creates a problem between design and development team on the issues like font sizes etc.
It has been seen that developers often do not follow usability guidelines for mobile devices and sometimes work independently losing the web standards. This can also result into inconsistency issues with bad user experience.
The web standards are far more improved as compared to the mobile environment. We still find mobile UI not as improved as the desktop versions.
Challenges for Mobile Devices
In an experiment performed to study how user feels while accessing the web and mobile, the result was surprising. Mobile and web users had different opinion. Mobile users with significantly smaller displays complained having to force their mind to memorise so many things at a glance which was not the case with the desktop. Users found it twice as difficult as desktop to read and interpret information.
The experiment was performed in a lab with no external distractions for users.
It was also concluded that lack of viewing area affected the understanding of the context for the readers. Moreover, one needs to be more sharp with their memory to grasp things while reading on a mobile device.
The research also concluded that in order to achieve compactness in the mobile user experience, the interface must be minimalist with no elaboration of content.
