Last Saturday, my family and I were coming home from playing volleyball right about the time when Michigan was playing Northwestern in football. We tried to get the game on the radio, but the AM station was too staticy and the FM stations were covering the Tigers game. No problem! We’ll just get the audio stream of the game on my smartphone and we’ll be fine. Except that seemingly simple task turned into a long-winded quest.
A Story of Frustration…
First, I was confronted by a decision, whose answer was not quite clear: use the college game day mobile website or the regular Michigan mobile site. I chose the game day mobile site (it was game day after all), but it was mostly devoted to articles and videos covering the games of the day (which was nice, but not what I was looking for). Time to try to Michigan sports mobile site…
The Michigan sports mobile site showed a list of the games Michigan was currently playing. It showed the football game as live, so I clicked on that link and it displayed what supposedly was a game tracker. The score was at the top — but it was displayed as the score per quarter, which had to be decoded to get the current score. Plus, the play by play was just a list of text that you had to scroll down to see the current play (instead of updating at the top). A link to the audio stream was nowhere to be seen. Onward to the next stop…
Time to try the normal Michigan sports website. I knew I had seen free audio streaming there… How to get there from the mobile site though? My browser was now defaulting to the mobile site… Looking all around for a link to the normal site, I finally found the link buried at the bottom of the page. Once on the normal site, I clicked on football link, and got a page full of articles reviewing last week’s game and previewing the current game. Ugg! By this time, I was pretty frustrated, but was also determined to hear the game (it probably would have been easier to just wait until we got home).
Finally I found a link buried in the side bar to get live audio streaming. After several more clicks (because the “listen to the game live” link didn’t just go right to the audio stream), I made it to a page with a dead plugin. Flash. The streaming audio plugin was Flash, which doesn’t work on iphones. Are you kidding me? Well, we had Aaron’s phone, which is Android, so I tried to retrace my steps (with a lot of backtracking) and finally got to the audio stream, which we were able to listen to for 10 minutes before we got home.
Making a Mobile Website Work
The point of this story is to think about what you think your mobile users may want to do on your site and present them with easy ways to complete those actions. On a sports website, getting schedules, current scores and listening to live streams (or watching videos) are probably top actions from a mobile device. If you’re not sure, taking a look at the analytics for incoming keyword searches, click trails and top pages on game days can give you more insights.
Complete mobile website failure. Most people wouldn’t bother to go through the number of steps I went through. A few tries to get the information and they would go elsewhere (which I actually did, but there aren’t any live audio streaming iphone apps for Michigan football either — probably due to licensing?). Mobile websites need to be designed completely differently from regular websites. The information people are looking for on a mobile site (on a small screen, out and about) differs from what they’re willing to sit through on a laptop or computer (longer browsing time).
What tips do you have to make mobile websites more successful?
(photo by music2work2, on Flickr)