Agile Development - A Product Owner's Story

According to a recent survey conducted by iCrossing, 84 percent of respondents said they expect sites they visit frequently to provide a dedicated mobile version. In the UK there are over 76 million active mobile phones in circulation and 15% of those are used on a regular basis for surfing the internet. The Mobile Web isn’t just the ability to access existing web sites from a mobile device. Successful mobile web sites go beyond replicating what’s available over the internet using a PC or laptop, it is a collection of mobile-friendly websites along with search engines optimised for mobile, mobile advertising and pay-per-click advertisements that are not only displayed specifically for mobiles but are also relevant to the situations that the user of a mobile might find themselves in. Think of the mobile web as “an ecosystem for mobile devices” [Dushinski [1]] Dushinski also presents a nice little equation which summarizes what a successful mobile web presence is. I...

Once you have decided your company needs a mobile web presence, the default and incorrect decision is often to miniaturize your highly successful existing company website. In most instances this is not good practice and here's why: Mobile phones have smaller screens with different dimensions to a PC monitor display and generally poorer resolution and refresh rates. Even film makers don't just transpose a movie from the ultra-wide screen, very high definition cinema scope format to a smaller TV format, even though TV's are rapidly catching up on the cinema in these terms. We all remember the highly dissatisfying practices of the past where actors looked horizontally stretched or cut in half if they were to one side of the cinema scene... Don't just assume a web site will work on mobile by shrinking it to fit, even with the bigger better quality mobile displays of today. Simply miniaturizing an existing site will lose the advantages of mobile such as personalization, ...