Mobile Design

Globally, Internet usage patterns are shifting. Increasingly, people are accessing the Internet over mobile devices. Along with the obvious challenge of designing for small, low-powered devices comes a great opportunity to reconsider our sites and focus on what is most important. Designing for mobile might just improve the user experience of the web sites built for powerful desktop machines with big screens.

Mobile Web vs. Native Apps

Both native apps and mobile web sites have their pros and cons. Which you choose to build is a business decision. The choice is must be based on leveraging the advantages. There are no hard and fast rules. As a general rule, native apps have more power -- but mobile sites have more reach.

Native apps are more powerful because they are "closer to the metal." There are fewer layers of software between your code and the device itself.

Apps can take advantage of the different devices' capabilities. Since the app must be coded for a specific device, you are forced to tailor your app for a specific machine. This means that the code and the experience are tailored to the device. You can get full access to the full capabilities of the device: its location detection, device orientation, digital compass, and video camera access. Through a browser, you would only be able to access the location detection and the device orientation. Native apps have access to capabilities in the device that are hard to match with mobile web.

This also means they have less reach, and that your app can only be used on the device it was designed for. If you want to support multiple platforms, you must write multiple versions of your app; one for each platform. This is obviously expensive. It is difficult to maintain multiple versions of a an app. It takes time and money.