The web experience should be defined by devices, not designers.

This would give users better experiences and allow web designers to use their budgets more wisely.

Issues:

• There’s always more devices, operating systems, use contexts, browser versions etc.
• For many designers, there is not enough budget or time to design and test websites properly with all those different devices in mind.

Observations:

• We (and our clients) want the web experience to be perfect across all devices all the time.
• Designers redesign and redesign common elements often diregarding the most important element of any site. THE CONTENT!

We are asking developers to support more devices than they even know exist. The end result is that nothing really get’s tested the way it should and even worse: a huge number of devices people use every day haven’t even been considered when designing sites. If it works on a desktop and an iPhone, they move on.

Using web on mobile devices “breaks” the experience

When users go from apps to web, why does the experience need to break? The mobile web experience is pretty poor on most sites. If it is optimized at all for mobile use, there are often many compromises and lack all the gestures that make using devices natural and fun. The amount of people accessing our sites via mobile is growing exponentially. People deserve an excellent web experience no matter what device. We’re not delivering.

Responsive design is a good start. We’re trying to tackle the issue but we need more. We need different content for different use contexts. We need lightweight versions. We need optimized design for every device that uses Internet. Also, anybody who has used web with a mobile device knows that opening navigation elements is slow. What if websites worked the same way on your device than apps do? This way the mobile web experience would require less waiting for web elements to load.

Device OS Designers should help define web experiences

The idea is plain and simple: Device designers spend so much time working on product design and OS design. Why don’t they define the way to use the Internet for that device as well? I’m talking about shifting some work from web design people over to device design people. Let’s think about this for a minute:

What would happen to mobile online sales if somehow all the shopping carts were super easy and fast to use? How much sales is now lost because of shopping with mobile device is difficult, annoying and slow?

If the device offers a search function, why on earth wouldn’t we use that very same UI for searching on the site?

Currently we’re reinventing the wheel every time when we design a new website! Users want the content. Users don’t need branded web navigations on their mobile phones that are less usable than the native device UI navigation. What I’m saying here is that if web people used their budget more on content and less on device specific tuning of general functions, the web would be a better place for everybody. We need to start focusing on the things that matter!

Mobile Internet usage is growing like crazy and mobile UX is mostly horrible. Web people need help from device UX designers or end-users will keeps suffering. I’m not saying we should prevent a way to build a web experience from scratch. And I’m definitely not saying web designers should ignore designing and testing for devices altogether. But if there was a chance the device could handle general parts of web experience, everybody would win and that would make a lot of sense.