Stefan Butlin CTO

November 3, 2008

compelling mobile services

Mobile MondayGlobal Winner 2008

Mobile MondayUK Winner 2008

Commercial categoryWinner 2008

Best search providerWinner 2008

Mobile SearchCompany of the 2008

problems with building

mobile search made social.

Quick Poll

mobile search made social.

What’s so hard about mobilewebsites?

User identification

Handset diversity

Selling ads

Testing

Building audience

Getting feedbackTranscoders

Integrating SMS

mobile search made social.

Handsets: are any two alike?

mobile search made social.

Handsets vary in every way

Markup language support Browser vendor and version Screen size and depth Audio and video codecs Input methods

mobile search made social.

Quirks we workaround

SonyEricssons oversize their text some Nokias struggle with float OperaMini used to centre images some Samsungs display source CSS Moto Razr has tiny page size limit many browsers don’t know screen width iPhone doesn’t always get display:none

mobile search made social.

Strategies

Lowest common denominator Tough love Conditional markup Templating toolkits Capability databases

WURFL DeviceAtlas Build your own

mobile search made social.

Taptu handset customisation

WURFL for the basics (screensize etc) Augment with proprietary DB of browser

quirks Group handsets into major classes Invest detailed design per class Parameters handle variation within class

mobile search made social.

The Taptu social divide

iPhone/iClone (touch, ajax, big display)

midPhone (Nokia S60, Windows Mobile)

loPhone (Motorolas, xHTML mobile 1.0 etc)

blackberry (in a class all of its own)

(and no support for WML1.0)

mobile search made social.

Transcoders

Novarra get whitelisted where possible try cache-control: no-transform find real UA in x-Device-User-Agent

Google (GWT) put meta tags in to specify mobile versions

Keep an eye on your logs

mobile search made social.

User Identification is tricky

?? ? ??

?? ? ?

mobile search made social.

Indigestible Cookies

Cookie support is hard to read First challenge is getting cookies

back at all Then try getting cookies back after

users exit their browsers Surprisingly few phones persist

cookies after rebooting

mobile search made social.

Carriers know who’s calling

Carriers proxy every request Possible to have user ID added to

HTTP headers 200+ carriers worldwide is a lot of

deals

but not on WiFi

mobile search made social.

UserID - Some Taptu choices

URL session management Cookies where they work Optimistic user-account creation Designed for massive churn in user

records

mobile search made social.

Testing: same problem

mobile search made social.

Testing Strategies

Setup in every country, buy every phone Sample your home market and hope Read your feedback forums Enroll local mobile retailers Check out DeviceAnywhere

mobile search made social.

Taptu Testing

growing collection of in-house handsets DeviceAnywhere

test any handset, many markets enables outsourcing bulk screenshot collection

automated regression testing can’t spot browser quirks, but spots missing content, wrong pages, crashes

mobile search made social.

Give your users a voice

Host feedback forums Brace for honesty! Cultivate advocates Surprising demand for just chat

Run mobile-friendly surveys

mobile search made social.

Measure Everything

mobile stats are an inaccurate science filter on “detectably repeat users” IP for country of origin only

Carriers proxy everything Norway comes in high

3rd party analytics solutions available review how unique users are identified

Stefan Butlin CTO

November 3, 2008

thank you

Mobile MondayGlobal Winner 2008

Mobile MondayUK Winner 2008

Commercial categoryWinner 2008

Best search providerWinner 2008

Mobile SearchCompany of the 2008