I’ve had an itch that has been building in irritation and now its time to scratch: mobile websites have rubbed me the wrong way.
The Situation
Last night while trying to get to my hotel, I needed the address, so I googled for it, specifically the name of the hotem (the Marriott), and included the town where I knew my reservation to be. Based upon the summaries included with each search results, I could see that one included the exact information I needed, but when I clicked on it, I was redirected to the homepage of the mobile site.
While I appreciate the value and attraction of mobile websites, I really do not like my expectations getting hijacked.
I expected the resulting page to be the one I searched for, but instead it was the homepage for the mobile site. Then I have to search again?
Mobile Websites
Yes, I do like the idea of mobile websites. They can be much easier to navigate than desktop websites when using a tiny viewport. However, if a visitor is arriving from a search engine to a page other than the homepage, they are likely not ready to start navigating, but are targeting. Automatically redirecting them to the homepage is worse than presenting them with the targeted page in desktop mode.
In my experience, not that many websites engage in this practice of automatically redirecting users’ to mobile websites, but it appears to be a trend. I’ve only found a few to do it, the first couple I can’t remember, but Marriott.com is the straw that broke this camel’s back. Its been enough to cause me to write this blog rant - let’s put it that way.
Mobile websites are certainly a newfangled feature that web design companies are selling to their customers. So I expect to see more of them. Hopefully developers will not continue to overlook this important factor.
I have seen some web designs that are able to display properly on the desktop and on mobile devices. In those cases, no redirection is necessary. In my humble opinion, that’s the best option.
Conclusion
Its simply an issue of usability. Understand user expectations. Do not disrupt them.
After writing this blog post rant, I realize how different browsing a site is from visiting a page that has been searched for. They really are totally different.
So many times do we web developers assume that visitors are browsing, when actually they are simply looking for a single page. Either the page has the information they are looking for, or it doesn’t. Either way, they probably aren’t going to go browsing around, unless prompted. In that case, there is certainly the risk of disrupting the users’ expectations in a different way.
If you’ve experienced a mobile web redirect that you found annoying, please, do tell!
