Are Websites Optimized for Mobile Devices and Smart TVs?

Emmanouil Perakakis mperakakis@staff.teicrete.grBrunel University & TEI of CreteUxbridge, London, UK

Gheorghita Ghinea george.ghinea@brunel.ac.ukBrunel UniversityUxbridge, London, UK

Evanthia Thanou evathanou@gmail.comTEI of CreteIerapetra, Crete, Greece

MOBILE DEVICESDESKTOP/LAPTOP

IntroductionWe lived and still live in a world of Objects

We will live in a world of Connected “Things”

We now also live in a world of Devices

Introduction

Internet of Things Web of Things“Things” being part of the WWW

Communicating using standard web technologies through Web Interfaces

Web on non-PC devices

The Web started as a desktop nativeFor many years, the only way to access the WWW was through a Desktop/Laptop PC.

Then it was “opened” to Mobile Phones and later to Tablet devices

Web on non-PC devices

Recently, the Web is making it’s way to even more devices.So you can, or possibly will in the near future, browse the web from:

Web on non-PC devices

• But browsing the web on other devices is not an automatic thing.

• Every device has different properties, such as screen sizes, input methods, network bandwidth etc. , and even users can be in different states.

• So, for a website or a web application to be able to work optimally on non-PC devices, we need to take into account the specific devices properties.

• Failing to do that, will result in bad User Experience (UX) or even complete incompatibility with the device.

Optimizing Content for Devices

Custom device-specific WebsitesA different website from the Desktop will be developed from scratch, optimized for the specific device. It will share the same content with the main website, often sharing the same database, but the presentation layer will be different. (+) Optimized for every device (+) Easier to Develop websites compared to RWD (-) Develop new website for every device (-) Difficult to maintain (-) Questionable SEO (-) Even for same kind of device may need more websites

Device Specific AppsApps were popularized with mobile phones. It is common practice to develop a native App for the device which usually consumes the content of the website, sharing the same database, but using a totally different presentation layer.(+) Optimal for every device (+) Optimal UX(-) Need to create Specific App for every OS (-) Difficult to maintain (-) Absent from Search results

Responsive Website (RWD)This more recent method, became very popular in the past 2 years. The main difference is that the same website is used for all devices, but it adapts (responds) to the specific properties of each device.(+) Single website for all devices (+) Easy to maintain (-) Much more difficult to develop in order to respond to all device correctly

There are three main methods to optimize Web content for Devices:

Platforms Overview – Market Landscape

Mobile Phones & Tablets• An established internet-

connected device

• There are two major platforms: iOS and Android

• Plus a few other popular platforms, such as Windows Phone and Blackberry

Smart TVs• A newly internet-connected

device

• Smart TV market is very fragmented

• Μost popular Smart TV platforms (2014):

– Samsung: 26.4% – LG: 14.3% – Sony: 14.4%

Platforms Overview - Users

On Mobile Phones:• e-mail (91%), • searching the Internet (76%), • Social Networking (75%) and • news alerts (62%) are among the most popular uses of the phone

On Tablets:• Email (69%) and searching

for info online (70%) are the most popular daily activities to perform

• Social networking is also popular at 64% and news alerts on 52%.

REF: Salesforce.com, “2014 Mobile Behavior Report”, 2014. Nielsen, “Australian Online Landscape Review”, 2013

Mobile web browsing is gaining popularity daily while desktop browsing is decreasing as many surveys indicate

Platforms Overview - Users

Smart TVs - Surveys• Consuming Web on a Television device is not a new

thing, but it’s not a secret that it has failed to capture the interest of viewers so far

• On a recent study by Nielsen in 2013 in Australia although ownership of Connected TVs has increased (33% own a Connected TV), only 5% of them use it to access the internet.

• According to the Australian Connected Consumer Report the key problems are the lack of interest, lack of know-how, bad UX and lack of available content.

• A survey in Germany indicates that “many responders find the use of the Internet with the smart TV very inconvenient”.

• Web Browsing activity only captures the interest of 10% of the users while other functionality such as Social Media, Shopping, Maps etc has an even lower than 10% usage.

Smart TVs – Key Problems• Bad User Experience: As most aforementioned

studies indicate, the current UX on the Smart TV is not pleasant for users and causes frustration.

• Input Devices: Browsing a website whose its interaction design was built with the mouse/keyboard input devices in mind with a remote control, can be a very unpleasant and frustrating experience.

• User State: Users of a Television are in a different “state of mind” than when using a PC or a mobile device and normal websites don’t take this factor into account. A relaxed navigation style should be preferred

• Lack of TV-Optimized web content: Although most new TVs include some kind of a web browser, websites are optimized for desktop or mobile, not TV, and this can easily result in an unpleasant UX.

The Website Survey• In order to study the current state on the levels of adaption of

web sites to non-desktop devices, a survey was conducted on some of the world’s most popular websites.

• A list of the 100 most visited websites was retrieved from Alexa Internet (June 2014).

• From these, 49 websites that fulfilled our requirements (explained later), clustered into 8 categories, were tested whether they had an optimized version for delivering their content on (a) mobile phones, (b) tablets and (c) smart TV devices.

Categorization of websites

• Blogging Platforms (5)• Commerce (17)• Informational (4): • News (14):• Search (26): • Services (6):

• Social Media (9):

• Video (5): • Network Services (8): • Pornography (4): • Torrent (2):

Conclusively, the final list came down to 49 websites: 3 Blogging platforms, 12 Commerce sites, 4 information websites, 8 News websites, 5 Search engines, 5 web services, 8 Social networks and 4 Video websites.

Testing Devices• Smartphones: There were two representative smartphones, iPhone 5s for

iOS devices and Samsung Galaxy S4 for Android devices. These two operating system platforms are the leading Smartphone systems today.

• Tablets: An Apple iPad 2 (iOS) and an Asus transformer (Android and MS-Surface) were used.

• Smart TVs: Three devices were used, as there are more platforms for Smart TVs: Samsung Smart TV 2014 model UE55F6670, an LG Smart TV 2013 model 42LA660S and a Google TV Sony NSZ-GS8 set-top box

Testing Methodology• In order to have an accurate picture for this survey, each website was carefully

examined.

• For each of the selected websites, two pages were loaded, the home page and a typical content page.

• In order to confirm the availability of a responsive website, an App or a Custom website on a device category, it was decided that even if it was available in a single platform platform is enough.

• A study limitation was that the standards for accepting a website as Smart TV optimized were kept to an absolute minimal (large fonts, correct display, simple navigation).

Results

Mobile Tablet TV0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

49 48

24

Overall Optimization per Device• Results on testing website adoption on the

three different types of devices clearly show how serious website designers take the large movement of the users towards mobile browsing

• All tested websites had at least one mobile-friendly method to consume their content.

• Tablet-optimized website versions were also very popular, with only 1 website out of 49 not having some optimized version for a tablet device

• It is also clear that TV devices are not considered very important yet, as only 24 out of 49 websites had some kind of optimized version for TV compared to 49/49 for mobile phones.

Results

Mobile Tablet TV0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

29 25

9

19

8

6

44

43

12

Website Adaption on Devices

App

Custom

Responsive

• Looking at the preferred optimization method, clearly apps and responsive versions are preferred over custom device-specific websites

• Quite often, websites had both an app and a mobile-friendly website

• Tablet-optimized sites are popular but not as popular as phone-optimized

Results – Category Breakdown

Blogg

ing

Commer

ce

Inform

ation

News

Sear

ch

Serv

iceSo

cial

Video

0

5

10

15

20

25

Mobile

Responsive, App and Custom adaptation availability of top 49 websites on Mobile, Tablet and Smart TV categorized by type of website

• it seems that blogging platforms and search engines prefer the use of responsive websites and completely avoiding custom designs

• News, Social and Commerce websites have a somehow equal allocation of the three types of formats

Blogg

ing

Commer

ce

Inform

ation

News

Sear

ch

Serv

iceSo

cial

Video

0

5

10

15

20

25

Tablet

Blogg

ing

Comm

erce

Inform

ation

News

Sear

ch

Serv

iceSo

cial

Video

0

5

10

15

20

25

Smart TVAppCustomResponsive

Conclusion

Mobile-optimized website has become a standard, to ensure a better User Experience to the many mobile usersAs the popularity of these devices has grown massively, all the websites of the survey have at least one mobile version, while many of them have both an app and a responsive or custom website optimized for smartphones and tablets.

Smart TV-optimized websites are not common.Smart TVs, being the new kind of internet-connected device that grows popular, has not attracted the attention of the website owners.

Users are not happy with the current TV Web Experience.It was evident, both from the surveys studied and from the tests that were performed in the survey carried out in this paper, that current web content is problematic on Smart TVs and does not meet user expectations

Future Work

Extend survey on a greater number of popular websites

Create Guidelines for UX-optimized websites for Smart TVs

Perform user-testing on prototype TV-optimized websites

Maybe extend to other devices (watches?)

So…are Websites Optimized for

Mobile Devices and Smart TVs

MOBILE DEVICESDESKTOP/LAPTOP