[IxDA Discuss] Navigation on WAP sites

[Barbara Ballard]

On 2/28/07, Sunandini Basu <sunandinibasu at gmail.com> wrote:
>  Is it better to give a deeper navigation structure on a WAP screen? Is it good practice to put all all the links (that are there on the Home page) on all the inside pages - shallow navigation; as compared to putting only the link 'home' on all the inside pages, so a user has to come back to the home page to select other activities - deeper navigation?
>

The answer, as is usually the case, is "it depends".  The information
itself will likely have native groupings.

Issues to consider:
- some phones have a limit to the size of the page that can be downloaded

- many phones do not cache CSS or image files, so an extra page means
several extra requests

- some phones do not handle complex pages quickly (example: use a RAZR
to navigate from the main Cingular site onto the content store, which
looks the same.  Once you are in the store, the device slows to an
unacceptably slow pace)

- there are three major components of a connection: establishing the
connection (could be 5 seconds), starting a fetch (could be 1 second),
and downloading the file (at the network's connection speed).  With
faster networks, that last bit is the easiest.

- scrolling is very easy ... on some phones/browsers.  Opera Mini
(roughly 10% of mobile browser hits) scrolls vertically very easily,
by clicking the right arrow.  Blackberries are designed around
scrolling, as are some Nokias. On other phones, scrolling is harder.

- users are accustomed to scrolling, but the screen must be designed
to suggest that more information is "below the fold".

- phones do not handle cookies well, so if your site requires a
session cookie, larger pages are preferred


After all of those issues ... I usually don't worry about the screen
size too much.  Instead I figure out what I would like to be on the
screen, then optimize for load speed and full task speed.

-- 
Barbara Ballard
barbara at littlespringsdesign.com 1-785-838-3003