with building
s
problem
compelling mobile services
Stefan Butlin CTO
November 3, 2008
Mobile Monday Mobile Search Mobile Monday Best search provider Commercial category
Global Winner 2008 Company of the 2008 UK Winner 2008 Winner 2008 Winner 2008

Quick Poll
mobile search made social.

What’s so hard about mobile
websites?
Handset diversity
User identification Selling ads
Building audience Integrating SMS
Transcoders
Getting feedback
Testing
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
mobile search made social.

thank you
Stefan Butlin CTO
November 3, 2008
Mobile Monday Mobile Search Mobile Monday Best search provider Commercial category
Global Winner 2008 Company of the 2008 UK Winner 2008 Winner 2008 Winner 2008