We’re live from SXSW Interactive ‘08 and I just got into the Exhibit room for the Contextual Web talk that will  be given by Nick Finck from Blue Flavor, a web/mobile design and development company out of Seattle, Washington. The talk is about “…how to design for the next generation of the web which will exist outside of the desktop and mobile context”…so it sounds relevant AND interesting…

So this will be a continuation of a talk I guess he just did in Dallas, Texas. Today he’ll focus on content and mobile phones, specifically the iPhone. He just asked the audience how many of them had iPhones…I swear to God over three quarters of the 300 or so in the audience raised their hands. I’m lame.

Anyway, Nick starts out by listing off his four elements of context in web design:

• The User
• The Task
• The Environment
• The Technology

When constructing/designing a website you have to keep these four in things in mind throughout the entire process. First two I think are pretty intuitive, but the environment in which the site/content is accessed and the technology that’s accessing the content are things that I think deserve a little more thought . Not only the web environment, but also the physical environment in which we’re experiencing it.

The environment in which people access content is of particular interest to us as marketers and in some respects has been discussed for quite some time. However, I don’t think enough attention is given by advertisers to the web environment in which mobile content is viewed. He’s using the New York Times website as viewed on the iPhone as an example, and it really drives the idea home. The site is utterly unreadable in its pure form. To read text the user has to do a “ninja move” (pinch) the user interface to zoom in and read an article. Then a series of scrolls and zooms can take you to other content. Sites like these (which is pretty much every site today) are built for at-home viewing on a much larger screen. It’s a less than ideal experience for the mobile accesser…and an experience that’s going to become more common if the content makers don’t do anything about it.

So what can we as content creators do? With screen sizes and devices the way they are today, we may need to move away from rich pretty pages on mobile devices and move to a Leaflet look…distill things down to the most basic need for a mobile device. For NY Times this looks like listing off RSS feeds of stories instead giving the mobile user the entire condensed front webpage. For Flickr, the popular photo sharing and social networking site, it may be just having an upload field and a couple of pictures. Now these suggestions aren’t to be applied to the entire internet…just those sites that are interacted with mobiley (is that a word? It is now. Booyah.). Ideally, a site would be able to recognize when/if it’s been accessed on a mobile device, and when it is take them to the “mobile site” by default.

Suggestions like these not only help with ease of navigation, they also address hefty download times that cost mobile users time and money.

Reading this, it might seem that Nick’s suggesting we take a couple of steps backwards. I mean aren’t these drab webpages what we started out with in the days of Netscape and Prodigy? Don’t we want beautiful and seamless websites on our mobile devices? In a word, “Yes.” But that’s because in the 90’s we didn’t totally understand the internet as a medium and right now the same holds true for mobile marketing. Should we just splash up the entire NY Times website on a mobile  device just because we can, not necessarily because we should? Does the content really fit the medium in that it provides the user the best end experience? It’s something to think about.