Chris Thorne

I’ve written previously about the proms website redesign.

However, we just updated the site to supply a mobile view for those using the site on a phone. The site is now multiplatform, and uses content negotiation to provide the user with an appropriate experience for their device.

One of the aspects I find most pleasing about this is that it is still ‘1 URL for 1 thing’. One of the major advantages of this approach is that  the things that users want to talk about or point at can be shared easily across many devices. If a friend sends me a link to a prom, I can visit that proms page, and get all the information I need, even if my friend is on a PC and I am on a phone.

The ability to share content seamlessly across devices seems to me to be a very important part of user experience design, and one that often isn’t possible for technical reasons, or (worse) isn’t possible because the design team didn’t think about it early enough in the project. I’m proud that in this case, we did design for multiplatform from the outset.

See what you think.

PS You can compare and contrast the experience on different devices (I use a firefox plugin called user agent switcher to fool a browser into thinking it is on an iphone, a PC or other device).

This entry was posted on Monday, July 11th, 2011 at 9:52 am and is filed under Information Architecture, accessibility, design, multi-platform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.