GregBellDesign

Adaptation is an essential feature of the human psychological make up. It allows us to become comfortable with seemingly impossible situations and move forward together as a species. We can adapt to difficult situations which allow us to spend more time concentrating on how to make our current situation better. The flip side of this coin is also true: we adapt to good experiences.

To make this point crystal clear, here is an excerpt from "The Paradox of Choice" written by Barry Shwartz:

"Simply put, we get used to things and we start to take them for granted. My first desktop computer had 8K of memory, loaded programs by cassette tape (it took five minutes to load a simple program), and was anything but user-friedly. I loved it and all things it enabled me to do. Last year I dumped a computer with several thousand times that much speed because it was too clunky to meet my needs. What I do with my computer hasn't changed all that much over the years. But what I expect it to do for me has."

Everyone has had this type of experience. I certainly have. I couldn't even begin to imagine using my computer from 6 years ago, even if only to complete the simplest of daily tasks. Adaptation to computing power has changed my perception of computers and how they should function. It would be a big step backwards, even if the task took the same amount of time, to use the older, simpler computer.

So what does this have to do with the mobile web?

I believe that we are currently living through a difficult time for the mobile web due to this type of adaptation. There is no denying that people want the power of their favorite websites, whether it be task based sites like email and to-dos or information portals like Google News, available to them on their mobile devices. But, we have come to expect a certain level of form and function from these sites and these expectations are not currently being realized on the mobile web.

This problem is not specific to one area of the mobile web experience. It is not entirely because of the technology of these system, nor is it entirely because of the front-end design. It is not entirely an information architecture problem, nor is it entirely a business strategy problem. Rather, the problem of adaptation, in this case, is because of the overall user experience on the mobile web. What users have grown to expect on their desktop devices is a total disconnect from what they are currently experiencing on the their mobile devices.

As users become more comfortable using their mobile devices for more tasks, they are increasingly asking why the web is different on their handheld device. Why has the experience totally changed and how can I get the desktop feel on my handheld device? These are common themes that I have been encountering when doing usability testing on mobile devices.

Although I don't have any answers as to how we can alleviate this problem, I do believe that awareness is the first step. If we are aware that users have the expectation of the desktop web on their mobile devices, we can work to incorporate the two, rather than separate them. Users do not see a separation between accessing a site on their desktop computer and on their mobile hand-held device. So, let's work to bring the two experiences together instead of pushing them apart.