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So you’ve decided to take the plunge and try out some information on a mobile device, such as a PDA. How do you decide what information to use? What content is suitable for these devices? Before you rush ahead and make your entire Web site accessible on a PDA, decide what content may be best suited for this device. Embarking on this project on a small scale to start will help you weigh the costs and the benefits. Let’s take a look at one organization and their approach.
The Department of Technical Communication (TC) at the University of Washington wanted to assess its Web content. The department was trying to think of innovative ways to reach their varied audiences.
One main goal, according to department chair Dr. Judith Ramey, was to increase the department’s visibility as a leading institution in the field of technical communication and promote both its Bachelor’s and Master’s degree programs.
The department wanted to address the following audiences:
Due to limited resources, the department wanted to promote new developments in the department to these audiences without having to spend a lot of time or money - a tall order indeed.
After assessing the current content on the TC Web site, the department chose one specific, relatively contained area to promote.
The department has a weekly speaker series on current topics in the field. The series runs year round with a break in summer. The speakers include faculty, upper level students, and professionals in the field. The series is attended by students and professionals from the Puget Sound region and is also being offered online via streaming video. The department wanted to increase attendance for the speaker series, both in person and online.
Increasing attendance would also help to promote course offerings to prospective students and professionals.
The TC department decided that providing this information to PDA users was a good way to achieve these goals, due to the following:
Event Driven
Most people use a PDA as an organizer. The devices come with built-in calendar applications where users can enter appointments. Delivering event-driven information such as the speaker series directly to a PDA makes sense. If a person is interested in the topic they can immediately add it to their calendar.
Timely and In Demand
The speaker series site is updated quarterly and the topics change from week to week. The information is static enough to notify someone in advance of an upcoming topic, but dynamic enough that it changes regularly to encourage repeat visitors. As mentioned earlier, the speaker series often provides some of the hottest topics in the field. Communicating these in-demand topics to potential attendees can help the department show off its wares and generate interest its academic offerings.
To implement this project, the department decided to start small. They decided to take the information, currently listed on the TC Web site and deliver it to PDAs via the standard Avantgo browser.
The following changes were made between the original HTML page and the AvantGo optimized page.
Since the department only wanted to present the speaker series, not the entire site, all external navigation was removed so no broken links would appear in the AvantGo browser. This also removed a lot of excess content that the user would have to scroll through. All images were also removed to prevent broken image links. In the future the department plans to include a bitmap version of its logo.
In order to help users navigate a long page of information, anchor tags were included. This gives a user the ability to jump around, view speaker by topic and find out additional information about viewing the series online.
The department’s Web site does not employ the use of styles. A style sheet was created for this example to optimize the PDA version of this page and to separate meaning from presentation. In the future the TC department plans to implement style sheets.
On the original page, tables were used to provide spacing for the list of speakers. This formatting did not translate well to AvantGo. The text appeared in a single line without spacing, impeding readability. To work around this issue a hyphen was included between the speaker name and speaker title to add more space for the PDA version.
You too can see the differences between the original and the optimized versions.
Just point your Web browser to these sites:
1. Original: http://www.engl.iastate.edu/faculty/ramey/tc_521/speakers.htm
2. AvantGo Optimized: http://students.washington.edu/ejrose/speakers/
If you have a Palm and you would like to see how the two versions match up, follow these steps:
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