The AWS Blog

It’s great to see more mobile-friendly websites popping up every day, but if the site’s content isn’t selected carefully, it’s possible to launch a mobile site that makes life harder for your users.

After being peppered with commercials for Pizza Hut Pasta all day on Sunday while watching football, my friend and I decided to take the leap and place an order.

Even after being inundated with the commercial that many times, I only could recall two of the varieties: Mac ‘N Cheese, Alfredo and …. something.  So I pulled out my Blackberry and browsed to PizzaHut.com to find the menu so we could make a decision.

At PizzaHut.com I was presented with the mobile version of their site.  “Maybe we can even order online,” I said out loud (very few of my friends share my passion for web strategy, so I’m sure I was talking to myself).

At that point, my primary task as a user changed from finding the mystery flavor of pasta, to ordering online, assuming that I’d be able to pick the flavor somewhere along the way.

That was when I hit my first dead-end.

After selecting “Place Order,” I was taken to a login screen.  No option to skip registration; no option to register.  I clicked “Help” (something a geek only does when there are NO other options).  The help page stated that I would have to register first on the main (desktop) site.

Useless.

Deciding that my new goal was a bit lofty, and eager to return my attention to the game, I went back to my initial task of trying to find the menu.  Without a “View Menu” option on the mobile site, I browsed to Google, and clicked the “Menu” link in the abstract on Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  My hope was that their browser-detection redirect only happened on their home page.

I was wrong, and was flung back to the same mobile site with the same three sad options.

My final two attempts (changing my browser emulation to “Microsoft IE” and trying to open the site in Opera Mobile) were equally unsuccessful.

Now, I should give praise to PizzaHut.com for having a mobile site, but in some ways they’ve missed the mark.

Mobile web designers need to be aware of the context in which their websites are used.  Typically, mobile users are looking for a specific piece of information (event details, address information, contact information, or in this case, a menu).  This differs from standard website usage in that desktop users may be “browsing” or just reading and researching.

There are a lot of ways that Pizza Hut could have avoided this.  A simple review of PizzaHut.com (the desktop version) reveals that “Menu” is the first item on the site’s primary navigation.  It must be an important piece of content!

I also suspect that viewing the web analytic data for PizzaHut.com would show a large amount of traffic to that section of that site.

As you plan your mobile site:

- Put yourself in the context of your users (pick up your phone, and start to browse).
- Review your standard website’s information architecture for pieces of content that are relevant to mobile users.
- Perform a review of your web analytics, paying close attention to how the pieces of content on your site that receive the most views can be consumed by mobile users.

Using these three steps when selecting content for your mobile site will help you avoid creating a site that, although optimized for the handheld device, doesn’t contain the information that your visitors are looking for.

The pasta was great, by the way.  If anyone knows anybody at Pizza Hut, have them call me.  I’ve got a team of developers that love pizza, and it looks like they’re in need of some mobile web consulting.

We’ll work something out …