Nielsen is wrong on mobile

For all of Jakob Nielsen's many great contributions to web usability over the years, his advice for mobile is just 180-degrees backward. His latest guidelines perpetuate several stubborn mobile myths that have led too many to create 'lite' mobile experiences that patronise users, undermine business goals, and soak up design and tech resources.

The notion that you should create a separate, stripped-down version for 'the mobile use case' might be appropriate if such a clean mobile use case existed, but it doesn't.

First, a growing number of people are using mobile as the only way they access the web. A pair of studies late last year from Pew and from On Device Research showed that over 25 per cent of people in the US who browse the web on smartphones almost never use any other platform. That's north of 11 per cent of adults in the US, or about 25million people, who only see the web on small screens. There's a digital-divide issue here. People who can afford only one screen or internet connection are choosing the phone. If you want to reach them at all, you have to reach them on mobile. We can't settle for serving such a huge audience a stripped-down experience or force them to swim through a desktop layout in a small screen.

Also, 'the mobile use case' doesn't exist as neatly as Nielsen suggests. There's a persistent myth that mobile users are always distracted, on the go, 'info snacking' in sessions of 10 seconds. That's certainly part of the mobile experience, but not the whole story.

Long sessions

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