Creating a Positive Mobile Experience

I received my first smart phone in January at the Sundog holiday party where they surprised us all with a Samsung Fascinate. Now that I have a smart phone, I don’t think I would ever be able to go without one. In fact, I don’t know how I made it as long as I did without one. It is never more than a foot away from me. It wakes me up in the morning, tells me about the weather, contains my schedule and email and allows me the ability to search the Web no matter where I am. It has truly changed the way I do things on a day-to-day basis. In the past, I would have brought my laptop with me everywhere, hoping for a wi-fi connection—not anymore.

Last weekend I attended the WCHA Final 5 hockey games in Saint Paul, Minnesota. While I was there, I was on my phone a lot because the hotel wanted to charge me for wireless Internet—no thanks. At one point, I looked up the schedule for the NCAA frozen four hockey games on my Fascinate and pulled up the NCAA hockey Web site. Of course, as the page loads, I anxiously wait for a great mobile experience: a site with no zooming required, a site that is simple and easy to navigate through on a mobile phone. It turns out I had no such luck with this Web site. The NCAA Web site works sufficiently on a mobile phone, but does not provide a good mobile experience. I acquired the information that I needed but it took me longer to navigate through the site because I had to zoom and scroll to retrieve the information I was looking for. Having Web access everywhere increases the need for a positive mobile experience more than ever.

Being the geek that I am, I started to think about how I would design and architect a mobile experience for the NCAA Hockey Web site. It would include only basic information that a user accessing the site from a mobile device would need. The image shown is what I currently see when I pull up their site on a mobile phone and my suggestion for a basic NCAA mobile experience.

I have included all of the main navigation that is on the their current site, but organized it so that it was easy to access from a mobile device. There are many ways to create a great mobile experience, this is just one suggestion.