Acording to a study by Nielsen Norman Group browsing the web from a mobile phone today is as bad as it was to browse the web from a desktop 15 years ago.

The users had difficulties doing everyday tasks on their mobile phones, like finding information about a specific wine or finding arrival info for a plane.

Some of the hurdles they found was:

• The screens are to small (users using phones with bigger screens had a higher succeed rate)
• It’s hard to type on the small keyboards on mobile phones
• The mobile Internet connections are to slow
• Sites designed for mobile phones did better than the desktop version, but it can be really hard to find the mobile version.

These findings are exactly what a colleague and I found in our master thesis – “The User Experience of the Internet on Mobile Phones” (4,8 mb PDF in danish)- which is from 2008. Here is a very boiled down section from the abstract:

Screens and keyboards are factors that feel like a hurdle and therefore reduce usage. Also, the speed or lack of it, when loading pages seems to be a hurdle.

Nielsen Norman Group found that users did better in solving their tasks on websites designed for mobile phones and they do suggest, like we did, that servers should auto-sense users’ devices and auto-forward mobile users to the mobile site. I simply don’t understand why companies use money on getting a mobile website designed and then don’t do this simple operation.

Nielsen Normans Group used three usability methods. My colleague and I made our master thesis on basis of interviews, focus groups and surveys. But the results are pretty much the same.