KeithAhern.com

How NOT to do an iPhone/Mobile Site - Jetstar.com for iPhone

Jetstar have an iPhone site that’s so bad its actually damaging to the mobile web.

Let’s have look at the site analysed under Safari’s network timeline.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

• 3 seconds page load time ! (over wifi)
• 105K page weight for very little information, it not clear what benefit the 83K of javascript provides. 
• HTML and css is not compressed (see the ‘!’ bubbles in the diagram) 
• Non-bundled JS and CSS files - multiple CSS and JS files slow down page loads

So its slow, inefficient and not exactly pretty.  What about the content? Well, its just about useless:

•  the ‘Sales fares’ and ‘Standard fares’ links are misleading - they link to pages with no information about fares!
• The pages above prompt the user to visit jetstar.com on your ‘computer browser’ - no link to jetstar.com which Mobile Safari is perfectly capable of rendering.
• There is a phone number to call to make bookings but its you can’t click it to make the iPhone call the number (The contact pages also lack click to call)
• The flight schedule page links to PDF files missing an opportunity to use the iPhone UI to drill down schedules through times, destinations, classes etc.
• No link to regular site - there’s no way to get to the regular non-crippled jetstar.com site where users may actually want to buy tickets.  

Sure - it ticks the box of ‘We have an iPhone site’ but it really is a lousy experience for customers.  Mobile phones - especially the iPhone are perfectly capable of providing a fast, secure airline information and booking site.

Keith’s Mobile Goodness Score: 2/10

It goes to show you really do need to employ mobile experts when you want to tap into the 3 billion mobile users out there.

Mobile Web Tips - Part 2 - Essential Tools

1. Safari browser developer menu (Safari’s Preferences > Advanced > show/hide the Develop menu). Network timeline is great to see how efficient your site is.
2. Firefox browser with the following plugins: user agent switcher - for testing mobile versions of sites, YSlow - optimizing sites Live http headers - inspect http traffic
3. Tcpmon - this proxy is small and simple, it’s great for snooping traffic when you need to figure out why a mobile phone is not doing what you want it to do.
4. DeviceAnywhere.com - this site provides remote access to real mobile phones. It’s a bit pricey and does not have Australian telcos but you can get free access to Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. It’s invaluable for testing when you don’t have the real handset. I don’t use emulators.
5. Bluetooth modem software - debugging or reverse engineering on deck mobile services is very tricky on a mobile phone due to the lack of tools and the limited interface however if you configure your pc to use your phone as a modem and choose the on deck apn instead on the Internet apn you will get access to on deck services - and sophisticated debugging tools such as the ones on this list.

Optus iPhone availability

The Optus store on Oxford st. just told me Optus are completely out of iPhones for 4 weeks.

QRCode promoting street musicians in Japan

I  found this photo I took nearly 2 years ago in Japan,  Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park to be precise.  It’s pretty neat, the QRCcode links to a mobile page about the band.  Instant gratification.  Telstra is attempting to kick start it in Australia and good luck to them, I really think they should have got together with an industry body like AIMIA and get all the carriers behind it.  I hear they are attempting to push the QRCode app to all their NextG customers.  Eek, would not like to be the person who signed off on that.

Mobile Web Tips Part 1 - Page Efficiency

Page efficiency is very important on mobile phones. I used the term page efficiency rather than page weight because fast loading of new content is more complicated than low page weight.  Some people think that 3G networks negate the need for compression and caching. This is simply not true.  3G networks continue to be the poor equivalent to their wired or even WiFi cousins and have very high latency times.

An efficient page is, where possible:

• Loaded by AJAX
• Compressed using GZIP
• Has a cache expiry of 10 years
• Simple HTML, styled by an external CSS file

It amazing how many mobile sites fail on one or more of the above requirements.  Lets look at them one by one.

More »

Announcing the best iPhone sites in Australia, news.com.au, truelocal and moshtix

Well its time to reveal what kept me and a bunch of great people at News Digital Media and beyond (Tim & Tom) busy for a the last month or so.

Under an incredibly short development schedule we went from a simple prototype I created for news.com.au to 3 of the best iPhone sites in the world, I truly believe that.

iphone.news.com.au News from Australia and around the world

(iPhone only or Safari on a Mac/PC with Developer Mode/User Agent/iPhone)

iphone.truelocal.com.au Australia’s fastest growing business directory

(iPhone only or Safari on a Mac/PC with Developer Mode/User Agent/iPhone)

iphone.moshtix.com.au Buy tickets for events online and on mobile

(iPhone only or Safari on a Mac/PC with Developer Mode/User Agent/iPhone)

Thanks to Pete for the screenshots

Cleaning up the digital litter - KeithAhern.com is alive!