nclud is a creative web design agency bringing the web together through unique, stylish, and usable designs.

When those without the internet get it, will they get it?

The nclud team recently attended the Refresh DC meet-up this past week and it got us thinking – do we really care about the global impact of the mobile web? Should we care? Or, when should we care? As strong supporters of Refresh DC, we showed up in force and the presentation was terrific. Wayan Vota, of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) News, had a sensational and crowd pleasing presentation on the OLPC initiative and its impact on web design and development. The impact is real, but for whom of us will it apply?

Most of us have just gotten comfortable designing for “the web” and building for the variety of desktop browsers. Now the world wide web has evolved off the desktop and has gone mobile! Apple’s iPhone will prove to be one of the first mass adoption mechanisms for the mobile web. There are dozens of different devices all running new and never before used “web browsers” with a variety of generational changes being released quarterly.

However, the “mobile web” has a larger impact than simply our irritation with designing for new non-compliant browsers; playing like it’s 1996 all over again. More of the world is connected to the web via a mobile device than through our traditional means of connectivity. It is that large percent of the world’s population living in environments lacking the infrastructure for traditional means of web connectivity that we are speaking of. Many of you look back of at the first generation of websites produced early on and laugh at their primitive nature. But before your criticize too much, remember who their audience was – because you will most likely be living this all over again (I guess history does repeat itself). The early websites were building for a mass audience base that never before had been exposed to the internet. Imagine creating a website for a user who didn’t know that blue text with an underline connoted the ability to send you to another page. Imagine a user who didn’t know how to use the back button, what email was or even a user that didn’t understand that a list of text off to the left hand side of the screen was actually a table of contents of sorts to navigate through. Lets not even forget about dial-up connections and the infamous 640×480 screen size. The web has rapidly evolved like no other “industry” before has; we, the designers and developers more than ten years later, have taken a lot for granted when poking fun at the sites of yesterday.

We’ve moved on right? Why live in the past? Broadband is king and anything is game for being a link! Is it? Will the mobile web prove that thinking wrong or will it itself evolve fast enough for this not to be an issue? We don’t know, but we are damn curious!

Just to preface, the OLPC initiative, developed by MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte, is the creation and distribution of the much-talked-about $100 laptop. Within the next 12 to 18 months, 5 to 10 million laptops will be distrusted to children around the globe. These unique laptops will carry their own OS, Sugar, and be web ready utilizing the Firefox web browser.

Wayan, of OLPC News, kept speaking to the fact that there will instantly be 10 million new users to the web within a matter of months. Being the realist (opportunist) that I am, I immediately had to point out the fact that if there is a distribution of 10 million laptops to children of an average household of 4, then you more realistically have 40 million new web users simply as a result of the OLPC initiative; a number much more interesting and perhaps much more impacting (good and bad) — 1/7 the population of the United States (more than the entire population of Canada).

With respect to the OLPC initiative, lets be more realistic – are the families of third world countries worth ignoring? Being an ethical and do-good sort of company we want to say no, but being business-oriented-designers, we have to ask, are they? A family making less than $5,000 a year will never browse to the local Washington, D.C. BMW dealership’s website – they may stumble upon it, but are not likely to purchase. One could argue that the child of this family could visit the BMW website daily and be so awe-struck with the photos it becomes his life’s mission to achieve the “American Dream” and one day purchase a BMW of his own; ultimately resulting in a sale – it is a long shot, but possible. But for organizations such as The Discovery Channel, this becomes a much larger and much more real problem – these children could become quickly dependent on their educationally entertaining content — but will the auto industry advertising on Discovery.com care? If these advertisers are pay-per-click, or even worse pay-per-impression, they might actually be upset that there are potentially 40 millions new visitors that don’t have the means to be potential customers but now have the access to click on an eye-catching advertisement. This now becomes more of a social initiative than a profiting one.

There are two questions we have to ask ourselves. Do we want to design for these devices and then how do we design for these devices when the audience using them have never been exposed to the web?

We at nclud have put a lot of our attention lately to designing for the mobile web, but our focus has been on the more experienced user. Personally, I believe the “mobile web” as a technology will evolve at a fast enough pace that it will replicate the traditional web so rapidly that designing specifically for mobile devices will be a slightly unnecessary task (think IE7, still a headache, but close!). Until that day comes, it is a very interesting and exciting new creative outlet for us all to explore!

Oh yes! And a HUGE thank you to The Push Group for sponsoring the event! I’ve worked with them on some projects and they are an amazingly talented and fun group!

Posted by Martin Ringlein on March 27, 2007 | Permanent Link |