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Survey suggests that most Japanese smartphone users couldn’t care less about mobile sites

Andrew Miller Aug 3, 2013
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It wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that smartphones and mobile technology in general have changed our lives in ways that we might never have imagined even 10 years ago. Communication between people on either side of the globe has become almost instant, with a wealth of information quite literally at our fingertips, and we now have more processing power in our back pockets than the PCs that took up most of our desks in the late 90s.

But is it possible that we are becoming a little too obsessed with making our data-loving life as streamlined as possible? What we’re talking about here are the mobile versions of websites that users are often redirected to when trying to visit a website on their smartphones. Often, these smartphone-friendly sites help us navigate more easily and avoid having to pinch to zoom or pan around the screen to read their contents. But due to their simplicity, many mobile versions lack many of the features of their PC-version brethren and we spend time trying to find what we really want.

A survey conducted by Kenrei Takuchi, CEO and Management Consultant for Iroha Ltd, suggests that a significant number of smartphone users in Japan have a fond dislike of the mobile versions of popular websites and wish they’d disappear back up into the sky where they came from.

The survey was conducted to celebrate the release of a revised version of Kenrei’s book “Things That Sell and Things That Don’t” and asked 100 smartphone users whether they thought the sites designed specifically for smartphones were really needed.

Users were asked, “Which type of site do you find easier to navigate: PC sites or mobile sites?” To which 39 percent responded that they preferred mobile sites. A whopping 45 percent of users said that they preferred the standard PC site, though, while 16 percent said that they were fine with either type of site design. That said, 60 percent of those surveyed felt that mobile sites offered few advantages.

Another question that was posed was, “Have you ever, as a result of not being able to read the screen properly, had to switch between site formats (from PC site to mobile site, or vice versa)?” Only 29 percent of users said that they have ever felt the need to switch to a mobile site while browsing. However, in line with the consensus that mobile sites don’t really yield any benefits, 63 percent replied that they had switched from smartphone to PC sites while browsing.

While I’m sure that many mobile sites have advantages in given circumstances, I can personally relate to the overwhelming majority of this survey’s view that it can sometimes be much easier to just view the original PC site rather than work with the limited information given to us through mobile sites. But what do you guys think? Would you ever miss the more compact style of a mobile site? More to the point, if you’re viewing our humble pages on your mobile device are you finding it user-friendly? Let us know in the comments!

Source: My Navi Woman