Top 5 North American University Mobile User Experiences

We expect that the majority of the current and prospective universities and college students are avid mobile users.  You may find many supporting facts in statistics published by Noel-Levitz, LLC In the 2013 E-Expectations Report.  Below are some of the report highlights:


 

  • 78% of respondents have regular access to a mobile device; 80 percent of those devices are a smartphone, tablet, or iPod Touch.
  • 43% of students reported using their mobile devices for all of their Web browsing.
  • 82% said they preferred to look at college Web sites on a PC/laptop instead of a mobile device. However, 68 percent said they have viewed college Web sites on a mobile device.
  • 73% of students expressed interest in downloading campus-specific applications for schools on their target list.
  • 47% check e-mail on their mobile devices daily; 67 percent check at least once per week.
  • 98% of students would open an e-mail from a college they were interested in attending.
  • 67% of respondents use Facebook, compared to 79 percent of respondents in the 2012 E-Expectations study.

 
Let’s review the top 5  North American universities according to the Ranking Web with the goal to understand how the top university web sites support their mobile web visitors. The Ranking Web is published twice a year (data is collected during the first weeks of January and July for being public at the end of both months), covering more than 20,000 Higher Education Institutions worldwide. The following  North America universities  are among the top 5 on the Ranking Web (Webometrics) list:
 

  1. Harvard University
  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology
  3. Stanford University
  4. University of California Berkeley
  5. University of California Los Angeles UCLA

 
The ranking does not include web design as all the measurements are related to the contents published (quantity and quality), especially those open access documents of academic interest or relevance. Below are our findings and comments about the top 5 universities mobile web presence.

Harvard University

http://www.harvard.edu/ The university has a responsive web site that is partially touch screen friendly. The home page offers also a mobile web application m.harvard.edu that can be accesses by clicking a link on top of the page.   jar-mobile-university-ux-blog-1

The m.harvard.edu  web application is a mobile web application that is  goal driven so the app user can jump from the home screen to one of the topics like Courses, Shuttle tracker or Dining.   However when the user navigates deeper within the web application then the content below the second level of navigators may not be mobile optimized. This makes user experience somehow not predictable as you don’t know by clicking a menu item if the target  content is mobile friendly or not. I would prefer more clear separation of navigation to mobile and non mobile content.

 
 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

http://web.mit.edu/

The MIT web site is not a responsive web design site. Instead the site offers to download a mobile application from the App store. It means that an occasional mobile user has to scroll and zoom the desktop site or go to the app store and install the application.

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Stanford University

Stanford University provides for mobile visitors a mobile web site with News, Events, Athletics, Maps and Direction as well as Links. The Links is a mobile friendly hierarchical menu but it leads the user to the main desktop site content that is not responsive. Overall the site mobile experience is far from the optimal.

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University of California Berkeley

http://www.berkeley.edu/

The Berkeley university mobile home page provides visitors with two choices:

Mobile Site or Full  Site

The Mobile site provides hierarchical menu that mostly leads to the desktop web site content that is not responsive web design.

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The Full site is not responsive and is not easy to be navigated using a smartphone touch screen.

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University of California Los Angeles UCLA

http://www.ucla.edu/

The main USLA web site is developed using responsive web design approach and also offers on its home page link to web mobile application.  The approach is similar to the Harvard University web site. The mobile web application is designed using mobile apps pattern which is the most user friendly for mobile users.  User may access events, directory,  map and other the most common mobile users task with one or two click. UCLA  has develop the own Mobile Framework http://mwf.ucla.edu/. According to the framework documentation: “The UCLA Mobile Web Framework facilitates the development of a robust, feature-rich, cross-platform mobile web presence. It focuses on mobile web standards, semantic markup and device agnosticism, allowing developers to develop a single application capable of running on all web-capable mobile devices.”

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What are our findings from the top 5 universities mobile web site review

I would rank UCLA and Harvard University web experience as the best among the top 5 universities. UCAL stands  out form the crowd by offering its own mobile web framework.

 

University Mobile Web Presence Challenges

I think that mobile web presence of the North American universities is still far from the optimal.  In majority of cases there is no overall strategy how to deal with massive amount of web sites and content developed so far. There is no consistency in mobile user experience approach between deferent university web sites.  Even within one university we see attempts to solve the problem using different mobile web presence approaches, for instance, Harvard university offers two web site options: Responsive Web Design and mobile web application.   Lack of consistency in mobile web approaches may confuse users as they don’t know which option to select in order to achieve their specific goals. You have to learn every time how to use the web site from your phone.  This is indication of the deficiency in the overall University mobile web the user experience architecture.

Majority of the North American universities have invested significant resources in their web site networks that may comprise dozens or even over hundred different web sites of schools, faculties, departments, research center and other university organizations.

To make all those resource mobile and touch screen friendly is a huge undertaking and will take time and resources.

To support mobile web  users Universities and school apply different approaches including mobile native and web applications, responsive web design (RWD) sites and responsive delivery (RD) transformation of the existing desktop sites.

I personally think that combination of responsive delivery and mobile web,  native and hybrid applications likely provides the best balance between providing the optimal user experience and efficiency of implementation.

University web sites are designed to communicate with different audiences such as prospective and current students, faculty and staff, alumni, donors, employers and parents.  We may assume that the mobile web goals of different audiences are not the same and that makes the user experience design of mobile university web sites even more challenging.

To address the mobile web pretense challenges each university needs a unified mobile web strategy for achieving the best mobile web user experience and balancing   between complexity and efficiency of the web projects delivery.

You may also read more about different options to provide mobile web presence in the Jar Creative whitepaper.