• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 29, 2011

A 2009 report issued by the usability experts at Nielsen Norman Group likened the mobile Web to the desktop Internet circa 1994. Its latest assessment of the mobile Web found only modest improvement -- it has now evolved to where the traditional Internet was in 1999.

If that's dismaying, consider that the new report covers only smartphones and touchscreen phones, not more basic feature phones. And that at the current rate of progress, Web performance on mobile phones will not be on par with the PC-based Internet until 2026.

On the bright side, the research also confirmed that apps tend to be more user-friendly than the mobile Web.

The Nielsen Norman study asked people to perform a wide variety of tasks on their devices, from looking up the price of a camera in an electronics store to finding interesting pictures related to the day's news. Participants include 105 mobile users from four countries: the U.S., Australia, Hong Kong and U.K.

Those surveyed were evenly split by gender. In terms of age, 12% were 50 years or older, while the remaining 88% were evenly distributed across the ages of 20 to 49 years. Devices tested included many iPhone and Android devices as well as some Windows Phone handsets.

The firm found the average success rate in completing nearly 200 different tasks on the mobile Internet was 62% compared to 59% two years ago -- hardly a leap forward, despite the exclusion of feature phones from the study. More specifically, the success rate for mobile-optimized sites was 64%, while the figure fell to 58% for non-tailored sites.

By comparison, the current PC-based Internet success rate is 84%.

Nielsen Norman advises Web publishers to create mobile-specific versions of their sites and to have explicit links from the full site to the mobile site and vice versa. "Unfortunately, search engines often fail their mobile users and erroneously point them to the full sites, even for companies that offer mobile sites with much better user experience," stated the report.

While the mobile Web's rate of improvement seems disappointingly slow, the firm says it's at about the same as for the desktop Web over the last dozen years.

Mobile apps fared better, with a 76% success rate across 194 different tasks. Of course, building an app is typically more costly than a mobile site because a developer must code different versions for each platform. "Thus, we can really recommend building mobile applications only if you're either rich or offer a service that's particularly suited to mobile use," noted the report.

As a result of what it has learned in the last two years, and because of rising user expectations, Nielsen Norman has increased the number of mobile design guidelines it recommends from 85 to 210. The company's guidelines boil down to two overarching principles: design for the small screen and limit the number of features to those that are most crucial for mobile use.