TNT4 Developing a Mobile Website

John Chivvis: Before we get started, I wanted to just take a moment and thank a couple of folks. They weren't able to be here with us, budgets and all that good stuff, but one of them is our Lead Programmer, Jeff Carouth, and then Bob Timm, who's also Programs and Student. If it wasn't for these guys, and especially Bob's enthusiasm, we probably wouldn't be where we are today.

Erick Beck: Yeah.

John Chivvis: And so we definitely want to thank them. This is a podcast; we wanted to get their names into the stream. Also, if you want to play along with us today, we will be talking about m.tamu.edu as well.

Erick Beck: This is kind of our obligatory statistics page that's got to be on the beginning of every production. It is basically talking about how mobile is the future. And I think we all know that. We've all got the phones.

As soon as we all got off the airplane yesterday, the first thing everybody did, head over to Baggage Claims, start pulling out their phone, checking email or looking at the scores from the game and that sort of thing.

So we could've picked any graph to put on here. This is just one saying that mobile is expected to outpace us tops in the next couple of years. I think we all kind of realize that. And... if we go ahead and go to the next slide. If you don't know that... Well, bad resolution. You've been basically living in a cave if you don't know that mobile is here.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: A really dark cave.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: So there you go. So, anyway. So here we are, and we wanted to throw that in there as well.

So, basically following on our campaign here, kind of a brief history of where we are right now. Our campaign obviously right now is 'It's Time for Texas A&M', and for us, it's actually time for us to go mobile.

We started this back in 2009 where our director of Marketing Programs bid out a contract with a vender to help us develop some iPhone applications, a single application which we call Tamumobile. And in it were a number of modules. When we first started off there were six, and now we've upped it to 12. It basically feeds information that tie into this that were pulled and it shows everything from news and athletics to courses, and what you see up here, dining, calendar, those kinds of things.

After that happened, we were in the process of beginning to lay out the framework for our mobile website. And so in 2010 we rolled out our mobile web, again starting off with what we had. But then as we began to see feeds and see opportunities, looking at questions, we began to add. And so now we've added all kinds of things to it as well. And we'll talk about some of these today as we kind of walk through our presentation.

Erick Beck: So this just talks about... whenever somebody thinks about mobile web, there's really three big things that people tend to talk about. One is going to be mobile web versus apps. And we'll talk for a few minutes about that during the presentation.

The next piece is going to be the HTML and the CSS. It creates the website itself. We've already had one presentation on that this morning, so we're not going to go too much into that.

And then the next section is going to be what kind of content goes into the sites. And judging from the questions that we had this morning, that's something that everybody seems to be really interested in, so we'll try to answer a lot of those questions here this morning.

John Chivvis: Yeah. I hope you like my design skills here. Here's my girl under a tree, for those of you who were here last year.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: I figured you'd all enjoy that. That's an Easter egg that you all get.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: So let's take a moment and let's talk a little bit about the differences between native apps and mobile web and where we're coming from in this, for this.

Really and truly, when we talk about this, ultimately, at the end of the day, it's about three things. One, it's about the experience that you want your end user to have. What is it that you want them to be able to do? How is it that you want them to be able to access that or interact with that?

And when I mean 'that', I'm talking about the content. Is it just quick information? Are you just trying to get them the information for a phone number or an office hour or a type of course? Or is this something more where the experience itself is greater than the content? We're looking at something that's going to be more interactive than that.

And ultimately, based off of those two, then, you can decide what's going to be the best delivery for you. Is it going to be a native app or is it going to be something that's going to be delivered by a mobile web? And we may even, if we have time, talk a little bit about hybrids on the line.

Erick Beck: Yeah. That's one of the things that we do want to emphasize, that we're kind of past the point now where we're talking apps versus Web as platforms and we're really talking about getting the content and the experience that the users want, and then pushing back on that and the vehicle that best delivers that rather than arguing, "Do you want an app? Do you want Web?" and only being one or the other.

John Chivvis: So let me quickly hit some highlights of both the native apps and then also the Web's and also the cons for it.

Obviously with pros, I've hit the Top 4. Really and truly one of the best things is that you can control the user experience. Because of this, I can design anything the way I want, I can provide the graphics the way I want, I can have it navigate the way I want. I can do whatever I want to this within that framework of that app. I control it.

Second part is, use of the hardware features. The great thing about apps, and you see it now for the things that you use. For all of you Foursquare users, you're tying into your GPS. For those of you that are using Layar, you're using Augmented Reality. Those are the things that are coming from your device itself. And fact that I'm using an app allows me to take advantage of that that I may not see elsewhere.

And again, also... Go ahead.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And I would just circle this one because, to me, this is the most important of the four, because it really talks about what the app is going to be in the future rather than necessarily what it is right now.

John Chivvis: Obviously one of the big strengths is offline usage. We were talking at dinner, I think, just the other night about how important it is in many cases to decide where that division point is and how much content you're going to actually divide in a native app, whereas at the point you divide to know we need to go out there and grab that information from online and we need to have that connection.

But again, the pro, too, is that you can put it there. And then obviously you're using the code on the device itself and not being subject to subsets of HTML, CSS and what not.

The downsides to it, though, obviously you've got to develop for each platform. As I mentioned before, at ours we've developed in 2009 the iPhone app. It wasn't until several months later that our vender provided us with the Blackberry app, and not only one app but two Blackberry apps: one for those that had onscreen touch keyboards and ones that had the older-school keyboards that were hardwired into the device itself. It had to have two.

So the downside is that you've got to have each one. And in fact, I think they're going to help us roll out an Android, I think either this month or next month. So, again, we're having to wait on some of the development times. And we see that, as I get down here, 'cost' and 'deployment time', and development time ends up being stretched out somewhat.

Obviously, different experiences based on your device. On the ones we have now, for example, our Blackberry handles the maps and handles our courses and handles some more information differently than what you would see on the iPhone, so in some cases, trying to find out from them what version they're using and what they are using, especially when you're trying to help troubleshoot some things. Sometimes it can be a problem.

And then obviously, these things. Testing. Because you haven't had the device, you're also going to have access to the build itself. Sometimes it's going to be a pain.

The other side, mobile web. And then people say, "Oh, that's because mobile web is the answer to everything." It's got its pros and its cons as well.

Obviously, it's a whole lot quicker, a whole lot less expensive to develop for mobile. No problem. Obviously, upgrades are quicker because, again, you're throwing them up onto a Web server. It's accessible to all. As Justin showed us earlier in one of his examples in the propellerhead CSS1 for mobile is that you can actually get to where... it looks great across all these different browsers.

And, again, more discoverable. Ultimately, because it's a website, as Erick reminds me numerous times that Google is your friend, and it's going to help you when you're advertising and also providing access to that site and that information.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And the other thing is, basically, because it is a website, most of us already have the personnel that have the expertise to build a website. So the HTML, the CSS that goes into is not a whole lot different from what you are already accustomed to. You don't have to go out and find somebody who may be able to program in all the other languages for the apps.

John Chivvis: Obviously the biggest for us, or in general, for mobile web, is customer satisfaction. We had a big discussion about this just the other night is that many folks still believe that if it is mobile web, it can be as good as the native app.

Now, that's beginning to change as you've seen devices change, as browsers change. That is changing. But still, it is something that we find--and in fact, Jeff and Bob, their spouses were talking to them about it because they're all excited about the development for this, and they said, "We probably won't use it." "Why?" "I want a button to press." "Why?" "Well, because I just want the buttons." "OK."

And for them, again, it was just inherent in them. The app is not as valuable. It does not provide as much information. It's not as rich. So, again, finding customer satisfaction is an issue there.

Obviously we see things like user experience. It's going to be depending on the design. More difficult to access native device capabilities. Obviously trying to work from a website to access phone. Yeah... nice try. And, again, I find though that sometimes is a pain in the rear. All right.

So, having said that, we're going to move ahead a little bit.

Obviously the line here says, "Is there still an app for that?" We talked about 2009, we talked about when we first brought this up. That was the big thing. Bringing that app to the market was a great thing. Why? Because it allowed me to now have this mobile presence. Browsers weren't where they were, data plans, all of those kinds of things weren't as robust as we see it now, and so therefore it was built on the app.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And just to kind of bring this back to what John was saying, we still had this attitude that every phone wasn't an iPhone. And even a year and a half ago, the iPhone was the only thing that was out there.

Before that, Motorola RAZR was considered top-of-the-line, and we were getting to the point that people had the apps, and in order to differentiate yourself you had an app. You had to have one in order to just be 'the cool kids'. Now that's starting to change.

John Chivvis: So, now we talk about the future. And so here's where we were. And I wish you could see this; obviously it's a little dark. This is actually a busy airport shot, and that person right there has a smartphone. And that's where we were.

But the problem is, again, you look at service plans, you look at the two-year cycle of phones, you look at people who inadvertently drop their phone into water so they could go get--

[Laughter]

Erick Beck: That would be me.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: Oh. I was thinking about Nick and the iPhone 4.

Audience 1: I lost mine on the roller coaster.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: A roller coaster.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: But, again, what you do is not only does this person have that smartphone, but now you have all of these people who now have smartphones. And not only these people, you've got all these people. And then that's my mom.

[Laughter]

Erick Beck: Oh. Yeah.

John Chivvis: She still doesn't know how to use her voicemail for it.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is that, yes, we are beginning to develop and design as we're geared towards mobile web development. All of these folks are using smartphones, but in the back of our mind we still have to remember that there are folks there who are going to be accessing this from not something that's the top-of-the-line. We have to keep that in mind.

Erick Beck: Yeah, because the other big thing about the adoption of the phones has not necessarily been only the speed of the adoption but it's also been the fact that the capabilities of the phone have been going up by so much on each update. It really hasn't been incremental.

We've gone, again, from something like a Motorola RAZR up to the iPhones and the Androids that can do just about everything. So it's not the same thing that we saw back in the early days of developing web pages where you could have a nice, slow, incremental adjustment to technology. We're talking about leaps and bounds here that are causing you to constantly rethink everything that you're doing.

John Chivvis: And why is that important? Well, obviously this is data from RBC Capital basically showing 2011. We're talking six months from now. Smartphones over PC sales. And from our standpoint, for the work that we do, this is kind of an important stat for us.

So that leads us to, obviously, 'How do we make this transition?' instead of just thinking, how do we still think apps, Web, and how we move forward from this.

And to kind of summarize all that real quickly is that basically we're looking into mobile web because, again, we can get these things up fast, we can get them to market quicker, and again for us it's about quickly conveying content when it comes to a website. We want to make it fast-loading. We want to get this information to them for that. Again, tapping into what's available, and then use our apps for high-profile projects, ones in which we really want to just take that device and what we're wanting to do from an experience standpoint and move that to the next level.

We want to be able to take and do that Augmented Reality campus tour. We want to be able to go in there and work with our venders to create that interactive student experience so they can access courses and files and information all online but let that be done through the app because of what's available, because of the hardware and the software.

Erick Beck: Yeah. So in a lot of ways what we're seeing is the evolution of both websites and apps. What we had a year and a half ago was where everything was an app in order to be the cool, sexy type of thing. Now with all the CSS, the Ajax that the phones are able to support, websites are able to pick up some of that, and that allows the apps to start moving into some of these more high-profile areas.

John Chivvis: So basically, like I said, we've come full circle back to where we said, "Content is king."

I had a chat with Zach and a couple of folks there and we started really talking about the idea of content and how important content is, and, again, not only just the content itself but how do we get the content to the people in the way that they're expecting and also in a manner that allows them to glean what they need without the rest of the fluff for them.

So, who do we design for? Well, do we go after this girl with the iPhone? Do we go for this guy with his 'Droid? Do we go for this guy with his TracFone? And I don't know if you can see this guy. I called him Creeper. He was in a blue hoodie. It was a cool picture. Here was a guy in a blue hoodie, so I just had to get him. He had a Blackberry.

But the point is is that, who do you design for? With all of these phones out here, who's the audience? And that's what I say about mobile web is because with that, then we can actually say, "Hey, it's all of the above." But... This is where Eric has his obligatory...

Erick Beck: Yeah. Well, I should've... Let's go back for just a minute.

Yeah, because one of the things we've really got to remember is that because we are talking about the website, a lot of the same boring old rules that you've gone through for every other website really apply here. We can do a website that has all the cool features of an iPhone, but yet if you do graceful degradation nicely or progressive enhancement, depending on how you like to define it, that same content can be viewed in the older phones without a problem.

Like John was saying, whenever I dropped my phone in the water, between the times that I did that and got a new one, I had an old... basically today you would call it a texting phone... that I hooked up between the activations, and I was able to view our website because, again, it was able to be viewed by older phones rather than being optimized only for iPhones.

Those of you were designers back in the, say, late '90s might remember at the bottom of every page, "Best viewed by Internet Explorer," and how we all hated that with a passion.

[Laughter]

Erick Beck: And those of us who are kind of in the industry were pushing for Web standards that would be available across all of the browsers.

Well, if we're really going to be honest with ourselves, we can't say Microsoft was doing bad with Explorer because they weren't supporting standards but at the same time start putting "Best viewed by Web Kept" down on the bottom of our pages. We really need to be doing something that can be viewed by everybody.

I see. This is our little proof that "Star Wars" can be applicable to everything.

[Laughter]

Erick Beck: This was actually a nice headline in an article on A LIST Apart. It's just saying, basically, it's not as easy as it sounds to necessarily sniff for devices and be able to present them. Every phone out there is very un-standard in how it does its user agent-reporting.

There's CSS methods of selection, there's JavaScript, there's Server-side, tons of different ways, probably more than we can really present here. But basically the idea is there's a lot of prefab kits out there. The Open MIT Project, for example, will do a lot of this for you. And I really recommend if you're going to target them, score different views, that you go try to use one of those toolkits as a base rather than try to roll your own.

John Chivvis: So, with us, we set it out for our designers, really and truly, we want to come up with something that allows us to want to be consistent, allows us, again, for us, from a support standpoint, to have something that's consistent, because it makes our supporting a whole lot easier than trying to go out and work through all of these adversities. For us, as Erick said, following standard conventions so we're not confusing people.

And this is really these last two points. If your user is an iPhone user, don't go creating a new navigational UI structure that totally goes against what they're naturally thinking when they're using their device.

For a lot of us who use Google Maps, for example, on our regular websites, if that's what you use, why do you use that? Well, in some cases, obviously, it's free and it provides some great things. But the fact of the matter is that pretty much everybody out there uses Google Maps and knows how that works. So when they come to your site, that user experience is the same.

So what we're saying here in our design is to, again, be consistent and follow those standard ideas that people have when they come to actually laying out their site.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And one of the other things is you're probably going to get pushed back from some of your administrators on this because they see mobile as new, so that means we can go out and we can be different, we can do our own thing. Just as a plug for our keynote, it's a matter of 'Don't make me think'. People are used to using these interfaces. Give them what they're used to using. Make it simple for them.

John Chivvis: Ultimately, at the end of the day, your mobile site has to be lean. It has got to be fast. It's just the whole point. If you're waiting for them to download a half-meg spinning graphic, why? What was the point for that? Because they're trying to get it and get out. And so, again, it's all about displaying the content and it's also about how to actually best lay that content out so they can get to it. And understand it.

And we had to put this in. Also you have to understand that your mobile site, you may only think of it as being on your iPhone or your Android device or your Blackberry. But what we've seen from our analytics is there's a lot of actual desktop users that actually use that.

Because, again, if they're going there for a certain reason, they want to get that information and get out quickly, then in some cases they know that mobile site does that. It's not "I'm having to drill down all these extra layers deep. I'm not having to go through all of these other types of file formats." That information is there.

So if you look at some of our traffic here... oh yeah, iPhone, there it is right there. And then here's our Blackberry, and here's our Android. But what sits out here? Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. So there's a chunk of folks that are using that. And so it's... Go ahead.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And so just following up on that, that brings me to kind of one of my pet peeves is whenever we were developing this presentation in our site, please don't hijack my connection.

Whenever I'm going to a mobile site on a browser, I want to see the content that's on here. There's all too many of them that will go to this 'ooh new cool' how I made the mobile site. If you go from there, some of them will have a link to get you back on to the site so that you can see the content. A lot of them don't. So just kind of help out your viewers by letting them actually get to the content as quickly as they can.

John Chivvis: So, mobile content.

Erick Beck: And more girls under trees.

John Chivvis: Yes. That.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: Except this is a mobile girl under a tree with the device.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: And I love this picture, one, because it says, "Howdy!" and they're laughing and it obviously shows you how great Texas A&M is all the time.

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: But most importantly, it shows this girl with this device, and she's not talking on it. And I bring this up, why? Because, again, they are interacting with the device not as a means just as a phone but as a means for either conveying information or receiving information.

Most funny is as we were putting this together, Erick said, "I want this quote on this page." And I was like, "OK. Great. Who's this guy?"

[Laughter]

John Chivvis: And he was like "Hey, he's the guy that did the presentation earlier this morning!" So it's kind of a great kind of time.

But this is a great point is that it's not just a matter of you holding the phone and standing there, "I've got this mobile device." It's the fact that I am somewhere trying to do something at a specific time. I am in line trying to get my coffee and I've got my phone, and I'm trying to check scores. I am just turning into the campus and I want to know where the parking lot is so visitors can park. I'm standing with my parents who are helping me try to pick out courses, and I need to quickly know what courses are available.

They are somewhere trying to do something, and these are the devices that provide that solution. And that is key. I mean, if anything you take away from that, that is probably the most key point.

Erick Beck: Yeah, because I was at HEWeb a couple of months ago and I saw this presentation, and this quote really stood out. And for me, this was a 'the clouds are parting and the enlightenment is coming down on the golden wings' kind of moment.

This really did become kind of the basis of the philosophy for what we put on the mobile website. Because like John was talking about, it's not just that the mobile is a platform that has different requirements. It is the mobile user is a completely different user from a desktop user. They've got different needs, they've got different wants for what content they want. So basically they're looking for different experience.

So that kind of leads us into one of the questions that was asked about, do we just make a mobile website or do we make a completely different website, or just mobilize the website that we've got? And that kind of leads us into here for the different content.

John Chivvis: This is actually a Ph.D. student's desk that this photo is from. But it's got some interesting things here.

If you look here, the average New York Times article is 1,200 words. OK? Think about trying to put that online. In fact, I think Zach and I were talking about this yesterday. Who's going to read 1,200 words of an article on a mobile website? That's a lot.

So we say, "Oh, let's cut it down." OK, if you look at SEO best practices, they're saying most of your mobile content is somewhere between 250 and 500 words. Basically you're saying, cut that New York Times article down by two-thirds to get this.

But even when we think about mobile websites, that's still too much. Why? Because, I mean, look at now. What are we talking about? Twitter: 140 characters. OK. So I'm cutting 66% to get to this. What am I cutting to get to here? We're talking about cutting our content down to a point.

And I'll be honest with you. This sometimes is a fight with your writers. A lot of times with folks, especially if you deal with the communications group that has traditionally been in print media writing their news and releases, writing their stories, helping them to understand this change in mindset all the way down to here can sometimes be difficult.

But, again, you have to be thinking about your end user and what they're wanting.

So, Erick made this point and alluded to it is that making a mobile website is not the same thing as making your website mobile-friendly. OK? Two different things. Completely.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And definitely do go do the mobile stylesheets on your www.edu site, but that's really not sufficient anymore. Again, it is a different experience that people are looking for with completely different content.

The girls walking around under the tree are probably not looking for tuition and aid calculator. They're looking for 'When is the next bus coming? When is the computer lab open? What is on the menu in the eating establishments?' That sort of thing.

John Chivvis: Yeah. I don't really think they were laughing about filling out the Admissions' PDF form as they were walking. I can pretty much tell you that.

I mean, for example, for us with our mobile website, and again it's on, we have a section about that. And for us on the current desktop, it's long, drawn-out FAQs. It's actually three or four or five or six different pages of facts about Texas A&M as well as a half-meg PDF.

Mobile-friendly says I can go get that. For a mobile website, it's cutting it down to get quickly to the points of information that we need.

Our bus routes, which is our most popular part of the site. If you go to the transportation site to get the bus route, you have to go the specific bus route, and you actually have to download it, and again, another half-meg PDF to get the route names and the actual times that the busses are going to...

Erick Beck: In this nasty format of the table that you can't usually look at until when the next one is coming.

John Chivvis: And so what was nice about this, and again, talking about devices, talking about what you can and can't do with hardware, is for us is that basically we had them just put it in a text file of the... we got the optimized JPEG for the route, and then what we did is say, "Hey, on your time, just give us a text file. That's quick, fast, it's easy and it's light."

And for them, it was something easy for them to do. And we won't ask them to go out and learn how to use Google Transit or anything like that. This was quick, easy, dirty, out-the-door out.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And then what we'd do is we'd process that file and we'd just spit out the next three times that the busses are going to come.

John Chivvis: Based off of the phone. It's time.

Erick Beck: Exactly. We know you're standing there waiting for the bus. You don't care what it's going to be at four o'clock this evening. You want to know how long it's going to be before it gets here right now.

John Chivvis: Same again with us for open office hours and operating hours, labs, libraries, dining facilities and such, going out, collecting them all from all these different websites in different styles, different formats, different links, and then boiling it all down and helping them understand how to boil it down so we can get something that looks a whole lot easier to understand than trying to cipher through some of this other material.

Ultimately, it does tie back into what we talked about before. It's not only in thinking about what it is on our website we've got, but what is it really and truly that our mobile users really want. What are they asking for?

And that's part of the problem you have when dealing with the politics sometimes of your administration or what they're saying us to do. Because in some cases, what they believe students want and what students actually want may be two different things.

Erick Beck: Yeah.

John Chivvis: And that's where discussion has to happen.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And basically what we're finding out is people are coming to your websites, they're trying to fulfill a need. They're trying to perform a task whether that would be finding out when the busses are coming or whether that would be if you're on a desktop filling out a form or some sort of thing like that, so the mobile sites really distill that behavior.

So what we're seeing is people are coming here looking for how to accomplish something. They're not just looking for general information. So we have things like the best routes. We have things like labs' hours, dining menus, things that you need to fulfill something that's immediate, in front of you, rather than something that you can access just at any time.

John Chivvis: And the nice thing about your mobile site is that, again, you can attach and enjoy all those great things that Google Analytics provides.

So I can tell you right now that some 80% are coming after the bus routes. I can tell you that some 10-ish%, 12-ish% are using our operating hours, and the rest are coming into our basic information right now. I mean, there are some little things here and there, but that's the way it's working and it's great because, again, those tools are there. We have those abilities to figure that out.

But, having said that, and I don't know if you can see it right here, there's a little link down here on the bottom of our site that says, "Full site." And it's like what we said before: in the way same way we don't want to hijack someone that's on a desktop from using the mobile site on their desktop, the same thing is that looking at iPads, looking at these increased use in tablets that are coming down the line, we also want to let those folks who are coming to the mobile site still have quick and easy access to the full site. So, again, to continue on with the experience that they've got.

Erick Beck: Yeah. Because what we're realizing is that a lot of people that have the iPhones, that have the Androids, most of your sites look pretty good on those nowadays. So if you really do want that tuition and aid calculator, well, we're not going to prevent you from going there.

Just kind of the flip side of that, though, also goes back to a point I was making a minute ago. On your www site, if you want to do the detection of the user and then find out if they're on a mobile, again, don't just automatically send them to that mobile site, because they may want information that's on your full site.

What we're doing on our next iteration is just putting a link up in the top left that's hidden by default that your mobile stylesheet will turn on, and the very thing that you see will be a link to the mobile website. That way, you're getting people to the information if they want it, but you're allowing them to basically define the content they want to look at.

John Chivvis: You know, having said that about Analytics being your friend, for us, it's also helping us understand what that is that content that people want.

And the great thing for us was that last year, 2009, every year Texas A&M plays the University of Texas in football at Thanksgiving. This past year, it was on Thanksgiving. And looking over our Analytics, we began to see something that as the traffic hits on certain pages, a couple of the pages spike. And for that, it's usually the page that has the answers to these two questions.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And I think the big point of this was though not necessarily that it's the people in the stands but we were on national ESPN that day. Everybody and their dog knows who University of Texas is; we kind of live in their shadow a lot of times, so we were seeing a big spike, too. 'What is the A&M all about?' Since it is Thanksgiving, we do have a little bit of a slowdown for the normal traffic.

But more important than the spike up here is the spike... we're seeing people who, they didn't want to leave their TVs to go into the other room to get their computers to look up what A&M stands for. They wanted to get their phones out and look it up right away.

So, again, something about us that you don't necessarily think of as being important for mobile site, we saw a lot of people actually coming and using that information. So thinking outside of the box, it's now part of the standard fare.

John Chivvis: I would say for us, lessons learned. And I'll go and pull these up. And the visual across here is that not only do you have the site that we developed but we have our libraries who started building their own, soon activities who actually have something that they've actually... churning their Drupal stuff into a mobile framework.

And then obviously even one of our departments said, "Hey, we have some mobile content we'd like to have for our own site, but we also want to link back." And so we provided them with some templates and some other materials to help them move along.

So in many cases, it ties into what we're talking about here is, one, don't worry about publishing everything it wants. When we first started, it was just, "Let's get up online the things that we had access to, that we could quickly turn around and get over value." Our directory, for us, was the big one there. I think... what was this... I forgot. News was one.

Erick Beck: Yeah, news.

John Chivvis: Because we were working with feeds that we already had access to. And that's a big thing for us because with a university of our size, we are very, very decentralized. So everything is not conforming to one place. And so for us, these were things that we could start with because we knew we had access to them. And so we started that way.

But having said that, you've got to be willing to make some mistakes. You've got to understand that this is a growing process for us. We started with one structure, and there was some times in which all of a sudden, as we add a new feature, we were like, "Oh, crud. That's a lot of searches on this front page." And so we had to go back in and restructure for that. And it has been that way. And that's obviously what is important to be able to be flexible.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And part of that is we were pushing out to a new set of applications about every two weeks. So all that reorganization of the site was able to kind of be masked and covered up by that. So people saw, "Hey, they're adding new things. This is a real and dynamic site." So they kind of expected things to be moved around here and there.

One of the other kind of mistakes that we made was we probably went too far in the whole 'keeping things backward, fully compliant'. Rather than doing 100% screen widths, we did kind of fix it at what was the minimum at the time, which actually causes problems whenever you change portrait to landscape in your view.

So that's something that whenever we do the new site, we will go back and take our own advice, adhere to standards. Everything is going to be 100% now.

John Chivvis: Another big thing is that look for partners. Whether you're a small school or a large school, you can't do it all by yourself.

And the big thing about partners is in a couple of areas. One, in many cases, if you need information from them, don't say, "Hey, we've got this great thing coming, but you're going to need to do more work so it will happen." Trust me, you don't get many friends that way.

It really does just mean sitting down with them, finding out what their workflows are and getting that in the way that they put that information and get it online, or where they end up putting that information so they've got access to it. It may be spitting out a text file, it may be them just helping you publish an RSS feed that you can go grab for it.

In some cases, it's the 'We've just been waiting to jump into Google Transit' or what not. But again, work with them for that because by doing that and bringing them in as a partner, you get a lot more buy-in, and they also see more value into the work that they're doing.

And when they do that, the other side of it from a partnership standpoint is that they are some of your fiercest marketers. I mean, the main reason why we've done so well with the... and I'll jump to this one... that we've done so well with the busses and the transportation is that on all their busses, all their marquees say, "When is the next bus? M.tamu.edu." And boom, and there you go.

Erick Beck: Yeah. I mean, traffic literally doubled overnight the day that they put those marquees up.

John Chivvis: Also for us, we're beginning to obviously look into the idea of QR codes, and we're talking to transportation services about actually putting the QR code for the actual bus route on the bus stop.

So, again, when we talk about the mobile website, now we're also looking at how do we begin to start working across not just the website but into the app so we can begin to start looking at how do we want to handle this, how do we start taking advantage of some of the other things that might be on that person's phone.

Even the library is already jumping into it. They're putting this up on their floors to be able to provide more information about what they're providing. And they've been great because not only are they developing their own thing but they always send stuff back to us saying, "Hey, where are you guys? This is where we are. We're about to add new databases so that you can do some mobile searching while you're in the library."

And that's great for us to know because it now affects the way we handle some of our searches, but also it allows us to understand where they're going with this that we can better frame our site to get those users from there into what they may be looking for when it comes to the library.

And then obviously, last but not least is the tick is helping show off the materials that you have, which is our director of Marketing Programs, the one that first brought out the apps.

We had these as just apps only and we were developing mobile web. What we did is we sat down with them and said, "Hey, how do we bring this together?" So what we ended up doing was creating Tamumobile having apps and Web. And what that ended up doing as a nice dovetail is that we had the apps, but it gave our apps people an outlet for those folks who didn't have access to those Blackberry or iPhone or, what will hopefully be, Android apps.

So now anybody felt like they could be... and experience the same thing that the Tamumobile apps were having. So in many cases, it did well. And that ends up being propagated out across our campus to our students through our communications, through commercials, that they're doing on their own without us having to touch it at all. It's been one of the nice things not really having to do any of the marketing for that on there.

So, bringing it all full circle. We talked in the beginning, apps here, Web here, and what we're seeing now is we come back around in our new designs, is that we are in the backside but beginning to integrate data instead of saying, "This is the only data that it works for apps, this is the only data that it works for the Web." We're trying to find ways that we can consolidate.

So, again, we're not creating errors, we're not creating different experiences. And it also makes it more manageable for us.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And on our second time around through this system, we're actually able to think of these as one big system rather than individual apps so that we can make the calendar work with the map application or we can make the map show all the dining facilities on campus and that sort of thing.

John Chivvis: And we talked about new features that we're always adding, updates that we're always making. I mean, the fact that just before we came, we were able to get out maps up and running online.

And I will go back to how I'm bringing it full circle, our folks Jeff and Bob that we showed off in the beginning of it, if it weren't for their enthusiasm, the maps, we wouldn't have maps today, because they were like, "You're going where? OK, here we go!" and then started going in that enthusiasm. And if you can work with that enthusiasm, it's a great way to help get this off the ground if this is something that you're beginning to look into.

Erick Beck: Yeah. And then just to kind of wrap it up, Update, update, update. Always keep this going. Bringing back to the very beginning of the presentation, remember how fast mobile is changing, and you really have to keep the mobile website changing just as quickly.

The whole concept of a two-year cycle, like we have in desktop publishing, really is not going to work. Ours is already a year old and we consider it obsolete right now. So we're already starting to look at a Version 2 of it.

John Chivvis: So having said that, I'll open it up for questions here. Some URLs if you'd like, obviously being in the presentation. Everything is also in the materials that you have here.

So are there any questions? Yes, ma'am.

Audience 2: Somehow you established the content... ?

John Chivvis: OK. I will repeat her question so that Brian gives me the thumbs-up. The question was asking how do we deal with content from a workflow standpoint because obviously we're generating content for a second site here? How do we do that alongside the content that we're generating for our actual desktop website as well? Do you want to...

Erick Beck: Yeah. It's really not terribly difficult because what's on the mobile site is in a lot of ways an abbreviation of what's on the full site. We're really just highlighting different aspects of it so it's not really two completely separate content areas with two completely separate sets of content.

John Chivvis: In many cases, the culling down part allow... Because a lot of the information that we have are coming from our partners, from feeds and things like that, we're able to do some of that in the programmatic side of things so that we're either cutting out parts of feeds, we're only bringing back certain things from the feeds.

So for us, trying to do more of it on the programmatic end. Because really and truly our team is only four people. And we're talking 4,000 m.tamu.edu sites. I don't want to be managing all that content or having it all coming through me and have to decide.

Erick Beck: Yeah.

John Chivvis: But there are some cases from an administrative, corporate standpoint that we will take care of, and that's where we work with our writing and our copy team. But really and truly it's trying to do it from the programmatic side because ultimately, at the end, we want to work this back through our partners to, again, give them that buy-in, to give them that feeling that they are a part of this process, and that helps us out that way.

Matt, what have you got?

Audience 3: Erick, you mentioned like a user agent platform?

Erick Beck: OK. Matt asked about the recommended user agent platform. And actually what I said was that's kind of off the content section of this presentation. So one of the big ones is the Open MIT Project. There's a couple more out there. We really didn't include that kind of information in this. We were really trying to focus on what to put in the site.

John Chivvis: Yeah, the Open MIT one there.

Any other questions? Yes, sir, in the back.

Audience 4: [40:59 Unintelligible]?

John Chivvis: I'm sorry, one more time, though?

Audience 4: [41:06 Unintelligible]?

John Chivvis: Well, that's a good point. For us...

Erick Beck: The question?

John Chivvis: Oh, sorry. The question was, basically, how is it with using our website are we trying to do some things in which it allows us greater interactivity from the students' standpoint in the classroom?

And I'm a little more generic there, but I'm going to try to kind of wrap it around this. For us, in many cases it's also working with our faculty and staff to decide what they want, because our faculty, in some cases, many of them are very reserved and holding their information, so for them, the interactivity for them steals from the traditional standpoint of interacting in class with the students. So for them, that's not as great.

Our director of Marketing Programs is working with a lot of faculty to begin to start pilot some of these other specialized and own-use applications.

So it is actually going through an application that's being developed, and not from our end but from a Web standpoint, because for that, that's more customized content that's being delivered via the mechanism which is the device and not through our Web specifically so. It's on our radar but it's not something that's specifically for us that is something that I think we're going to be wanting to tackle.

Erick Beck: Yeah. One of the things that we do actually have on here though is we've wrapped a lot of our social media aspects. So we have the Twitter feeds, we have Facebook, the Flickr that people can contribute to and that sort of thing. So there is some kind of user contribution, but it's not very extensive.

John Chivvis: Anybody else? Yes, sir.

Audience 5: [42:46 Unintelligible]?

John Chivvis: The question was, how do we deal with following styles or branding and such with our sites, because as you saw, there are a number of folks that are doing their own thing.

And we use basically the same principle that we've used with our regular Web branding across desktop sites. And for us, instead of trying to force it on our folks, because we've tried that and it kind of works with our print materials, business cards and things like that, for us, when it comes to Web, we found a whole lot more buy-in and collaboration by sitting down with folks and explaining, "Let's go through this. Let's talk about this," providing some templates that they needed. But by working on a symmetrical level instead of complimentary by saying, "You will use this," we've had a lot more buy-ins.

So even the library who may be a little bit off, their color palette's the same, their primary mark's the same. Well, yeah, it's not a cookie-cutter jump from one place to the other. Visually there's still enough consistency so that people will still know that they are a part of...

Erick Beck: OK. And part of that good, though, just goes to the organizational structure of the university.

I have literally never talked to anybody who's more decentralized than we are. Every department, every office literally can do their own thing and we have no say about it. So what we have to do is really provide the best example that we can and show them that it's easier and better for them to follow along with what we're doing rather than trying to do something on their own.

John Chivvis: OK. Yes, sir.

Audience 6: [44:25 Unintelligible]

Erick Beck: As far as the www site? So the question, if I understood it right, was the percentage of mobile users coming to our university website.

Right now, we're running right around 2% to 3%. And I will be the first one to admit, our current website is not terribly mobile-accessible. It still uses Flash. We're going to be pushing out a new version in another couple of months. It's going to, I think, be much easier to access, and I think that will make our numbers go up.

John Chivvis: We'll take one last one, and I think Brian's ready for us to get out there. So yes, sir, right there.

Oh. From the app standpoint, no. Because it's something that's all provided to us from our vender, they are the ones that are slowly doing the development and such. But what we are beginning to look at is, how do we start taking advantage of mobile.

And in some cases, because this content is pretty much website content, at what point is an app natively developed all the way through... what they call 'native' all the way through, valuable, or what is it where we want to create a basic Android wrapper of the phone's browser and provide that mobile content.

And trying to figure that out is... And that's why I mentioned if we had, we would mention hybrids, and that's kind of something we're beginning to look at, and that might begin to free up our apps folks to develop, again, those more self-contained, using-the-hardware type, high-profile apps on that. So, good question. Thank you.

OK, Brian. I think we've eaten up your time.

Erick Beck: OK.

John Chivvis: Thanks, you all. Enjoy lunch.

[Applause]

Erick Beck: Thanks.