Recently I read an article on the Economist that detailed the growth rate of mobile usage in the developing world including China and India. Of particular interest was the observation that many people in these countries will only access the Internet via mobile phones. That led me to thinking about a world where more people are accessing the internet via these small screen devices. Will the Web be the same? How will the pages change? Here are some possibilities:
- No large images on the pages that will not easily fit within the small screen. The small screen size will be used as the standard to create the thumbnail of images.
- Pages will be organized top to bottom rather than wide (this is already happening as a matter of style)
- Pages will be much shorter and will be more organized into mobile screen sized nuggets.
- Less typing and more point-and-click interfaces in the applications since typing will never be that easy on a small device (though I have seen many fast thumb typers!)
- More text to audio or embedded audio versions of pages for people to automatically listen to pages rather than read them
- Use of text messages for purchase confirmation, identity verification
