Facebook’s iPhone Site: Not a Grand Slam, but a Home Run

The Mobile Web is certainly not dead, and Facebook’s newly-available (though perhaps not yet released) iPhone site is showing us why. Though it is an iPhone-specific site in that it uses JavaScript and iPhone-centric CSS to avoid sacrificing presentation, it smartly takes into account the context of the mobile user in many ways. This is not to say that it gets everything right, but the folks at Facebook definitely made some great choices that many other companies will soon be emulating.

Here’s a look at what they did right with respect to the five main types of context I spoke about at BarCampDC, followed by a few things that could use some improvement still.

Factor One: Location

The Facebook team delivers fantastic work with its iPhone-dedicated site, but it is not quite without its shortcomings.

Facebook’s iPhone site clearly recognizes that you’re not sitting at home while you’re using it. While some people may be browsing Facebook to burn time with the site, many others will be using it to find contact information for friends. Friends’ profiles are a click away, either using the Friends tab, or using the search interface in the upper right.

Even better, profile pages pay attention to the fact that you’re on a phone. Phone numbers use the tel: pseudo-protocol to allow you to dial them directly, and addresses link internally to the iPhone’s Maps application, since they used Google Maps links. There’s no cutting and pasting ability on the iPhone, but Facebook helps alleviate any need for it in the first place.

Factor Two: Infrastructure

Of course, since this is an iPhone-specific site, Facebook paid attention to the obvious iPhone specifics: the page width is perfect, the site is designed for vertical viewing, etc.

Most notably, they paid attention to the speed (or lack thereof) and latency of the EDGE network in an important area: search and status. These are probably features that will get a lot of use from most mobile users, and having to load a separate page to update your status or search for a friend is far from ideal. So Facebook took advantage of the JavaScript capabilities of the iPhone and made searching and updating status possible without requiring a page load. Perfect.

Factor Three: User Information

Facebook can tie your user information into their mobile site with their hands tied behind their back, so this factor is barely worth mentioning. Even so, they make sure that relevant information is easily-accessed: your personal events are just a click away, the news feed is right there, etc.

One noteworthy bit of functionality here is their use of AJAX to assist in filling out forms. Take, for instance, sending a note to another user. Rather than having to remember or type out a name, like you typically would on a mobile site, Facebook makes sure that you get the same find-as-you-type capabilities on the mobile site as you get on the real site. That capability is even more important on a mobile device, so it’s great to see they put in the work to make it happen on the iPhone.

Factor Four: Social Interaction

Again, something that Facebook can do with its eyes closed is social interaction. After logging in, you’re greeted with the Wall, which is definitely the source of “social browsing” they should be featuring. They also more heavily highlight the ability to see friends who are online now, which may be rather useful when out and about with your mobile device.

Facebook is all about social interaction, so spending any more time on this is silly.

Factor Five: User Tasks

Considering the context of the mobile user, and focusing on tasks they’re most likely to want to complete while using their mobile device is a key element necessary to being successful on mobile. In this case, Facebook does a nice job.

I’ve already mentioned above that two commonly-used features — search and status updates — are done without a page load, which makes them super-easy to access and use without wanting to hit yourself in a head with a mallet (as most pages over EDGE are wont to do).

Additionally, all of the extraneous features and options that you’re not too likely to want are hidden away in lieu of a simple, four-option navigation: Home (Feed), Profile, Friends, and Inbox. Along with the Status and Search tools built into every page, that probably covers 90% of the use of Facebook on a mobile device, and keeps the interface clean, simple, and uncluttered.

Missteps

Though they did a lot of really great things here, there is still some room for improvement:

• Remember how EDGE (and, let’s be honest, pretty much every other mobile network) is slow? Facebook displays too many images on pages. Making image display an option, either as a profile setting or in the way many email clients do with HTML-based emails, would alleviate much of this, only slightly sacrificing aesthetic.
• It seems that Facebook’s authentication cookies and sessions are tied together between their main site and their iPhone site. So if you’re using an iPhone, and you last used the site from your desktop, you need to log in again. My Facebook username is mjwilkinson (at) alumni (dot) bowdoin (dot) edu, so every login attempt is painful. If you could have simultaneous sessions running on those separate sites, that would be a major plus. Apple could release some sort of keychain use/integration on the iPhone, and that would solve the problem as well. Their regular mobile site doesn’t seem to have this problem, and it may be annoying enough that it keeps me from using the iPhone site casually.
• There’s no attempt to use any practices that might make this at all usable on any other phone. So if we were validating it as a traditional mobile site, there would be huge mistakes that would make it a relatively poor example. Since they have a decent mobile site already, this can be forgiven to an extent. Hopefully, this is all just a small temporal slice when we’re back to browser-specific pages, and everyone will get into sync shortly.

Yeah, some criticisms, but what kind of review would this be without a few? There is a lot of great work and attention to mobile context here. The authentication issues may be a dealbreaker for me, but there are a few ways this could be improved on either Facebook’s or Apple’s side.

In all, a great step forward, and hopefully something at which people will take a serious look before doing a mobile or iPhone site themselves.