Primary Site: http://www.ucf.edu/
Mobile Site: http://m.ucf.edu/home/

The Basics
Mobile UCF is essentially a shell of the University of Central Florida website. None of the pages are updated manually nor does any of the content on the home page change from day to day. The links when clicked, primarily pull from other resources, or feeds, such as the news feed. At first glance, the site seems somewhat basic and seems hard to navigate.

UCFMobile

The Design
When focusing on the web site’s colors, the UCF school colors are represented accurately as required by the UCF Marketing Graphic Standards. However, these are about the only colors represented within the web site and the mobile site does not accurately reflect the color scheme or look of the actual UCF website. I find this particularly odd, since the server automatically redirects you to this site when you’re attempting to view UCF.edu from a mobile device. You would assume the site you’re taken to would look somewhat similar to the full site and continue the use of the white background gradient.

Aesthetically, I am pleased with the site’s use of icons and not just simply text for each link provided on the page. This really can help repeat users navigate to what they’re looking for much more quickly.

Lacking
The UCFMobile site does lack one major element – the ability to search. Right off the bat when the site loaded up, I looked for any form of search. The lack of this feature is quite annoying, considering the black banner found atop the UCFMobile site is similar to the banner atop all the full UCF sites which include the search feature.

On another hand, if a user turns their iPhone horizontally the presentation of the website is relatively useless. You can only see one link at a time; this visibility makes it nearly impossible to use the site. Even if you did attempt to use the site, with 13 links presented on the home page, by the time you have scrolled to the bottom you’re likely to forget what you read at the top. I know I did. This approach makes the site rather lacking since it is a so called mobile site, the site should be optimized better for a mobile device.

UCFMobile

The Download
When the site’s viewed in a vertical fashion it’s useable but not ideal. Without the addition of a search bar the masthead atop the site remains virtually useless and lacks the match to any of the other UCF site mastheads. The color’s do match the school colors, but they also do not match the UCF full site theme. If the site was fixed, I think the user experience would be much better for mobile devices.