Original Site: www.CNN.com
Mobile Site: www.m.CNN.com

CNN is widely considered a reliable source for news. I was glad to see that their website continued this trend. At first glance, users see the CNN logo paired with their traditional red band across the top.

Room for improvement
This same approach was continued into their mobile website. Mobile CNN.com, slightly makes better use of its limited space by reducing the red band and converting it two useable buttons. These buttons, Latest News and Audio/Video, look good but are slightly useless. For one, you’re delivered by default to the Latest News section, making one think they’d replace the smaller top right Weather button with the Latest News button.

Three screens to load, just to play this video.

To further this, the second section – Audio/Video – is highly unorganized and seemingly slow. When you first load it up, you’re presented with a still screenshot of a video, and when you click this section you’re presented with another screen asking you to play the video. It would just make sense that they’d eliminate the play video step and just play the video when you click it. Additionally, when I typically browse the CNN site, I’m not on the world’s fastest internet connection, I’m usually on the go using 3G (4G is still rather sparse) so it’s rather irritating to have to load up and watch an advertisement before my video. CNN should really consider doing away with mobile video advertisements – stick to banner ads for mobile, there’s just not yet enough bandwidth to go around.

My last major critique is on their home page. When you load up the site, all you can see is an oversized image of their Latest News story; in my personal opinion, I feel many people would rather read the multiple story captions than see a single low quality picture. If they weren’t interested in losing the picture, they could eliminate its wacky rectangular shape, square it up, and make room for the pictures headline.

What It Does Best

Latest News. Where

But CNN mobile does do best what its known for – delivering news. Disregarding discrepancies with image sizes and buttons, the actual content within is of the same quality on the original site as is the mobile site. Often you’ll see companies cut down material for mobile web. CNN mobile has set up its content in a nice fashion; instead of loading the entire page at once, it distributes the articles into multiple sections, and offers, at the bottom, a choice to load the entire article. When you’re done reading, you can even select Next Article to move on.

The Download
Overall, it’s a useable mobile site with a full load of content. While some sections require a few additional clicks to navigate, for the most part you’re not restricted into shortened footage or articles. It’s a nice relief from having to navigate the full site to find what you need. If Mobile CNN fixed up their navigation buttons, eliminated the video advertisements, and reduced the repetitive clicks I think the site would be as good as it could get.

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.

Full Site: http://redchairproject.com
Mobile Site: http://sulley.dm.ucf.edu/~tnethers/dig4104c/assignment1/index.php

First Impression
When I first looked at the site, I had no idea what this site was about. I thought, red chair? And I got it, they were featuring events – like movies, theater and more. It clicked, and I knew I would have to go with the ticket stub red carpet theme.

With the layout planned, I went to work in photoshop.

My first task was to gather the appropriate content from their site and modify it for a mobile device. With this in mind, I figured I wanted the width to be 320px and I decided on a fixed background that was 320px. The content would sit inside the design of the background. Next up was the ticket stub feature – this one took a bit more photoshopping and formatting to get right, but eventually with the use of some div tags the stub feature appeared.

Optimized
I knew the entire site should be optimized for a phone, so I made sure to remove as much detail as I could, so I started with removing unnecessary imagery – many of the associated event, venue and organization imagery was so small or poorly depicted you could barely make it out. And if I were to resize it further, they’d be even worse off. They were the first to go. After their removal, I figured, what were the primary features of the site? I didn’t want the user to feel boggled down, so I wanted to let the user find just the information they needed and no more. The primary use looked to be the Event sections – featured or categorized. I knew this would need to make it on the homepage without a unnecessary clicking. Instead of porting over the entire database of events I took a few events to be featured on the homepage, if the owner were to approve of this site, I would add the rest of the database.

Where to?
Next up, I figured the two primary resources would be venues and organizations. Users might want to know where they needed to go, or the phone number of an organization. I took these two sections and offered a nav bar with the three main sections included. The user could now navigate between the three sections.

The Download
All in all, I think the site could do without alot of its current features – thats why I felt simple is better. I know when I reviewed the Godaddy site previously, I had mentioned I would have preferred a simpler site. That helped me to decide on the simple approach, rather than a busy site with too much going on. Color choices were easy, matching the red carpet theme with the ticket stub color and a bit of black for easy readability. I think with the full implementation of the events, etcetera, this site has potential.