User Experience on Mobile – MoreVisibility

Kristin Lesko - September 6, 2012

Recently, I was browsing the Internet searching for the latest and greatest in mobile design, and I stumbled upon a feature I found really exciting on the University of Central Florida’s mobile website.

The feature is found on the “Customize” page within the mobile site and it allows users to do just that. By selecting or deselecting main navigation pages from a listing, the user can decide what information they’d like to see and, conversely, what information they don’t.

So if a student visiting the site wasn’t interested in the “Athletics” page (maybe they’re a Florida Gator fan that bleeds orange and blue), they could remove this page from their version of the mobile site.

Homepage Main Navigation, Before Customization

Removing “Athletics” Page

Homepage Main Navigation, After Customization

What’s really fascinating about this feature though is not the functionality itself, but rather, what the action of removing pages represents. It allows the users to tell marketers what information they find valuable, not vice versa. And if UCF marketers are tracking these actions, this data would be invaluable to providing better insight into what type of content their target audience wants to see from UCF on its mobile site.

And UCF isn’t the only university that’s offering audiences a custom mobile experience. Harvard University’s mobile site has it, too.

Expect to see much more of this “opt-in” type of functionality in the near future, as mobile websites become more tailored to the individual and their unique needs.