The Move to Mobile

We’ve been working on a high profile football site presenting analysis on player performance and enabling visitors to investigate the likely outcome of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Making these statistics easy to understand is tricky enough on a web browser, but our client also asked us to put together an iphone app that would make all the key facts available to any iphone carrying football fan. What better way to settle a pub debate than to check your iphone, and within a few swipes have access to all the key statistics?

Getting information out of the website and into the iphone was easy enough, but designing the app to make this information presentable on the small screen, and simplifying the navigation to make it work intuitively was a tough task. In addition, we had to overcome the fact that many people using the app within a pub may not have any network coverage, so we had do devise a way to make the app function even if it was offline.

You may question if it is worth doing an app like this at all since all the stats are already available on the website and the iphone already has a great browser. But if you have the app on your iphone, it quickly becomes a much better way of getting to the facts you are after – there is no zooming in and out of a web page to see the data you want since everything is optimized for the small screen; all the data is cached on the device so you don’t need a network connection, and moving between sections is very fast as there’s no HTML to load and render.