Ham? Maybe.

Wine? Quite possibly.

Limited strenuous exercise? Almost certainly.

There are a number of reasons why my fingers might feel fatter in 2010, that’s “twenty ten”  people, not “two thousand and ten”. Stop wasting good syllables. A problem shared is a problem halved, so I decided to discuss my condition with a few close friends. Turns out a number of the folks I surveyed were also suffering from podgy digit disorder. After much contemplation we uncovered a common factor in the way we all behaved over the Christmas holidays.

We had all spent more time playing with our iPhones. From DoodleJump to Tweetie we’d all been tapping, swiping and pinching far more than your average working week and it was starting to have physical effects. Or so we thought. Why else would we be tapping a back link when we were trying to hit the search field?

Leave enough space between action taps - One of Bill's "8 Rules of Thumb" (source: How People really use the iPhone - Bill Westerman)

It wasn’t until I stumbled across Bill Westerman’s presentation – How People Really Use the iPhone that I started to think maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe it was my phone, or more specifically the application’s user interface design. Maybe all of my additional holiday usage was starting to uncover flaws in the way some iPhone apps were designed. Turns out Bill’s study uncovered a number of common usability issues experienced by people when trying to navigate a series of common apps.

These common issues have formed Bill’s “8 rules of thumb” a great checklist for iPhone application planners and developers.  Just as no serious web project would be undertaken without a strong planning, prototyping and testing cycle neither should the brave new world of phone based application development.

OK, so Gartner recently revealed that Smart Phone sales were up 27% (whilst standard mobile sales were down 6%). The iPhone was a major contributor with 13% of all new handsets sold in 2nd quarter 2009 up from 3% in the corresponding period of 2008.

I haven’t seen a personal device get traction like this since the Sony Walkman in the 80s and there’s a real simple reason. It’s not the phone, the phone is actually rubbish – it’s the promise of a truly decent mobile web experience. The crux of which lies in the ability to zoom in and out with ease – funny that whilst the cynics were saying that mobile web will never work because the screen is too small, Apple invented a way to take screen size out of the picture…so to speak.

And Joe Public loves this new type of web experience. According to AdMob’s April 2009 Mobile Metrics Report Apple’s iPhone accounted for 43% of all mobile web traffic despite having just 8% of all handset sales in the same period. So, mobile internet usage is on the march and yet many digital marketing folks don’t seem to be paying attention.

How many of the major Australian web properties have customised their web experience for the iPhone (and other smart phones)? I’ve seen a few, Realestate.com.au for example but most brands are missing an enormous opportunity to engage via what is the fastest growing form of web access. If you’ve got a smart phone then go take a look at some of your favourite sites….they’re bad huh!?

It’s not just about missing opportunities either. In many cases a mobile alternative version of your web site could be required to maintain an acceptable level of accessibility and usability. For example Flash is not supported by the iPhone’s safari browser and sites that rely heavily on this plug-in will not display as intended (if at all). And it’s not going to be fixed overnight either as there are some fundamental reasons why Apple is resisting the inclusion of Flash.

So stop sitting on your handsets and take action. Start by including mobile based browsers in your web testing standards for all new development, that’s a bare minimum. Most importantly strongly consider developing a unique version of your major web application or site especially for mobile web browsing.  It amazes me that Seek currently has no iPhone version (or app) of their site – imagine the take-up of mobile based job hunting – come on guys what’s taking you so long, surely it’s not the business case!