iPhone applications seem to have a tremendous buzz around them at the minute, and in the first two months of 2010 my company has had a lot of requests from cultural organisations to create Apps for museums, festivals and heritage sites.
I think it has come as a surprise to many of these organisations when I have told them that they should think again. While there are an estimated 2.5 million iPhones in the UK, this is only accounts for about 10% of the smart phone market and it is better value for a cultural organisation to look at creating mobile friendly web content, then a more expensive application which only a minority of their audiences can access.
I think this is especially true of museums and galleries, where organisations have a real responsibility to make their content accessible to as many people as possible.
In the UK 53% of the mobile phones have built in internet access and this now accounts for over 3% of web traffic. Museums and galleries who I spoke to have experienced a large rise in the amount of traffic coming from mobile phones with some receiving over thousands of web visitors every month from mobile devices.
To me, it seems like better value to put resources in to creating website which will work for all smart phones, rather then an App which will only work on an iPhone.
A recent blog post from Ted Forbes at Dallas Museum of Art highlighted this, his museum chose to create a ‘smARTphone Tour’ which would guide visitors around their collection rather then develop an iPhone App.
Ted writes ‘I was completely blown away when I got to the museum to see people on all kinds of phones not only curiously checking out the web app, but also in the exhibit taking it all in!’
To make the ‘smARTphone Tour’ even more accessible, Dallas Museum of Art also had iPod touches available for visitors to use in the gallery, these can access the internet via a wifi network, making the web based tour accessible to these users as well.
With 16 months being the average time that a person keeps a mobile phone, we can expect the number of smartphones to keep rising over the next year.
As we start to roll out mobile friendly websites for museums and galleries, I am really interested to see high the number of visitors browsing these websites from smart phones rises.
Will we have over 10% of website visitors coming from mobile phones by the end of 2010, or will more accessible websites push this even higher?
Nice post and follow up, and reminds us that the museum web site is not dead. Mobile apps are not a website killer and should never be.
I added some points regarding why web apps are better than apps on my own post:
http://www.vincentroman.com/blog/mobile-sites-web-apps-for-museums/
Cost and ease of roll out are major factors and benefits for institutions in my book. Reaching the widest audience possible is also a major factor that should make it easy to convince decision makers.
In 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Project predicted that by 2020, mobile devices will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world. The US might be a bit ahead and it’s not 2020 yet, but we’re definitely heading towards that.
http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2008/The-Future-of-the-Internet-III.aspx?r=1
I think a combination of things will be necessary: applications that make use of several media platforms as well as websites. However, like you pointed out, websites do need to adjust to the mobiles and make mobile friendly websites.
There is little point in developing an app if the museum bans you from using mobiles in their galleries, like the National Galleries!!