I would like to do a quick informal poll about your community migration to Lithium Mobile v2:
Have you already migrated your community to Lithium Mobilve v2?
If your answer is "no": What's holding you back?
Since 2012 we have been talking at every LiNC about an awesome mobile experience. And there has been made great progress in a completely rebuilt of the mobile experience using modern web technology. And still in 2015 I unfortunately need to answer my poll question:
No, we haven't migrated to Mobile v2 yet.
We are still waiting for Windows Phone support.
And I think our community is not the only one in the software and telecommunication sector, even though mobile community access is the single biggest growth sector for our users. A quick look around shows the communities at GiffGaff, Telefonica Germany, Verizon all also still use mobile v1. The AT&T Community is using a custom built responsive layout.
So I'm really curious to hear from fellow Community Managers why we aren't further on the way to a modern mobile community although every year we agree it's so important to us.
...and btw: I need to use the desktop Lithium Community layout on my Lumia since this community switched to v2. Sloooow 😞
Good topic @Claudius
I confess I'm a little ignorant about mobile currently because in the previous community I managed, we couldn't justify the expense of mobile as only around 5 per cent of our traffic was from mobile devices.
But it is a topic I am now very interested in as we will be building a mobile version for the new community I am managing. I was surprised that Lithium's proposal to us specified mobile v1. On querying it, I was told we could have version 2 if we wanted but that the build would be significantly more difficult.
I'm now keen to hear from others about the advantages and disadvantages of going with v1 compared to v2. As per your poll, what is holding communities back from moving to v2?
Thanks heaps,
Jason
Hey @Claudius
I agree with that your saying, if feels like an age that we have been talking about mobile first and a super mobile experience yet few seems to achieve it "im speaking generally the world of online not just lithium"
That said i actually like v2 and think its a massive improvement from v1 however we don't have a lot of different interaction styles "Dont use any of the unsupported ones for v2" the vast majority of my mobile users are iOS and Android with a small % for BB and Windows so your issues hasn't been of concern to us but I can see how it would impact you.
Long live Mobile 1st...
Stephen
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Hi Claudius,
This is an interesting one. We're still using Mobile v1 as we don't feel Mobile v2 is fully ready for our community yet. While we've done some work to customise V1, ideally we'd look to a fully responsive solution so that we can adapt and target the multitude of devices out there.
We see on average around 60% of our traffic from mobile devices now and this continues to grow, it's up a significant amount over the last 2 years. Fully responsive is definitely the ideal solution, building the UI for touch as well (larger buttons, target areas) bring added accessibility benefits.
I understand this is something that Lithium are also looking into going forward. It's not just the screen size issue it's the form factor as well, more and more users are on touch-screen devices.
I am in favour of Mobile V2, It is using angluarjs, that creates SPA. It would generate a better user experiences, coz it resembles the native mobile apps.
However, the transition from V1 to V2 is not an easy task. It is gonna take some time before it is fully featured. before V2 is matured, the responsive design could be a better choice. besides AT& T , Optus Community Australia has adopted the reponsive design as well.
One of the key decisions holding us back from Mobile V2 is the lack of V1 features that are ready, we're keen to wait off until V2 matures a bit more.
Our thinking though on the responsive design side though is consistency across devices. Streamlined development as well, maintaining multiple skins can be a pain. We'll continue to watch as V2 develops and and see where things go, responsive is something that is not easy to achieve on a community platform that is full featured such a Lithium's but there is value in it even for larger screen devices from Desktop and Laptop down to your mid-size tablets with Mobile for the smaller devices.
How to know which mobile version i'm using for the community? (we just launched the community in Dec 2014)
And another question does mobile version 2 support the "suggested search result" on mobile? (Pls see my post http://community.lithium.com/t5/Technology/suggest-community-platform-to-support-mobile-internet-use... here)
Thank you.
Hi mojijoy,
Not as far as I know out of the box, however it may be possible to do with some customisation. Suggested search could be implemented as a customisation with some development work, however I'm not sure if it is possible to do this inside that environment or whether it would be more suited to Mobile V1 which has more customisation options.
Another consideration is the feature set you currently use in your community, if you're using polls, blogs, groups, tkb and other interaction styles.
mojijoy wrote:
How to know which mobile version i'm using for the community? (we just launched the community in Dec 2014)
And another question does mobile version 2 support the "suggested search result" on mobile? (Pls see my post http://community.lithium.com/t5/Technology/suggest-community-platform-to-support-mobile-internet-use... here)
It looks like your community is still using mobile v1. The new version 2 featuers much more dynamic pages, e.g. automatic loading of further messages on the front page when you scroll down or a much different reply experience.
You can have a look at mobile v2 by accessing community.lithium.com from your mobile or at http://community.lithium.com/?device-view=mobile from your computer. Don't miss out accessing the community search via the magnifying glass icon on top right. It doesn't feature search auto-completion, but itäs still a more streamlined and faster search experience compared to v1.
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