I’m currently writing research on Mobile Web sites for the Anywhere Enterprise team. In the process of my research, I came across this cartoon from Eric Burke at StuffThatHappens.com that really seemed to capture the challenge of designing user interfaces in today’s culture of information overload:

Said another way, Apple and Google seem to embrace the concept of distilling a user interface down to its very essence. Most other companies? Not so much.

This same theme has come up again and again in my interviews with people, companies, and designers associated with mobile applications. The trend over the last ten to fifteen years has been to put more and more content onto desktop screens. Just as in the cartoon above, we fill the applications on our 22-inch screens with icons, shortcuts, and text to ensure that we have given the user everything they may want. At the same time, those applications request more data from that same user so that we might better fulfill their needs.

The poster child for this type of information overload are Web sites like Yahoo! Finance, the front page of which is shown below.

Yahoo! Finance provides a rich and detailed investment site full of news, stock graphs, tabs, tickers, ads, and videos, all crammed onto one page; even a 22-inch monitor doesn’t do it justice. It succeeds admirably in exhaustively giving the user everything he or she wants. We shouldn’t wonder that the user leaves the page exhausted as well.

The temptation everyone has in designing mobile Web applications is to make them small versions of desktop applications. Yet systems that struggle to deliver everything the user might want on a 22-inch screen have no chance of succeeding on a 3-inch one, especially with Anywhere users who are splitting their attention between their mobile device and other activities like walking on a busy street. For Web sites to become Anywhere sites, they require a more Apple- or Google-like minimalist design discipline. Perhaps we can call it the Zen of the Anywhere Web.

The example I’ve been using when I talk to people about my report is the Bank of America mobile Web site, shown below in its iPhone version. They clearly have the Zen of Anywhere. And it’s paying off in their business — they have 750,000 active mobile banking users in the US, by far the largest number of mobile banking customers in the country today.

I’ll have more to say about the challenges of mobile Web sites and the Zen of Anywhere when my report gets published in the next few weeks. But in the meantime, I’m keeping this mantra in mind: Less, more focused content means more success on today’s Anywhere Web.

Hmmmm. Come to think of it, I probably should have made this post shorter.