Mobile apps and Mobile websites

With the proliferation of Smartphones around us, the perception margins between mobile websites and mobile Apps are becoming increasingly blur. As a User Experience (UX) professional, I happen to speak to several people everyday — including Business professionals, Designers, Software engineers, homemakers to students and kids. I often noticed that a majority of those people interchangeably starting to refer to mobile websites as “App”.

While speaking to industry partners, I observed a trend of reducing attention towards Usability testing of mobile websites. Thanks to abundance of vendors offering website development, the responsiveness of mobile websites is a given. User testing of mobile websites design is increasingly taking the back seat. In some organizations, designers are not designing the mobile websites anymore, it’s just the bug-fixing of broken views for some web pages.