This is Swipe, a blog by pinch/zoom about mobile, design, user experience, usability, development and the future of technology.
Jason Grigsby captured the zeitgeist of the conference perfectly with the closing talk. We’ve come a long way but we need to stop defining what we do by the constraints of what came before. Mobile is different and should be treated as such. Here are my raw notes:
- Mobile user will do anything they want todo on a mobile device
- People believe separate sites are evil
- Separate sites done poorly are evil
- Mobile people have been dealing with UA problems for a decades and we should learn form them
- One web to w3c means the web should be thematically consistent
- The idea of tacit knowledge should be a collaborative
- No matter how you approach it we still have a lot of infrastructure to build
- Our vision of mobile context is wrong, or at least out of date.
- We actually might know too much.
- Mobile as the 7th mass media
- Mobile is the most Borg-like technology we’ve ever known
- The unique abilities of mobile are inspiring
- If we are in a new medium what are we barrowing from the previous one and does it make sence
- More Latino and African Americans acces the web w/ smartphones than whites
- The digital divide has shifted: not access to the Internet but access to mobile formatted content
- the west is far behind in understanding mobile partly due to all our time spent on a pc
- Mobile technology is the most important technology since print
- It’s world changing technology not just for the affluent
- Is there a mobile web: is it new in some way then the web
- Let’s not be limited by pur past.
- Think big don’t limit yourself to the size of the device and what the web was/is
See also
Mobile Design Breaking Development mobile web
In the second of two parts, Bryan Rieger continues the discussion on responsive design and how they approach it. For them it begins on the server side and letting it do the heavy lifting. Here are my raw notes:
- Tech media loves a good story and everyone is living life on the bleeding edge
- Must have Android device of 2009 is a doorstop today.
- HTML 5 will save us all but only works on a few top end devices
- We have a big grey area in the device spectrum
- Currently we create a great experience for a privilege few
- Buying the latest device isn’t a priority for most
- The iPhone changed perception, people now expect more from their devices
- Our mental model were formed by big beige boxes, we aren’t prepared for a world dominated by feature phones
- Only download what you need not everything
- Using UA strings to creat a profile and then adapt the HTML and images to what is needed for the device
- Server side sniffing isn’t evil
- Let the server do the heavy lifting
- Android making the smart phone landscape a lot more complex and fragmented
- The new lower end device could be the kindle
See also
Breaking Development Mobile Design mobile web
I had been looking forward to Luke Wroblewski’s talk for some time after hearing great things from others, and it didn’t disappoint. The talk focuses on why it makes sense to start with mobile and content and build out from there as wells some things to make the mobile experience better. Here are my raw notes:
- -20% of home pc use between 2008-2010
- People are doing more during in-between times.
- Twitter 55% use mobile
- Most from mobile site.
- More and more people are using the browser
- Mobile web is growing faster and faster
- Mobile is different: small screen, battery, inconsistent network, fingers, sensors
- It’s intensely personal
- Tighter intervals on consuming data through out the day
- Use posture greatly effects usage
- Core behaviors: lookup/find, explore/play, check in/status, edit/create
- Mobile forces you to consider real world use cases
- Focus you down to stuff that matters
- Maximize content right away
- Content first navigation second
- Focus on the stuff people a using
- The act of signing out shouldn’t be so prominent since it’s such a pain to sign in
- Navigation: pivot & explore. Avoid excessive navtop navigation link
- Because it’s good in iOS doesn’t mean it’s good all mobile experience
- Be smart w/ input fields for better relevant use
- Input masks are a great way to innovate
- Small little things go along way in allowing us to make input better
- Moving to directly interacting with the content
- Rethink, relearn, recharge the web
Breaking Development Mobile Design mobile web
Hot on the heels of the Boston Globe launch the day before, Scott Jehl talked about what went in to making it a responsive site. It was a great and timely case study and one I want to dive deeper into. Here are my raw notes:
- Make it work everywhere and especially on new browsers
- Should it be responsive: commonality across experience, developer skill-set, time up-front vs. Maintenance, interest in challenge
- It’s really hard but a layered approach can be rich without being exclusive
- Had to retingk and develop ways out of their problems
- Baseline: content first, mobile first image, mobile friendly layout
- Asset bseline: basic CSS, basic js, qualified enhancements
- Basic = browser defaults
- Defining the break points is key
- Responsive behavior: collapse what you don’t need right away
- Challenges:
- Content negotiation: Landing pages are heavy so treat them like navigation.
- Ads: they aren’t awesome
- Lots of popular touch devices don’t support touch events.
- We can be rich w/o being inclusive.
See also
Breaking Development Responsive Design Mobile Design
Nick Finck took us out of the confines of mobile to talk about the whole user experience in his talk The Cross Channel Experience. He emphasized importance of thinking about all the touch points a user has with a brand, not just the part we are working on. Here are my raw notes:
- 90% of business say the cross-channel experience is critical to business
- What is it? It’s the process of designing for all the touch points a person has with a business regardless of channel
- 65% of search is from seeing something in another channel
- 53% of mobile search is for local
- 3 types of touch points: static touch points, interactive touch points, human touchpoint
- Learn about your users and how they interact with it, why and where.
- Attention to details count.
- Follow the whole engagement not just your touch points.
- Netflix is a great example of the cross channel experience.
- Comcast is an example of poor cross channel experience on lots of fronts.
- Work more like a hive instead of individuals.
See Also
Breaking Development cross channel experience
Brad Frost and Jack Bishop kicked off the second day of the conference with Selling the Mobile Web. They offered practical insight in selling the mobile web experience to clients as well as internal teams. Here are my raw notes:
- Users expect more from mobile than the desktop
- 80% of users would use the mobile web if the experience was better
- The power of the web is it’s ubiquity
- Mobile isn’t just a checkbox
- They want to have a positive experience with your brand wherever they go
- People are accessing your content from a mobile device whether you like it or not
- You are only as strong as your weakest link (only having apps)
- Social media is an opportunity to sell the mobile experience on the web
- It’s what behind the link that’s important
- Mobile web is immature but the seed is planted
- Getting there takes colaboration and education
- There is a difference between support and optimization.
- One of the most popular devices to access Nike site is psp.
- Let’s make assumption on the hierarchy if content, not the content itself.
- UX keep it simple and clear
- Design is about usability and fluidity, not pixel perfection
See Also
Breaking Development Mobile Web
Scott Jenson closed out the first day with his talk, Why Mobile Apps Must Die. While it was the end of the day and a lot had been discussed I left feeing invigorated. He encouraged us to dream big and to step outside of what we know when approaching mobile. Here are my raw notes:
- Apps are a hold over from desktop
- We are aping the desktop for mobile
- Native>Web but porting is a pain so we port and then go back and do it again.
- Creates four visionaries: The fanboi: single platform/Uber capitalist: brute force/Web pragmatis: just copes/Web enthusiast: change agent
- We get caught up in the whole native vs web where one has to win when both have distinct advantages.
- How can we move forward?
- Just in time interaction: be able to walk up to something, use it then forget about it.
- Suggestion 1: break the browser ghetto
- Window parity, background processing, fingerprinting (more control), hell implement the damn spec
- Suggestion 2 discover service
- Filter the world in front of you. Show what’s around you and allow you to interact w/ it.
- 1 apps prevent just-in-time interaction
- 2 smart devices overwhelm apps
- 3 the browser ghetto must go
- Be more like Russell from Up
- We need to think big and dream.
See Also
Breaking Development mobile Apps
Steve Souders’ talk at breaking development focussed on how we can improve the speed of mobile sites. A lot of the techniques are familiar to those who’ve been designing on the web but are even more critical when accessing sites from a mobile device. Here are my raw notes:
- Faster sites means less server load means saving money
- As site gets faster site traffic increases
- Japan shows potential for mobile commerce. They ares farther ahead.
- Business who capitalize on faster mobile will reap the awards this holiday season
- Fast is a selling point
- Mobile is a level field, it’s slow for everyone
- Part of the problem is we are still figuring out the technology we are using
- Mobile performance best practices:
- 98% of the time when a page is slow it’s JavaScript.
- Images are 50% of the bytes downloaded
- Reduce http request
- Responsive images using ua strings (sencha.io)
- Script asynch & refer (asynch: execute when available defer: execute when parsing is finished)
- Browser cache doesn’t work as well as it should
See also
mobile design Breaking Development development
Some good news for Conde Nast as they reveal their subscription figures for the New Yorker iPad app.
Offering the first detailed glimpse into iPad magazine sales since subscriptions became available in the spring, The New Yorker said that it now had 100,000 iPad readers, including about 20,000 people who bought subscriptions at $59.99 a year.
This makes subscription revenue for the iPad app around $1.2 million a year, not including users who download individual weekly editions for $4.99.
The New Yorker is one of the success stories of publishing for iPad. Unlike its other Conde Nast mates (GQ, Wired), it doesn’t offer much by way if interactive features, videos or graphics, and instead lets the content speak for itself, offering an app that concentrates on readability.
$1.2 million is not a lot of revenue when compared to advertising but this is still a lot more than the initial cost of creating and then maintaining the app.
For the iPad to be a truly successful medium for publishers, it cannot exist on circulation revenue alone. “You’d need a lot higher volume if all you were doing was selling ads against it,” said Mr. Lipsman. “But when you’re getting subscription revenue, tens of thousands of subscribers are meaningful.”
These are really strong numbers. It will be interesting to see if they decide to keep their native iPad app going forward, or if they go down the FT route of offering an HTML5 mobile app and bypassing Apple’s 30% cut of the revenue.
Apple Insider reports that Qantas is trialling offering iPads as in-flight entertainment on a selected flight to test audience reaction. The iPad 2 will have a custom interface and will be “locked” so it can only be used in conjunction with Qantas’ proprietary streaming application (just in case anyone was thinking of walking off the plane with one).
While the iPad seems so obvious for in-flight entertainment (honestly, it’s the only time I ever really use my iPad), I remember a colleague was working on the in-flight entertainment system of the new A380 back in 2002. I was chatting to him about the project, and he mentioned the most challenging part was trying to predict how people would consume entertainment 5 years in the future. Their agency was doing a lot of brainstorming around offering a whole library of movies or music to choose from when you booked your ticket so you could customize your entertainment experience before you got on the plane.
What they couldn’t / didn’t predict was the iPhone and iPad and how completely it’s changed the way we consume entertainment. They were being really forward-thinking in implementing touch-screens long before the iPhone, even though touch screens in the back of an airline seat in coach class could only have been invented by a sadist. It’s so interesting to think back to those conversations and see what they got right (people will expect a library of content to choose on demand) and what they didn’t foresee (the majority of passengers carrying around their own entertainment devices).
If the trial is successful, Qantas will look to roll out iPads across more flights, and will then evaluate installing iPad brackets into the seats.