Category Archives: Industry

There’s been a lot of buzz around an article by Jakob Nielsen: Mobile Site vs. Full Site. .net mag has a good packet of articles:

• Nielsen is wrong on mobile by Josh Clark;
• Designers respond to Nielsen on mobile;
• Nielsen responds to mobile criticism.

The gist of the replies / rebuttals are that Nielsen seems to be stuck in the old way of thinking, and isn’t embracing what is becoming the reality for web development today: the massive number of different devices being used to access the web means applying a robust, Progressive Enhancement-driven, Responsive approach is the way forward. It doesn’t make sense to assume user intent from device context, to give mobile (or tablet, or other) users less content, or to provide separate sites at separate URLs.

Related: Browser screen resolution stats rile devs.
These screen resolution trends are nice to look at for historical reference, but that’s about it. The relation between screen resolution, browser viewport, and physical size of the screen is becoming increasingly complicated. Smartphones have physically small screens, but often have a high resolution. TVs have physically huge screens, but can have resolutions of 1920×1080: the same as many laptops.

This line of work is getting more complicated and difficult; but more interesting because of it!

The most recent issue of A List Apart has two excellent, must read, articles:
The Best Browser is the One You Have with You by Stephanie Rieger;
For a Future-Friendly Web by Brad Frost.

A word of warning, though: set aside at least half an hour for these. Good stuff, worth digesting, including the many, many, links contained therein.

There are plenty of posts doing the rounds talking about Responsive Web Design in the bigger picture sense: workflow, tools, and so on. (I find Mark Boulton particularly eloquent on the subject: always a pleasure to read!).

Two posts that really caught my eye were more focused, though:
responsive navigation patterns by Brad Frost from a few days ago (a well thought out, well written, round up of responsive navigation patterns, with pros and cons for each.);
A Responsive Design Approach for Navigation, Part 1 by Filament Group from yesterday (a step by step guide to setting up a solid, progressively enhanced, responsive navigation).

Personally, I’m tending towards using a select for smaller screens: hooking into the native UI seems like a good thing. This could mean using JavaScript (something like Filament Group’s cunning testfit in their example above) to switch the select out for a ul for larger screens.
Relying on JavaScript for anything that basic makes me uncomfortable, though, even when it’s done progressively. I’ve been wondering about putting in both select and the ul as a starting point. (Loading extra stuff is bad, yes, but these would be tiny text snippets.) Then, using media queries or some cunning RESS action (see also Dave Olsen’s excellent article) to pluck out or hide the one that’s not needed.

Filing this under: Must Think More About It.

The number of internet-connected devices in the world is increasing at an alarming rate. There are about ten in my house of two people, and the devices have wildly varying degrees of connectivity, usefulness, and physical size. I think the future friendly folk have got it right when they say: disruption will only accelerate.

Ideally

In an ideal world, we would test on every device to see that everything works fine. Time and cost make this impractical, though.
(By testing on every device, I don’t mean matching up the design exactly or even providing an identical experience. Expecting a web site to look and feel identical on a smartphone and a television, for example, is somewhat like expecting a movie to look and feel the same watching it on a laptop on a plane as watching it in a crowded cinema. The two will be different experiences, but still essentially the same movie.)

Realistically

So, what can we do? Test as much as we can, on as many devices as we can.
We can’t pick up every problem and every error, but each one we do find helps us learn more about things to look out for, and help us build more robust sites.
There are a number of services like Perfecto Mobile that offer remote testing of a large bank of mobile devices. They’re not cheap, though, and I think that actual physical testing trumps remote testing.

Linky

Here are a few links to articles that make me think more about this.

• An old-ish article, but still a good one is Peter-Paul Koch, “Smartphone Browser Landscape” on A List Apart.
  

  In this article, I’ll give you an overview of the mobile web market, as well as phone platforms and their browsers, so that you can decide which mobile devices to test on. Then, we’ll look at how to set up a mobile test bed.

• A more recent article by Stephanie Rieger, “On designing content-out (a response to Zeldman and others)” reminds us that emulators and rough-and-ready browser resizing isn’t quite good enough:
  

  Testing on devices reveals all sorts of stuff that simply adjusting content never will, and that you won’t see by simply testing by resizing a desktop browser.

• Finally, Brad Frost’s “test on real mobile devices without breaking the bank” gives some good, practical, real world advice on setting up a test suite.
  

  Mobile is the future of the web, so it’s time to start investing in some mobile devices. Testing on actual devices is now an absolutely essential part of web design.

Personally

I’m still reviewing my options. As a one man show, I don’t have a large budget to buy lots of devices just for testing purposes. I have to rely on emulators to some degree.
I don’t currently own any Android devices, or Nokia, or a Blackberry, but I’m looking at Pay As You Go options for getting more devices, and still having access to phone networks for testing.

I’d love to hear people’s thoughts on this. Sound off in the comments, or drop me a mail.