Welcome to the March newsletter for 4ourth Mobile Online Training. Yeah, I started this in February, but it was a bad month and I am trying to get through my backlog. You will get one of these emailed out to you every month or two, or so, or so as long as you stay subscribed. If you want me to change the address, just tell me about it.

This is probably going to occasionally contain minor marketing like if I launch another major product so if you don't want to get them just tell me and I'll remove you from the list. But it will mostly be occupied with describing the updates to the training, other interesting articles and information, and the date for the monthly call.

Actually, turnout was so low in January I will simply say instead: If you want to meet and chat about something specific, respond to this with your easiest times of week, and I'll arrange something.

Updates are basically just things I find online which seem relevant. I bookmark them and come back occasionally to update the decks:

• The Demographics of Device Ownership - Even in the lowest penetration segments, practically everyone has a mobile phone. "Some 78% of adults ages 65 and older own a cellphone, compared with 98% of 18- to 29-year-olds. Lower-income adults are less likely to own a cellphone. Rural residents are slightly less likely than urban and suburban residents to have cellphones. Still, nearly nine-in-ten rural residents (87%) have them."

• Why It’s Totally Okay to Use a Hamburger Icon The bad reputation menus have is from mis-use. Continue the principles above and put tertiary items in the menu. Over-populating the tab bar isn’t going to solve the problem a lot of sites and apps are discovering. In Defence of the Hamburger Menu “…this will only be possible if we stop showing off to our friends by “hamburger shaming”, and embrace the plucky icon for what it is, warts and all.” I've added a slide to the lesson, added the above info to the resources, and added a step to the exercises.

• The "Average Page" is a myth The title is because the author is being pedantic about what average means, but it’s all the same thing as the previous slide: page size is climbing, badly. Now from this you can get some really neat data, and what I get from it is that average page size is huge due to some bad outliers. What to take from that? Well, don’t be that guy. Presumably, much more of the internet than those few is modern and high tech but remains manageable or small. Set your target sizes (as acceptance criteria for download times) accordingly, and make the developers do a good job.

• State of Connectivity 2015: A Report on Global Internet Access Lots of neat data and futurism fodder, but right there in the summary is a great point about how people are connected, or not. "The four key barriers to internet access include: Availability: Proximity of the necessary infrastructure required for access; Affordability: The cost of access relative to income; Relevance: A reason for access, such as primary language content; Readiness: The capacity to access, including skills, awareness and cultural acceptance." What can you do to address these? Think hard about how your product empowers, or disenfranchises people on each of these issues. You have more power here than you think.

• SOME OBSERVATIONS ON MOBILE BEHAVIOR IN INDIA How you use your phone, why, and how are only so universal. Regional and cultural differences abound. If you can’t get out out spend a few weeks on ethnography in other countries (and I can’t either) then read more. This is some general observations from India, and it’s different from the US.

• Phone Subsidy for Poor Could Expand to Include Broadband In the US they are thinking of expanding the lifeline coverage (free minimal home phone for safety, etc.) to not just mobiles, but the internet. Every nerd assumes cable modems, I assume mobile phones with internet coverage will count also. WSJ is being all paywall to me today, but there is a great quote about the internet being required to participate in the economy now, but 20% cannot afford it.

• Mobile Delivery with a Devops Mindset As I discuss in the Accessibility deck, you cannot design then move on. You have to design for maintainability, and change, and actually set a team to make this happen. No idea what I mean? Stop and read this deck.

• Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript On page bloat and bad behavior from needless javascript "There’s no good reason for any of this. These aren’t cutting-edge interactive applications; they’re pages with text on them. We used to print those on paper, but as soon as we made the leap to computers, it became impossible to put words on a screen without executing several megabytes of custom junk?" I try to avoid this by actually specifying in design that things like form elements are plain, vanilla form elements. I don’t know why, but front end code has gotten weird and hacky lately, as well-described in this article.

• Three very confusing telecoms terms Martin Geddes is a very, very clever guy I used to work with, who consults with telecoms all over the world and rants a lot about how networks are not at all what you think they are. Sign up for his newsletter, but this is a good intro to the topic. Network speed, and many other things, are a lie. At a conceptual level. "The speed of light is fixed, so networks aren’t getting “faster” like CPUs do. Indeed, there’s no “Moore’s Law” for networks.The idea of “speed” conflates packet (de)serialisation time (i.e. how long it takes to “squirt” the packet over a link) with low contention (due to network idleness). It also conflates “speed of response” (delay) with “speed of download” (capacity)."

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A number of decks are updated with this info, and those are all available for download, or (when relevant) viewing.

I also find other things interesting, but haven't always got a place to put them in decks, columns, etc. Here's a few of those:

• Everything you've always wanted to know about crosswalks "The human brain can only take in so much information. If you’re going about 15 mph your view is pretty wide. But the faster you go, you have to zero in on what’s in front of you; your brain can’t process everything that’s going on.” There's lots of neat stuff out there, this time some cogsci stuff from a discussion of crosswalk safety. I also like their concept of "design speed." Would be a nice thing to make analogous to apps and sites.

• My Little Sister Taught Me How To “Snapchat Like The Teens” I can't make this a good reference or real talking point as it never got to the point. But it's an interesting view into one person's perception of how the kids these days use the Snapchat.

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