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.
My March article for UXmatters is out, Session Expiry and Coke Machines, in which I use a touchscreen Coke machine as an example of the problems with assuming legacy technology solutions can meet user expectations, on new platforms.
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)."
You don’t want to hire me"My point is that in the ten years of my career I’ve never once worked for a company that really cared about their end result…I believe we as developers want to, and indeed need to, value our craft and projects we create. We all want to create beautiful things, and most of us do just that. I would very much like it if all those beautiful creations out there would work for all humans." The same topic, wanting to make sure we use JS the right way, and maybe getting back to server side code for dyanmic runtime rendering.
Tools don’t solve the web’s problems, they ARE the problem A screed worth reading, re-reading and passing to all your dev friends from the always-well-informed PPK. Don’t get caught up in false choices and trends. There are those who want to build apps because they are faster… but they don’t have to be. "Web does not have to emulate native, web has to capitalise on its own strengths, primarily its reach, which still outstrips native and will continue to do so as long as we have more than one native platform… the solution is simple: ditch the tools. All of them. (No, I’m not being particularly subtle here.) Teach the newbies proper web development. That’s it, really."
Despite being in other decks, I never really gave you guys the good overview of designing by zones, so have added the last graphic from Why It’s Totally Okay to Use a Hamburger Icon and a discussion of how to design in hierarchies to lesson #9. I also added another discussion of how Daniel Fisher thought about the same topic, with my research and came up with a design principle to improve the whole way his app works. He talks about the design process in Music, Redefined.
Reading the Scientia MOVR report Jon Arne noticed that stock browsers were not used nearly as much as you’d expect. Building for Android? Better not just use Chrome to test! Buy a Samsung and try it with intents, too! NON stock browsers (webviews and other browsers) are over half of all web viewing!
Infinite Scrolling, Pagination Or “Load More” Buttons? Usability Findings In eCommerce I don’t get down this far into widget design here that much, but infinite scroll vs. paging is worth discussing. Note that eCommerce has some different perceived needs, so your project may not care, but read closely and think about the best way. P.S. In my experience, it’s never paging. And you can usually fake paging when tech requires it with Load More buttons. So, only those two to choose from. Enjoy!
When you start a project, or move to mobile the first time for real your first task is to stop making assumptions. Figure out what your users really use, because it’s not a desktop PC anymore. The PC installed base is dropping, and in 2015 more iOS devices were shipped than Windows. And remember, Android outnumbers those like 6:1. What devices do your users really have?
Who Builds a House without Drawing Blueprints? Long, well-written screed on why specs are important. As one comment says, sad we have to be arguing for this in 2015. "The need for specifications follows from two observations. The first is that it is a good idea to think about what we are going to do before doing it, and as the cartoonist Guindon wrote: "Writing is nature's way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.""
Your brain is tricky. Our input processor shares audio and video input. Paying too much attention to something visual (even just reading something on screen) and you can literally not hear things. The human brain can only take in so much information. Roadway designers know that the faster you drive, the more you have to zero in on what’s in front of you; your brain can’t process everything that’s going on. So you can totally miss roadsigns, cross-traffic, or pedestrians off to the side. They have a concept called the https://www.minnpost.com/cityscape/2014/07/everything-youve-always-wanted-know-about-crosswalksDesign Speed of a roadway. I like that term. Design for an expected amount of information being absorbed at once. What is the design speed of your website or app?
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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:
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.
How to Become a User Experience Designer at General Electric Interview and presentation tips. If you want to be a UXer pretty much anywhere, these should work.
Too much Agile is badly done, and one of my real complaints is an often formal conflation of iterative and incremental. Having a problem understanding or explaining the two. This cute graphic might work in your next PPT.
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