Mobile Web Strategies Blog

I came across today a website that explain with responsive man face what I have been pitching about responsive design since the beginning of this blog. I took screenshots of the flash site just to demonstrate how easy is to understand why responsive design doesn't work for all types of sites. This is how the site look in the desktop size a normal man with his eyes moving. See the desktop big screen in black in the top. As soon as I resize the window at the brake point for the tablet the image distort. You can still recognise a man's face, however it is clearly  distorted. See the tablet indicator in the top of the page. Continuing resizing the window to the break point of a mini-tablet, I get the same image of the tablet, in a minimal proportion. See the space above the head, it wasn't there when the window size was a little bigger. Now is when the black magic happens. When it comes to the size of the smartphone, we do not have a man a...

"It's helpful to ask who has the most skin in the game when it comes to solving the congestion caused by rapidly-increasing video traffic on mobile networks: the content publishers who are pushing high-bandwidth video out? Or the mobile operators themselves, whose users instinctively blame them when video fails to start, or buffers and stops?"

Most of IT companies don’t see UX (User Experience) should be at the heart of everything they do which leads to their inability to present and sell UX as the starting point of any project. UX in most case is sold as an “extra” service while they should be seen as the starting point of any IT business strategy. UX is everything - it starts with the customers, go deeper to their customers and it should end with them in mind! What UX really is? UX is a business and digital field in itself. The misconception here is that most people think of UX as just usability. Usability though is simply how easy to use and simple the website functionalities are to the end user. For usability we have plenty of best practices already in place and even standardized. Bear  in mind that usability is only part of UX! UX is a continuous work that starts by what customers want to accomplish with their site, and not how they want the site to be , unless they are the ultimate end user of the site...

Lessons To Be Learned From Facebook Mobile User Growth To 54% From Last Year Today one of the headlines in the -> Online Media Daily was that advertisement on Facebook social network's mobile business rose to 30% of its sales this year compared to almost nothing last year which was responsible for the 39% overall raise of Facebook revenues . The lesson to be learned here is clear MOBILE USE is rising significantly and Facebook knows that because their monthly active mobile users is 751 million in the end of March. What that means? It means that Facebook mobile monthly active users have grew 54% from last year. Let's compare a bit The numbers above show how mobile users has double this year compared to the last one, but the same Facebook has announced that their monthly active users grew 23% compared to last year. This is  a real bomb news for the Mobile World It means that mobile is growing so fast that any company that try to blind itself...

I found this week a web site that has very interesting information about technology trend jobs. This information is vital in order to have a very good idea about how the IT market is consuming those technologies. I really worth to see those charts below and reflect on it. The information cames from Indeed and Simply Hired they have much more if you want to look at, but I have chosen to embbed in in the blog what has to do with HTML5, jQuery, Mobile Apps, iOS, and Android. Indeed and Simply Hired searches millions of jobs from thousands of job sites. This job trends graph shows the percentage of jobs people find that contain the search terms. 1. Mobile App Trends Mobile-app jobs 2. HTML5 Job Trends HTML5 Job Trends 3. jQuery Job Trends jQuery Job Trends 4. iOS Job Trends iOS Job Trends 5. Android Job Trends Iphone, Ipad, Ios, Android, Wp7, "Windows Phone", Blackberry, Webos, Cordova, Ph...

REAL USABILITY MATTERS - Usability is one of the single most important thing you can do to ensure success and money. Any design should have the user in mind, however when we talk about small screens this is a must. The Google presentations  What is a mobile site and why do you need one?  try to give business people and even developers the awareness that mobile sites nowadays is a must - but if they are build without the user in mind there is not use to have it. Their case studies are interesting. Mobile-friendly web apps help businesses: To connect with their customers Increase Revenues Reduce Costs because when sites are optimised and user-friendly you give your customers means to get what they want instead of wonder around, get tired and go to your competitor. The catch is that the only way to accomplish that is to invest in Usability. IT IS ALL ABOUT USABILITY. Improved usability makes you INCREASE YOUR MARKET SHARE - the like effect...

Mobile Friendly Contact Forms The way to go for mobile friendly contact forms is the touch-friendly CSS styling in order to make the buttons, controls and inputs with touchscreen experience. 1. Large touch target areas will definitely improve the form input fields 2. Other forms of input can also greatly benefit from input controls with CSS styling 3. HTML5 input types should be use to trigger keyboard events to aid the user on having  a great experience. Depending on the input type selected mobile browsers have different on-screen keyboards for different froms of data that should be taken into account. Just by including in the label the type="" and inside the quotes tel for phone numbers, url for websites, time for time, date for the date, e-mail for email we can make the keyboard behave accordingly with is very useful. I constantly came across mobile websites that make me look for the @ when I have to enter my e-mail, or any other type of data that is n...

Do you know what is XAMARIN? If work with C# and design/build for mobile web and apps this is the tools for you. Much like PhoneGap, XAMARIN is a cross paltform tool for developers who works with C#. They also have a XAMARIN studio (like Aptana and Titanium Studio) and will make your life a lot easier. It also come with a limited free edition that can be used. Check it out...  xamarin.com

THE REALITY OF RESPONSIVE DESIGN TO THE MOBILE SCREEN (The mobile analysis was done based on the sites presented on  mediaqueri.es .) Here you can see how responsive design are great for some desktop and tablets but might be a bad choice to communicate what your business is and what the user can do in the tine mobile screen. Check for yourself snl.no the big picture with the search in my Nokia Lumia gets the whole screen just for search, to see the rest, what the site is about and what it offers me as a user I have to scroll down. It could be better design for mobile, but this is a good responsive design for desktop and tablets. Another one is Suffandnonsense.co.uk the image when you open is the whole screen, to see what the site is about I have to scroll down. It could be better done for mobile but it is very good for desktop and tablets. You can check for yourself on your mobile all of the sites - this is good exercise to see that pictures might speak m...

I came across a very interesting website quirksmode.org in the Mobile section that explain beatifully in many parts what I believe that is the problem with mobile web design nowadays. I will be copying what I think is the most important points here. Some I might discuss but you will understand the probem when you read it. MOBILE WEB DEVELOPERS DOING THEIR JOB? The unique selling point of the web is that it runs on all devices; and not just on one platform. But it seems mobile web developers aren’t much interested in reaching out beyond one or two specific platforms. Developers should reach out to as many paltforms as humanly possible instead of confining themselves to the best ones. WHY ARE WEB DEVELOPERS INTERESTED IN MOBILE SO RELUCTANT TO VENTURE OUT BEYOUND THEIR iPHONE CONFORT ZONE? Mobile web projects for large companies are based on requirements written last year, during the height of the iPhone obsession. In addition, the iPhone’s share of mobile web traffic remains...

Yes, responsive design frameworks are a good thing but it all depends on your website. Remember there is no one solution for all and if you can use a framework to make a responsive design for all it will depend if you have a content base site and if your site is not "user-specific interaction dependent". I have watched the Sitefinity webinar (embbedded below) and the tool is very useful for creating Responsive Design and even mobile that is content base such as magazines, newspapers and any other website that does not require the user to do a specifc thing on the site. The added bonus on the tool is that the user edit blocks of layout template that is not table based and their text clean out any style done by text processors - this is a tool build with the user experience in mind. However as Sitefinity presenter said himself at the end of the webinar "Responsive Design is not a complete solution..., there is still a lot of granulatity..." You can hear ...

In my earlier post about the differences between Responsive Design and Mobile Web App I have talked about two of the three approaches for mobile web app: The second that is Responsive Design and the third that is Mobile-Specific , but what about the first? Here is the first approach that is not recommended but depending on the website, its design, its content and its purpose, it might be ok. 1. "Do nothing" approach This approach is the one which desktop content is served to the mobile device unaltered. This is unfortunately the most used approach for mobile around the world, however it is changing fast. The good side of this approach is that it is less work to do and no need to maintain, however it is not an optimal choice regarding user experience and nurturing your customers. This approach is good for lightweight pages that have flexible content and that is arrange in such a way that it is not totally zoomed out and is easy to read when tabbing twice the text. ...

This blog is also available on mobile form, which means that you can read and comment from your phone as well. What would be a blog that speaks about mobile web development that is not available on mobile?

One of the critical parts of creating applications for devices is taking into the form factor (Form Factor means the sizes of the devices among other electronic things). This includes the size of the screen or the resolution of the device. HOW WILL THE APPLICATION LOOK ON PHONES versus TABLETS? 1. There are many applications that are built specifically for phones or specifically for tablets, but there are some inherent web technologies that can be used to target both with mobile web applications. 2. One of the most common tactics for creating content that works across devices is with responsive design. 3. Many web developers use responsive design as Responsive design lets you specify different CSS files for different screen size with media queries. So instead of creating entirely new content or an entirely new application for smartphones or tablets, CAN WE REUSE CONTENT AND SIMPLY SWAP OUR NEW CSS RULES DEPENDING ON THE SIZE OF THE SCREEN? Yes and it is the easies...

There are many different ways to deploy content to devices for developers. The main distinctions between content that runs inside the device’s web browser, just like any website, and the content that runs as an application on the device. Mobile applications give you a lot of benefits. MOBILE WEB APP 1. Give access to device features and sensors that are not normally available to websites. These are things like camera, offline, storage, and information on the device like what is in the phone’s contact list. 2. All the major platforms tend to have very different ways to build mobile applications. They each require their own tools and languages to deploy applications and create content form them. A good example is Xcode and Objective-C for building iOS applications, and Eclipse and Java for building Android applications.

WHAT's IS A MOBILE WEB APP? A mobile web app is a mobile application that combines the versatility of the web with the functionality of touch-enabled devices. Mobile Web Apps should be built with HTML5 and take advantage of the best of this cutting edge technology — providing an attractive alternative to the app stores, while still providing users with the rich look and feel of native applications. Because mobile web apps are web-based, they are compatible with both iPhone and Android smartphones — making it easy to deliver your content to a large mobile audience. Since mobile web apps don't need to be listed in the Apple App Store or Google’s Android Marketplace, you can distribute your mobile web app on your own terms without complex and lengthy approvals. Just quick and easy widespread distribution through multiple channels including: a mobile link (URL), text (SMS), barcodes (QR), social media networks, email, and more. Mobile web apps can include existi...

Which to choose Mobile Web app or Native app? Before to know what to do is important to know the difference between the two. Web App is accessed on the Web viea the user's browser, but it is an website that offers app-like functionalities. Native App is platform driven, in other words, it is built for example for Andoid or iOS, or Windows 8 devices. It has to be installed on the user device just like an application that we install in our desktop. Native Apps offer superior experience but the cons is that it is not suitable for everykind of company and to write one code that works in everything is not that simple.