The Contextual Web
Notes from The Contextual Web with Nick Finck
Context is important to design. As an example of environment, technology, and other principles let's look at the iPhone
Scenario: Shopping for tea but can't find it so trying to find a store that carries it while on the road.
Load up the Whole Foods website. This site is non-mobile. Some sites are smart enough to know that you are on a mobile device. Exploring the site on the iPhone is very difficult because it is not designed for this experience. The site is slow and it takes too much time to find out that they don't list the brands they carry. This site doesn't work well in a mobile context.
Fitt's Law matters in mobile. The size of the target and the distance to it is essential to connecting users t information on small screens.
Loading time also matters here. You want to send the user markup optimized for their device and context. The interface should also adapt itself to the medium.
So let's do a deep dive into mobile.
Content is one of the most problematic areas in mobile. Readability and page width are the biggest problems in this space. Interaction is another big area for improvement in mobile design. Navigation on NYTimes Mobile, for example, is a big list. The hotspots are close together and it is hard to hit the right item.
Pagination is also very difficult on mobile devices. In the case of facebook, Ajax is used in combination with a big hot spot to add more content to the current list. Search is also difficult because typing is expensive. Search ahead display is helpful because it makes it easier for a user to go back and fix a typo before submitting their search.
Lastly, screen size is a major issue. Although we've been talking about the iPhone, there are many devices coming that require us to take the issue of screen size seriously. Know the context in which your product will be used and design for it.
Resources
Books: Contextual Design and Observing the User Experience
Download the slides for more links.
Q&A
Q: What about showing photos that are very large?
A: Use thumbnails intelligently and pare down your content to what makes sense for this environment.
Q: What about technologies like Flex and other emerging development tools?
A: The iPhone represents the new direction for these services. The primary interaction online is clicking on things and ingesting content. You'd have to talk to the developers of these other technologies for how they fit into mobile but HTML, CSS, and Javascript are very powerful tools for creating rich interfaces for mobile.
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