Web Development Advent Calendars for 2013

Ganesha may or may not be stealing chocolate from the advent calendar.

For a few years now web developers around the world have celebrated Saturnalia Christmas with advent calendars covering topics related to the web. Some come and go, but you'll probably recognize a few regulars on this list.

I may have missed some, so please pass them along if you know of any. For those I know are not returning, I have listed them at the end.

1. 24 Ways

24 Ways, the one that most of this think about for web development calendars, is back again. It's been going strong since 2005 and based on its history this year should have some good articles.

2. Perl Advent Calendar

Perl Advent Calendar goes all the way back to 2000 (and back then looked a bit more like a traditional advent calendar, too) and has been dispensing tips for Perl developers ever since.

3. 24 Jours de Web

24 Jours de Web is starting its second year as an advent calendar for web folk. Written in French, it is clearly primarily targeted at French speakers, but a round of Google Translate will open it up to far more readers (like me).

4. UXmas

UXmas is an advent calendar aimed at the user experience community. Coming from Australia, American readers may be thrown just a bit by the schedule. The calendar promises everything from sketches, to articles, to tools, to videos.

5. Webkrauts

Webkrauts has an all German advent calendar, and it also dates back to 2005. It covers general web topics, but being in all-German readers like me will benefit from a Google Translate version of the page.

6. 12 Devs of Xmas

12 Devs of Xmas will also start the day after Christmas and go for 12 days from then. When all the other calendars have wrapped up, you'll still have one to read. The site is silent on its return, but this tweet suggests it's gotten writers and has a plan.

7. Freelancember

Freelancember 2013 is targeted squarely at freelancers. Its daily entries will consist of downloadable gifts in the form of PDF worksheets. Think of this as less about web-tech and more about MadLibs for projects. It has last year's calendar there as well, and so far (as of December 1) I cannot tell the calendar will just be a repeat of last year.

8. Mozilla Developer Network Holidays calendar

Mozilla Developer Network Holidays calendar includes brief links to resources or demos and suggests that you can edit them (if they are MDN resources). It doesn't link to previous years, but you can just hack the URL.

9. SysAdvent

SysAdvent is targeted to systems administrators, but there is a some cross-over to web developers. It has posts dating back to 2008 (and yet I missed it in last year's collection), so there is plenty of good material there if you're too impatient to wait for each day to be revealed.

10. Web Accessibility Advent Calendar 2013

Web Accessibility Advent Calendar 2013 is in Japanese, and thanks to the wonderful powers of Google Translate, I can tell you that it is a calendar to make the talk about Web accessibility (based on this statement: Webアクセシビリティに関する話題でつくるカレンダーです。). If you know Japanese, I welcome any corrections. The site Adventar.org appears to host other advent calendars, some about web technologies, some about ramen.

Not Returning

A handful of calendars aren't returning this year (so far), but in most cases content from previous years is still available. These include Font Deck's Adfont Calendar (which also skipped 2012), the Fronteers advent calendar (in Dutch, and also skipped 2012), Web Advent (it's taking a year off), Performance Calendar, HTML & CSS Advent (this is the 2012 calendar), She Said It (no access to old calendar), 12 Days of Podcasts (or at least there is no indication on its site or Twitter).

Not Web Related

ScienceGeek Advent Calendar Extravaganza is not web-related at all, and frankly it isn't promoted nor is it tagged (although I linked to “special” since that tag had the first day and nothing else). It is, however, probably going to be neat stuff given the first day is a giant image of the Christmas Tree Cluster.

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Slides: Responsive Web Design Primer

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the University at Buffalo (my alma mater) to give a presentation for its CIT professional development series. I got to talk about responsive design.

Knowing in advance that the room would have technical and non-technical users I went for a code-free presentation. One thing I learned is that code would have been useful, so if you're looking for any in here you won't find it.

I understand there is video from the event, and as soon as I have it I'll share it here as well. In the meantime, enjoy the slides without any context. Which may be more entertaining than my typically awful attempts at humor.

Responsive Design Overview for UB CIT from Adrian

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New iPad Browser: Coast by Opera

Yesterday Opera announced the release of its newest browser, Coast, built specifically for iOS tablets (I would say just iPads, but if my fridge gets an iOS tablet UI then I'd be wrong and will have paid too much for a fridge).

Background

Recently Opera moved away from Presto as its rendering engine and hitched its future to Blink, the rendering engine born from WebKit that powers Chrome. Now instead of Opera worrying about the rendering engine, it is focusing on the user interface, the place where it can set itself apart from the other browsers.

Essentially Opera is removing the browser chrome (implying to the user that a web page is just an app) and adding gesture support. Given that Opera was the browser that introduced us to mouse gestures well over a decade ago, and given that a touch screen is an inherently gesture-based UI, this seems like a natural fit.

Bits for Developers

Sadly, my office wifi was down and I couldn't play with the browser immediately (my crusty iPad 2 is wifi only). So instead I took some time to read through the developer notes.

Tablet First

Overall Opera recommends general responsive design current best practices, though it promotes a tablet-first approach. Opera offers some CSS you can use to specifically target iPads Mini, 2, 3 and 4 (Retina and non-Retina), though it leans on vendor prefixes with only a brief note to also use other prefixes and unprefixed rules.

Responsive Images

It's also clear that Coast supports the new srcset option for responsive images. It even offers a code example: <img src="image.jpg" srcset="retina.jpg 2x">

Note: As Bruce was kind enough to inform me (because I missed it in the dev notes), responsive images will be supported only in iOS7 and up.

Update as of September 20, 2013

According to Opera, iOS7 did not come with a WebKit update. That means Coast cannot support responsive images via the srcset attribute without a polyfill. Nor can Safari, of course.

Tile Speed Dial Web App Image

Instead of "Speed Dial" icons/images, Coast now looks for a "web app image." If you don't have one, Coast will first look for a Windows 8 tile image, then an Apple touch icon, then a shortcut image, then just a favicon. You can, however, create your own 228 × 288 pixel image and stuff it into your site with the following HTML:

<link rel="icon" href="$URL" sizes="228x228">

User Agent String

Don't use this to do any browser sniffing. Browser sniffing bad. This is instead handy for recognizing it in your logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 6_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Coast/1.0.2.62956 Mobile/10B329 Safari/7534.48.3.

General Review

Getting going is pretty easy, just start typing into the only field on the screen. As you type you can see a Google preview on the left, which you can tap at any time to go to Google, or a list of icons on the right which correspond to sites you might mean. The icons start out just displaying the first letter of the site, and then identify the site's tile or shortcut image.

Note the handy ".com" and ".net" options that appear above the right end of the text box.

Once you are on a page, you can go back by swiping from the left, forward by swiping from the right, or reload the page by pulling down from the top — but not too far or you get the iOS menu instead.

Vine of me playing with back, forward and reload in Opera Coast.

Opera Coast skips tabs and windows altogether and, frankly, feels a lot more like Internet Explorer for Metro than other current tablet browsers. It's pretty easy to see the open "tabs," flip through them, get more details, and discard them. It's also incredibly easy to forget you have so many tabs open. I regularly found myself littered with tabs because of all the links opening new windows.

Testing Opera Coast window/tab management.

While in that tab view, you can also see how "safe" the page is and can get to options to share it, email it, print it, and so on.

The arrow on the right gives you all the share options.

I don't have a printer installed, so I'd love to hear feedback on how Coast honors print styles.

Adding and removing a bookmark, tile, whatever, is pretty easy. It took a few swipe-fails, but I got the hang of it well enough to show the whole process in one uninterrupted Vine:

It takes a little getting used to, but it's not too hard

Gotchas

There were a few things that threw me off. Perhaps because I am a power user, perhaps because I only played with it for one evening.

Swipe History

The swipe for back/forth is handy, but conflicts with behavior I have already learned. In Chrome for Android, swiping left or right has the infuriating feature of bringing me to the next or previous tab in the stack order. For those rare sites that implement a slide that is swipe-friendly, imprecise swipes will move me back and forth in the history instead.

Web App Images

Using the browser in portrait view, the additional screens of tiles (speed dial icons if you are already familiar with Opera) aren't immediately apparent. It wasn't until I turned to landscape that I saw them. The tiny dots under the Coast icon weren't enough for me to intuit that. They also aren't nearly large enough to tap to jump to a specific screenful of tiles.

Hit Sizes

The 9-box grid at the center bottom as well as the three rectangles at the bottom right are the only real browser chrome in play as you surf. They are also maddeningly small to tap. And I have dainty, lady-like fingers, so I suspect it may cause consternation for others.

Address Bar

If I am on a site and I want to change the address of the current page (maybe I fat-fingered and got to a 404, or I know a super-secret URL), I could not find a way to bring up the address bar and change it. It also made it impossible to know the current page address at any time. As someone who regularly looks at the URL for familiar addresses, indications of scam sites, quick commitment to memory, and so on, this alone takes it out of the running as an everyday browser for me.

Email a Page

I did not care for the email feature one bit. Not only does it embed a screen shot of the page (with a Coast watermark), the screen shot won't display on other devices. Outlook blocked the image because the attachment ended in .com (not .png or .jpg). Had it not come from me, I wonder if Outlook would have blocked it as spam. My Android email client couldn't display it because there was no file extension to give it a clue.

What you see when you choose to email a web page from Opera Coast.

Best case scenario of what the email recipient sees, though the attachment was blocked in Outlook and unusable in my Android email client.

Tweet a Page

Tweeting a page left me similarly dissatisfied. By default it includes a Twitpic screen shot of the current page with an Opera Coast watermark. When composing the tweet, I tapped the paperclip icon to see if it would do anything, but nothing happened. I opted not to tweet again.

Tweeting a page from Opera Coast.

The resultant tweet:

Tweeting a web page from Opera Coast. Curious how it will come across. http://t.co/bdx3mcQxiO pic.twitter.com/eq3vRhFX5N

— Adrian Roselli (@aardrian) September 10, 2013

Wrap-up

Overall, I like the browser. I like what it's trying to do for consumers. As a power user, however, It's not a fit for me though I'd be interested in bringing it in front of some other members of my family.

I also didn't get to try out unsafe sites, printing pages, responsive images (need iOS7), or poorly-built sites. My opinion might change as I continue to play with the browser.

Open Question

There are a lot of Android tablets out there, not just the four screen size offerings from Apple. So how long before we can see Coast on my Nexus 7, if ever?

Updates

I'm adding notes throughout the day as they come up.

• Feedback from users over at MacRumors.


• Norwegians just launched the iPad browser Apple couldn’t build at BGR.


• A Vine from Opera Coast showing how to move/rearrange groups of tiles/bookmarks at once.

Surprising no one, the following reviews from more mainstream sources completely fail to include any screen shots or videos that weren't pilfered from Opera. I only say that to remind you that by reading this post you have gotten the most in-depth review currently on the web and you should be excited and send me a thank you note and maybe read all my other posts and high-five me on the street.

These articles are, however, worth visiting just to see the comments and how others are reacting to it.

• Opera Coast iPad Web Browser Treats Websites like Apps at Time.


• Opera's iPad Coast browser debuts, packaging websites as apps at ZDNet.


• With Coast, Opera reboots its browser for mobile future at Cnet.


• Opera Coast: a Stripped-Down Browser Built Just for iPad at Gizmodo.


• Opera Launches Coast, A Slick New WebKit-Based iPad Browser at TechCrunch.


• Opera releases Coast, an iPad browser that turns the web into a home screen at The Verge.

Tips from Bruce:

Want to add a background image to your Coast home screen? Long press an image, set as background. Pull curled corner to remove it.

— bruce lawson (@brucel) September 9, 2013

If you don't see your new 228px site icon in Coast, empty cache by deleting yr old speeddial entry (drag to top of screen) & revisit yr site

— bruce lawson (@brucel) September 10, 2013

To clear history in Coast by Opera or change size of Speed Dial grid from 3x3 to 3x4, go to iPad settings > Coast

— bruce lawson (@brucel) September 12, 2013

Update: September 18, 2013

Opera has fielded some questions about Coast and collected them into two posts (so far):

• Coast by Opera is only a few days old, but we’ve already gotten a lot of questions about how things work. Here’s some answers.


• Nope, there are no tabs in Coast. That and a few more answers for this second set of FAQ.

Update: September 25, 2013

Another FAQ post from Coast:

• Yes, you can see the URL and you can copy links in Coast. Our third set of FAQ

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My Carousel Use Stats

I started this post way back in March after reading Brad Frosts' bit on carousels. Then I let it sit unfinished. With the buzz around ShouldIUseACarousel.com this week, I figured I'd finish it up. The data is old, although I offer updated numbers at the bottom.

The Process

I looked at all the visits to my home page between February 1 and March 3 to get 30 days of data. Of those visits to the home page, 83% of the time the home page was the landing page. I figured if a smaller percentage of initial visits to our site came via the home page then I would not read too much into the value of these numbers as the user might have already been through enough of the site to get what he or she wanted, but 83% is a pretty big number.

The home page has many content areas, but by far the most prominent is our carousel. During the time frame tested, there were 5 different carousel images with accompanying text. Each one has its own Google Analytics event tracker so I can tell which carousel item has been clicked.

For those playing at home, and using Google Analytics, it's as simple as adding an onclick to your anchor: a href="/Products" onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Slider', 'Columns']);". In this case I am tracking a custom event named "Slider" with the value of "Columns" (so I know which specific image/slide was chosen).

The Results

In the 30 days I tested, the carousel links were clicked less than 1% of the time the home page was visited — 0.8% to be slightly more precise.

Every other element on the home page received at least twice as much activity, with the tabs getting used nearly 10% of the time. Site-wide, the skip navigation link got clicked (tapped, followed) half again as much as the carousel at 1.2%.

To qualify this a bit, the carousel wasn't intended to serve as our only call to action on the home page. It's more about presenting a message to help brand the company as part of our new marketing push. Adding this tracking feature has allowed us to track how the carousel gets used, if at all, and which images/messages are more compelling.

The Latest Results

For this updated version of my draft post I looked at the last 30 days again (June 11 to July 11, 2013) to see what activity we've had on the carousel. The last 30 days are a good fit since we haven't been showing off the features of the slider to clients (which results in activity that is a function of people playing, not truly discovering and naturally using).

For the last 30 days, the number of clicks on the carousel is much lower. 0.2% of unique visitors clicked a carousel slide. For every 500 unique visits to the site, someone clicks on the carousel. Interestingly, this is the same number of people who print pages from our site and lower than the "skip navigation" activity in the same time period.

About the Carousel

Our site is a great place for us to experiment with the carousel since we can quickly refactor it, tweak it, replace it, and so on. Since its launch 7 months ago I have made a number of tweaks to the technology and we have played around with the messages to see what sticks.

We're revisiting the design of the carousel now to see how its relative size and different images and messages can affect its use. At some point it may go away, but not until I've had a chance to gather lots of data.

The carousel itself is both swipe-friendly and keyboard-friendly, uses a linear flow with a clear start and end, has indicators to show where a user is in the overall collection (also allowing a user to jump to a specific slide), and pauses when there is any action taken on the carousel (hover, click, tap, etc.). I built it to also serve images at appropriate sizes for appropriate devices, something which I am regularly tweaking. The base for this is the Royal Slider.

Related

• ShouldIUseACarousel.com


• Accessibility expert warns: stop using carousels, July 11, 2013.


• Carousels, January 23, 2013.


• Carousel Interaction Stats, January 22, 2013.


• Auto-Forwarding Carousels and Accordions Annoy Users and Reduce Visibility, January 19, 2013.


• Don’t Use Automatic Image Sliders or Carousels, Ignore the Fad, September 27, 2012.


• That big sliding banner? Yeah, it’s rubbish, September 6, 2012.


• 5 Big Usability Mistakes Designers Make on Carousels, August 2, 2011.

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Screen Shots of Win8/IE10 Media Query Values

There is a nifty tool at MQtest.io which gives you a breakdown of how your device reports features you might use for media queries. To use the tool's own explanation:

This test isn’t about what media que­ries your device can or cannot see (but it does show an 'unsupported' label if a device doesn‘t support something). In­stead it shows you which dimen­sions your de­vice will res­pond to when using ‘width=device-width,initial-scale=1.’

As one of the seemingly few owners of a Windows 8 tablet (specifically the Asus Vivo), I sometimes get asked to check sites to make sure that a developer's media queries work properly. It was testing my own site that led me to discover the prefixed styles that IE10 needs in Metro view (which lead to my surprisingly popular post, IE10, Metro, and Media Queries).

Armed with the features that MQtest.io can help identify along with a Win8 tablet, I figured perhaps others without a Win8 tablet could benefit from some screen shots showing the MQTest.io results in various configurations of Internet Explorer 10. Please bear in mind that the numbers are for my device, and probably will not match those you would get from a Microsoft Surface or another Win8 device. At the very least, however, these will show you what tests will run in Win8/IE10 and the types of values you can expect to see.

Screen shot of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 in desktop mode, with the tablet turned horizontally (wider than it is tall).

Screen shot of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 in desktop mode, with the tablet turned vertically (taller than it is wide).

Screen shot of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 in Metro mode, with the tablet turned horizontally (wider than it is tall).

Screen shot of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 in Metro mode, with the tablet turned vertically (taller than it is wide).

Screen shot of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 in Snap Mode, with the browser in the narrow view.

Screen shot of Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 in Snap Mode, with the browser in the wide view.

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Google Needs to Provide Android App Interstitial Alternative

Yesterday Matt Cutts from Google tweeted that Google search results for users on smartphones may be adjusted based on the kinds of errors a web site produces (of course I was excited):

Important: if your website has smartphone errors, we may change rankings for smartphone users: goo.gl/x8R4A #smx

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) June 11, 2013

Matt links to a page that outlines two examples of errors that might trigger this downgrade of a site's position in the Google search results and, right in the first paragraph, links to Google's own common mistakes page:

As part of our efforts to improve the mobile web, we published our recommendations and the most common configuration mistakes.

I think it's fair to assume that anything listed on the "Common mistakes in smartphone sites" page can negatively impact your site ranking. In particular this section on app download interstitials caught my eye:

Many webmasters promote their site's apps to their web visitors. There are many implementations to do this, some of which may cause indexing issues of smartphone-optimized content and others that may be too disruptive to the visitor's usage of the site.

Based on these various considerations, we recommend using a simple banner to promote your app inline with the page's content. This banner can be implemented using:

• The native browser and operating system support such as Smart App Banners for Safari on iOS6.


• An HTML image, similar to a typical small advert, that links to the correct app store for download.

I think it's good that Google links to the Apple article. I think it's unfortunate that Google does not link to Microsoft's own solution. If you read my blog regularly, or just follow me on Twitter, you may know that I covered both Apple's and Microsoft's app banner solution in January in the post "App Store Meta Tags."

You might also note that I stated that Google Play offers no such feature. Google, the force behind Android and the one now (or soon) penalizing sites in its search engine for app interstitials, provides no corresponding alternate solution of its own.

A great thing that Google could do for its Android users, for its search engine results, and for app developers, is to support a custom meta tag that allows web sites to promote their own Android apps in the Play store. Developers can start to replace awful Android app interstitials on web sites, users can get a cleaner experience, and site owners who can't conceive of other ways to promote their apps on their home pages can move toward something that is easier to maintain and doesn't penalize them.

I think it's nice that Google is paying attention to web devs by adjusting search results, but my ranty tweets are probably falling on deaf ears. The web would be indebted to someone who can get Google's and Android's ear on this.

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IE10, Metro, and Media Queries

The image on the left is IE10 in desktop view, on the right is IE10 in Metro view, both on the same device and at the same dimensions and screen resolution.

I worked pretty hard on our corporate site to test on as many devices and browsers as possible, trying to ensure that my media queries were solid and I was staying cutting edge without being bleeding edge. You might recall that I am already not a fan of testing in Internet Explorer emulation modes, but now I think I need to get the hardware to go along with my IE testing.

I recently picked up a Windows 8 tablet, making sure it had both the desktop and the (formerly-named) Metro interface. I set about testing the Algonquin Studios site in Internet Explorer 10 in both modes and was surprised to see that in the tablet / Metro mode my media queries were being mostly ignored (the site is built mobile first, so it honored the desktop queries). I took some screen captures and reached out to the Twitters for help.

Roger Johansson was kind enough to help:

@aardrian You may need @-ms-viewport {width:device-width;zoom:1.0; }

— Roger Johansson (@rogerjohansson) May 22, 2013

This sounded familiar but I did some digging (now that I had some direction) and came across this note in a six-month-old MSDN article:

By default, Internet Explorer automatically scales content when the window is narrower than 1024px. This primarily includes the snapped state and portrait mode. If the @-ms-viewport rule is specified, it overrides default scaling.

In cases where scaling is not needed or desired, the device-width keyword can be used. This keyword signifies that the page is optimized to work well regardless of the dimensions of the window.

When using this keyword, make sure that the page continues to work well in a variety of window sizes, including the narrow snapped state and portrait modes.

My tablet's width is 768 pixels, so it definitely fell under the 1,024 pixels that trigger scaling. This note, however, doesn't provide any context for how this only affects IE10 in Metro mode, because the media queries clearly work fine when using IE10 in the desktop mode.

I excluded the zoom:1.0; from Roger's tweet, popped open my CSS file, and added @-ms-viewport { width: device-width; } right to the top of the file, outside of any media queries. I deployed it and all was well (I actually went through a full testing pass, test deploy, and the likes, but that part of the story isn't very interesting).

Perhaps everyone else already knows this and I am incredibly late to the game, but just in case there's someone who is stuck or doesn't have access to the right IE10 configuration, I hope this helps.

The lesson I learned here is that if I want to properly test Internet Explorer 10, I can't rely on a desktop installation on Windows 7 or Windows 8, I need to also test in the Metro interface and, ideally, on the appropriate hardware as well. Looking at my logs, I see more than a few users who have come to the site with an IE10/Win8 configuration who may very well have thought the site was not responsive.

For those interested, this screen capture shows my home page after deploying the CSS update:

IE10 in Metro view, after the CSS update. You can see that my media queries have fired.

Update: May 24, 2013

Thanks to Matt Stow's comment below (which demonstrated my clear lack of Google-fu), I now know of some resources online that have been down this path and also addressed the best approach to supporting Windows 8 Snap Mode (example of Snap Mode below if you are unfamiliar with this). It turns out that Windows Phone 8 has a bug which makes my solution inadequate, although there is a scripting fix in Matt Stow's article which you can layer on top of this. On to the links:

• IE10 Snap Mode and Responsive Design, OCtober 17, 2012 by Tim Kadlec.


• Windows Phone 8 and Device-Width, January 14, 2013 by Tim Kadlec.


• Responsive Design in IE10 on Windows Phone 8, January 6 2013 by Matt Stow.

This screen shot shows the Snap Mode of Windows 8. As you can see, while playing my virtual accordion I decided that I absolutely had to also surf my company web site, which renders quite nicely thanks to the fix I implemented at the start of this article.

Update: October 15, 2013

Matt Stow reports that Microsoft has fixed the Windows Phone 8 viewport issue.

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Balancing Act: Features, Budgets & Timelines at Web Standards Sherpa

As of today I am an author over at Web Standards Sherpa. I wrote an article discussing the process of juggling a no-budget, tight-timeframe web site for Buffalo Soccer Club while still trying to adhere to best practices. The article is titled "Balancing Act: Features, Budgets & Timelines."

I get a chance to talk about responsive design and even rant just a little bit about print styles (the article itself prints well, too). The article also has the nifty ReadSpeaker feature which means that the page can read the article aloud to you in a voice that is entirely unlike mine (at least it's a male voice by default).

Adrian offers insight into the decision process of building a new site for the Buffalo Soccer Club, a not-for-profit with little to no budget and a looming deadline. Read it…

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Observing Users with Mobile Devices

Nuns taking photos of each other at the Peak on Hong Kong island with their Hello Kitty iPad (which could result in a niche Tumblr).

I had the pleasure of traveling to Hong Kong for the UXHK conference just last week (the conference was the week prior, but I stayed around to be a tourist). While there I decided to spend some time observing how people used their mobile devices and what devices they used. Far from scientific and probably highly tainted by my own assumptions, it was still an interesting experiment.

When I got back I stumbled across some articles discussing how people use their mobile devices and was pleased to find a lot of commonality.

My Own Observations

It seemed like everyone in Hong Kong was using a smartphone. Not everyone was, but given how often my movement on densely-packed streets was stymied because a texting twenty-something or an elderly Bejeweled player was slowly meandering through the chaos, it certainly felt that way.

What I did track is that once on the MTR (the Hong Kong subway), about 8 out of 10 people pulled out a smartphone and started to do something. Occasionally it was someone using it to talk, but usually it was some awkward one-handed wholly-attention-grabbing activity. For the cases where I could see, a bit more than half the people appeared to be playing games. Age did not seem to be a determining factor for games versus non-games. For the remainder, I saw lots of what may have been texting or tweeting. I am guessing this because I primarily saw people selecting Chinese characters as part of some sort of text-based input for an app.

I was most struck by how few iPhones I saw. It felt that most of the people who I took to be locals were using Android devices. I was also surprised at the number of phablets (large smartphones, but not large enough to be tablets) I saw. In particular, every time I looked I saw at least one Samsung Galaxy Note II.

Among tourists I saw a different breakdown. I am guessing who the tourists were, but camera-toting white people seemed an easy fit, with tourist traps, accents, and personal gear helping to suggest others. I saw many iPhones in their midst, and more than a few tourists taking photos with their iPads, Smart Covers dangling in the breeze.

The Apple store in Hong Kong. 5 people were taking photos as I walked by: 1 was using a digital camera, 1 was using an iPad, the other 3 were using Android phones.

How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices?

Over at the UX Matters site, Steven Hoober asked How Do Users Really Hold Mobile Devices? His approach was similar to mine in that he and his team observed users "in the wild," but they actually tracked data points as they went (instead of relying on memory, as I did). They get some interesting results in their observations:

In over 40% of our observations, a user was interacting with a mobile phone without inputting any data via key or screen.

The users who we observed touching their phone’s screens or buttons held their phones in three basic ways:

• one handed—49%


• cradled—36%


• two handed—15%

While I don't have numbers from my own casual observations to back up my opinions (they are just opinions, after all), I feel like the breakdown for how people held their phones when using touch input was similar to what I saw. However, I saw nowhere near 40% of smartphone users talking/listening to their phones.

One thing this study cannot capture is how people hold their phones for more specific tasks. For example, I saw lots of people taking photos with their phones, phablets, and tablets. Other than awkward arms-length self-portraits (with either the front- or rear-facing camera), I always saw them use both hands. This doesn't surprise me and it's probably not worth measuring, but it would be interesting if it turned out that my assumption was totally wrong.

Observations on use of mobile devices at airports and train stations

Maish Nichani and Bernie Quah at Pebble Road illustrated some casual observations on use of mobile devices at airports and train stations. While this isn't a scientific study, it's interesting to see that the poses seem to be universal.

For my observations, which were primarily on busy sidewalks, at subway stations and on the subway trains themselves, there would be additional sketches. Even the train sketches don't all apply (densely-packed subways are a bit different than trains with enough room you can sit sideways and that have access to power outlets). I spent far less time observing at the Hong Kong airport because I was either arriving and trying to get clear, or departing and trying to find food.

Your Own Observations

These two articles illustrate how easy it can be to see how people interact with their mobile devices. An advantage to this passive approach is that you catch people behaving as they normally do, without subconsciously modifying their behavior because they are being observed. Anybody who has run any kind of user group testing knows that can be a problem.

A disadvantage to this observational approach is that you don't know what people are doing — you have no context. While you might be able to quickly tell when someone is taking a photo, it's harder to tell if someone is checking in on Foursquare, playing Tetris, texting, tweeting, or looking up directions to a restaurant. This lack of context will always make your observations useful in only the most basic way.

Regardless, these observations might be enough for you to devise your own testing methodology as you build apps, make mobile-friendly sites, develop interfaces in general, or even work on hardware.

Tangentially Related

All those nifty touch-screen laptops have their own interesting challenges. Not only are they touch screen, they are mouse- and keyboard-driven at the same time. Boris Smus shows examples of how user expectations may pan out in Interactive Touch Laptop Experiments.

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App Store Meta Tags

Why yes, Dominos, I'd love to tap again to get your real home page to order a pizza when I could have done it right here, below your over-sized app pitch that could be done in a tiny ribbon.

This may be old news to some of you, but I haven't found a place that collects this in one spot.

One of the most offensive experience I have when surfing a site on my mobile devices is being forced to click through an advertisement for the site's app in the iTunes store (even moreso when I am surfing on a non-iOS device). There is a fair number of sites I have tapped away from because of this (I also don't expect to be served the page I came to see, but instead shunted to the mobile home page).

If yours is one of those sites, whether promoting your entire user experience or just a product, there is a less offensive way to present your pitch to users on iOS and Windows Phone.

iOS 6

Safari on iOS 6 and later devices can promote your app with a standardized banner. Essentially you stuff a custom meta tag into your page that references your App Store ID. If the user already has the app installed, then the ad becomes a launcher instead.

The code is pretty simple:

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=myAppStoreID, affiliate-data=myAffiliateData, app-argument=myURL">

• app-id is required and references your app's identifier.


• affiliate-data is optional and uses your iTunes affiliate string.


• app-argument is also optional and can allow users who have your app installed to jump to a specific place in your app.

More details at Apple's developer site: Promoting Apps with Smart App Banners

Windows 8

Microsoft offers a similar feature for users of Windows 8 in non-desktop mode who are also using Internet Explorer. I have not tried it, so I cannot explain how this works as the user changes modes nor how it works with the "charms" feature of Windows 8.

This code is relatively simple as well, though it requires two meta tags and supports up to five:

<meta name="msApplication-ID"content="microsoft.build.App"/>

<meta name="msApplication-PackageFamilyName"content="microsoft.build_8wekyb3d8bbwe"/>

• msApplication-ID is required and references your app's identifier.


• msApplication-PackageFamilyName is required and contains the package family name created by Visual Studio.


• msApplication-Arguments is optional and lets you pass arguments to your app.


• msApplication-MinVersion is optional and can direct users with an old version to the Windows Store.


• msApplication-OptOut< is optional and allows pages to opt out of installing the app, switching to the app, or both./li>
  

More details at Microsoft Developer Network: Connect your website to your Windows Store app (Windows)

Google Play, BlackBerry App World, Etc.

In addition to Google Play, BlackBerry App World, I looked for similar features for the Firefox OS and Ubuntu Mobile stores. I know there are other mobile platforms out there for which I did not look.

If you know of other apps tores that offer similar features, please let me know so I can update this post.

Related

There are other places where custom meta tags are used to display targeted content. One example is used for Twitter Cards and another example is used with Google News. While you can build support for them, neither Twitter nor Google is going to use them unless you have been vetted in advance.

Updated: January 29, 2013

I wrote a version of this post with an example at the Algonquin Studios blog. I'm pasting the example in here...

Real-World Example

One of our spin-off companies, SWRemote, has an app available for iPads. There is value in promoting the app to visitors of the site but not in blocking their access to the site content with a splash page or an extra click, especially if they are not on iPads. The SWRemote web site is powered by QuantumCMS (yes, I am promoting our web content management system), which makes it about 30 seconds of effort to add the necessary meta tag to the site.

Screen shot of the QuantumCMS custom meta tag screen.

If you are already a client of ours on QuantumCMS, all you have to do is choose Site Configuration from the Settings menu and pop into the Marketing tab. This is the screen that allows you to add custom meta tags. Press the Advanced button and you are off to the races. In the Name field, for this example, I just entered “apple-itunes-app” and in the Content field I provided the custom ID for the app appended to “app-id=.” As soon as I hit Save the web site was showing the app bar to visitors:

Screen shots of the SWRemote site on an iPad3 both with the app installed and without it installed, showing how the bar changes its message.

Oddly, even though the app runs on the iPad Mini, which is running iOS6, the app bar never appeared on the site when viewed on the iPad Mini. On an iPhone 5, the app bar started to appear and then disappeared — probably as the device recognized that there is no iPhone version of the app.

If/when there is an app available for Windows Phone, the process to add this feature will be the same, allowing the site to promote both apps dependent on the audience. QuantumCMS helps make the process easier, with no need to code any changes to your site templates.

Update, March 8, 2013

What he said:

I think "Download our app!" is the new "Skip intro…"

— Jeffrey Veen (@veen) March 8, 2013

Update, April 24, 2013

There is a recap of recent rants over at .net Magazine in the article "Devs rally against mobile web doorslams."

Update: June 12, 2013

Google has just announced that it may penalize sites that promote apps with those awful interstitials. Yet Google offers no solution (as you see above) for Android apps through the Google Play store. You can get more detail in my post "Google Needs to Provide Android App Interstitial Alternative."

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Letting Mobile Users See Desktop View of RWD Site

Bruce Lawson tweeted out a seemingly random musing today that I have pondered myself — what if, while on a mobile device and surfing a RWD web site, I want the desktop version of a site?

There are many reasons as a user that this might be the case, ranging from poor development practices that hide chunks of content you need to see to just wanting to know what it looks like.

Clearly it's enough of a use case that mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile, Chrome, Firefox, and so on, have a feature to request the "desktop" version of a site from a menu built into the browser.

Except that feature doesn't work with a RWD-powered site because media queries, typically based on viewport width, are used to deliver styles for traditional desktop window sizes. The browser feature only sends a different user agent string (bypassing terrible user agent sniffing) but doesn't do much else. Your 320-pixel-wide device is still 320 pixels wide, and the media queries know it.

Until the mobile browser makers report a false viewport (or, rather, assume one when choosing CSS from a set of media queries), we're kind of stuck. While I have many ideas on how that might work, that won't address the issue today.

While I had bandied about an idea to address this on the redesign of my site a couple years ago, it took a client request last year to get my team the time to finally code a solution.

There are some core steps the hammer out in the logic of any solution:

1. Put a link on the page to view the desktop layout. I prefer to have it in the raw HTML over writing it in with script.


2. In the more mobile-friendly CSS files allow this link to display. In the more desktop-friendly CSS files hide the link.


3. Either using a round-trip to the server or client-side script, remove the media query logic and serve up the "desktop" CSS.


4. Warning for Europeans: cookies. Set a cookie with that preference for the user. Whether it is for the current session, forever, or somewhere in between is worth an internal discussion.


5. Now display a link to view the "mobile" version of the site. Again, this can be done with or without script.


6. If the user clicks the link to see the mobile version, re-instate all your media queries, clear the cookie and pretend nothing happened.

This process is a bit oversimplified, but it covers the broad strokes.

There are some hurdles, of course. Your users might not understand what you mean by "desktop" or even "mobile." You could make the link to get out of one of the views too hard to find. You could bump up against expectations set by the mobile browser feature to request the desktop site. If you serve mobile styles to IE6 users, you could confound them if you don't clear the link from the page for them. And so on.

You can play around with what we implemented for our client at CHSBuffalo.org. View the source to see the styles and script. There is obviously logic on the server side, but you can make up your own for your own server platform.

These screen shots should give you an idea of what to expect when you visit the site:

The CHSBuffalo.org site as seen on an iPhone and on a Nexus 7, all styling determined by media queries.

The CHSBuffalo.org site as seen on an iPhone and on a Nexus 7 after clicking "View desktop layout" (with the zoom as the user would initially see it). The link to return to the mobile layout is at the top, though not as obvious as it could be.

This is what the user on an iPhone sees as soon as the desktop view loads—note the link to return to the mobile view is nowhere to be found. We did a poor job there and will have to fix it. Don't make the same mistake if you try this.

Related

• Turning off responsive web design, January 12, 2013 from Bruce Lawson.


• Opt-Out Responsive Design? September 12, 2012 at CSS-Tricks.com.


• Creating a faux ‘View full site’ button for responsive sites, May 26th, 2012 at NeilCarpenter.com.


• View Full Site Link for Responsive Web Design, April 12, 2012 at CreativeAndCode.com.

Update: March 25, 2013

In this post, Roger Johansson shows code the code behind making his similar technique work: Letting users disable responsive layout.

Update: March 29, 2013

Two more posts popped up this week around the idea of disabling responsive design, both of them looking a bit at the larger issue and then proposing an icon to toggle a design between responsive and non responsive: Thoughts on Toggling a Responsive Design On and Off by Jordan Moore and A suggestion for Responsive Design toggle icons by Andy Clarke.

I'm of the opinion that icons only mean something to a sub-set of users, so relying on them may be inadequate. I still like plain text.

Update: May 3, 2013

An article over at SitePoint asks "Should Users Have the Option to Switch Off Responsive Design?" The author tends to think that such an option is superfluous and many of the commentors agree. Many others point to bad RWD implementations as a reason to offer the option (though the developers of those bad RWD examples probably wouldn't care about letting users disable it). An interesting read if only to see more opinions.

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Google Maps: Misbehaving with UA Sniffing

Here's the TL;DR: Google Maps sniffs a browser's user agent string. If it finds Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, then it kicks it over to the m.google.com mobile home page.

So let's be clear. It's 2013 and one of the biggest companies on the internet is using a sniffer to redirect users on a browser and platform that it sees as competition.

Google's general claim is that the mobile version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers (such as Google Chrome) and therefore Google doesn't support non-WebKit browsers. Even though Google Maps works fine on Firefox mobile (which supports panning, but not pinch-to-zoom) and Opera Mobile (which sometimes supports panning, but not pinch-to-zoom), neither of which uses the Webkit engine. It even renders using Opera Mini, although I can't get it do anything. I can't test Internet Explorer on Windows Phone because I don't have it.

I can, however, test Google's browser sniffer by changing the user agent string in my browser to report itself as Windows Phone and watch my request for maps.google.com get redirected to m.google.com, the Google mobile home page. This tells me that Google isn't performing feature detection (such as touch events or multi-touch support), but is instead damning the browser by name alone.

This is the lesson Google is teaching young web developers who don't understand how flawed this approach is (contrary to its own instructions on best practices from less than a month ago). Google Maps happily lets me have a sub-par experience in Opera Mobile or Firefox mobile. It even lets me have a broken experience in Opera Mini. But Internet Explorer on Windows Phone? Google Maps just boots those users.

Reports I have read (and watched) on assorted articles online suggest that Google Maps works reasonably well on IE on Windows Phone (supporting panning and pinch-to-zoom). As such, I don't buy Google's argument that it wants to prevent users from having a poor experience—there is already evidence that a large number of users (more than use Windows Phone) are having a poor experience.

From Google:

The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari. However, since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the mobile web.

…Because we actively block them, should be how that quote ended.

So why is Google really doing this? Is it because it's fun to pick on Microsoft? Is it because Google thought it could get away with it? Is it to make the Windows Phone experience less appealing than Android's? Is it because Google doesn't like Microsoft's touch events specification (and how well it's been received) at the W3C? Is it because of recent court cases between Google and Microsoft?

In this case I don't much care. I care instead about the terrible example Google is setting for web developers.

Background

• Google Maps Has Never Been Accessible On Internet Explorer Mobile Now Blocked on Windows Phone (Updated), January 4, 2013.


• Now Google is blocking Windows Phones from accessing maps.google.com, January 4, 2013.


• Many Windows Phone users report being cut off from Google Maps (update), January 4, 2013.



• Google Maps never supported Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 8, and it likely never will, January 5, 2013.


• Shenanigans: Google Maps redirect issue on Windows Phones is a matter of competition, not compatibility, January 5, 2013.


• This is Why You Can't Access Google Maps on Windows Phone, January 5, 2013.



• Google Admits It Was Deliberately Blocking Windows Phone Users From Google Maps, January 6, 2013.


• Google says Maps redirect on Windows Phone was a product decision, and will be removed, January 6, 2013.


• Windows Phone Doesn't Support Google Maps Because Google Doesn't Want It To, January 6, 2013.



• Google Maps, Windows Phone, and an avoidable mess, January 7, 2013.

My Related Posts

• Let's Treat Old Browser Users Better, July 5, 2012.


• Another Anti-IE Gimmick, June 14, 2012.


• Exclusion Is a Feature Now, May 10, 2012.


• The Return of “Best Viewed in…”, March 4, 2012.


• Detecting Mobile Devices — Don't Bother, October 11, 2011.

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Ignoring Social Media This Thanksgiving

Past Thanksgivings

Three years ago I wrote a post describing how I used social media during my 2008 Thanksgiving dinner (mostly to keep my guests pacified in my tiny house while I considered cooking a turkey with a pencil torch). To my family it was novel to watch people across the country post their meals, perhaps in stark contrast to what I was feeding them.

I posted again about Thanksgiving and social media in 2010, this time discussing how people were getting help with their holiday plans online and how social media was far noisier than it was two years prior.

Last year when I posted about Thanksgiving, I included the #Turkey911 hashtag and talked about what a terrible idea it would be to answer the call from the web to upgrade your parents' browser. I also noticed even more noise on all the social media outlets, including from my own friends who had derided me for my food photos from prior years.

This Thanksgiving

This year as Thanksgiving approaches I realize there are far more people using social media than there were back in 2008 when I first started posting my holiday photos.

In 2008, Twitter had about 6.0 million users. As of March 2012, Twitter is up to 140 million users. In 2008, Facebook was at 100 million users and as of last month has now hit 1 billion users worldwide. Other social media outlets have come and gone, but these two demonstrate the overall penetration social media has into everybody's life.

That also helps explain why there is so much more noise online. Whereas in 2008 many users were sharing with smaller audiences, not as vocal, and spam and advertising wasn't a big deal, in 2012 it feels like everyone wants to share everything while I am also constantly being assaulted with social spam.

Two pieces I read in the last few days stood out to me as I was thinking about the coming holiday and social media.

The Quiet Ones

Over at The New York Times is an opinion piece titled, "The Quiet Ones." The author tells a story of riding in Amtrak's Quiet Car, where passengers are expected to be as close to silent as possible. In it the author makes the following observation:

In a 2006 interview David Foster Wallace said, it seems significant that we don't want things to be quiet, ever, anymore. Stores and restaurants have their ubiquitous Muzak or satellite radio; bars have anywhere between 1 and 17 TVs blaring Fox and soccer; ads and 30-second news cycles play on screens in cabs, elevators and restrooms. […]

People are louder, too. They complain at length and in detail about their divorces or gallbladders a foot away from you in restaurants. […] People practice rap lyrics on the bus or the subway, barking doggerel along with their iPods as though they were alone in the shower.

Mobile Vs. Social

Yesterday I read a blog post, "Mobile Vs. Social." In it the author discusses how people essentially need this constant input and interaction, that we are giving up or stifling real human interaction for the false human interaction of social media (or even SMS or email). He suggests just looking around in public to see it in action:

Just look at parties, lunches or any other grown-up interaction scene you can think of. People talk for a while, and then they just can't help themselves looking at their phones. Just for a second. Just needing that latest "fix."

My Point

I have a suggestion for all of us for Thanksgiving this year, one I will try to follow myself (which won't be easy) — turn off your phone.

I have no illusions about how trying Thanksgiving can be for many and how compelling it will be to escape to the cultivated social constructs in your phone. This tweet may sum it up nicely:

Always use "Thanksgiving" on first reference. "National Day of Family Hate" is fine for subsequent.

— Fake AP Stylebook (@FakeAPStylebook) November 21, 2012

So let's give it a shot. Consider it good practice for the coming bandwidth / electricity / zombie apocalypse.

If you need a little convincing, see if this TED video from Sherry Turkle ("Connected, but Alone?") does it:

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Reviewing Twitter's New Profile Header

Today Twitter announced that it has added header images to profiles, similar to what Facebook and Google+ have done. In addition, Twitter has updated its apps for iOS and Android devices to use those header images. Twitter explains why it has added this feature:

Starting today you can make your presence on Twitter more meaningful with new Twitter profiles. […] You can upload your header photo, which appears above your Tweets, to express yourself instantly, anywhere.

By adding a header image, I am both making Twitter more meaningful and expressing myself. Even though I have used Twitter for 15,000+ of my own tweets so far to express myself, and follow a group of folks that bring meaning to my Twitter stream. In case it's not obvious, I am suspect of the reasoning. It feels to me more like Twitter trying to make itself more like Facebook (and Google+ and App.net), especially with the promotion of any photos from my timeline into their own prominent photo bar on mobile displays.

Twitter offers only two parameters for providing the header image — it should not be over 5MB and it should be 1,252 × 626 pixels. I can only assume this over-sized behemoth is Twitter's way of accounting for high resolution displays. And so I dutifully made and uploaded my header image.

Desktop Browser

Screen capture of new Twitter header on desktop browser.

I am wholly unimpressed with the desktop browser experience. Not only has the image been scaled down (which I expected), it was scaled down to 542 pixels in width, or by a factor of 2.31. That's not a nice even number and it relies on browser image scaling (which isn't even bicubic in older browsers) to present the image.

In addition, my name and description are lost in the image, which means I'd have to build a space into my file just to account for the text. On top of all this, the link to my web site doesn't stand out in any way as a hyperlink. It is not obvious that it is clickable, and that's ultimately the thing I want people to click if they visit my profile page.

Forgetting how the image disrupts copy laid on top of it, the size of the image header leaves (at the window size I was using) only 3 tweets visible in my timeline. While at this same window size I only had 5 tweets visible with the old header, I'd rather have those two tweets back given the issues I have with the new header.

Compare this with my profile page before the header:

Screen capture of old Twitter header on desktop browser.

Mobile Browser

Screen capture of new Twitter header on mobile browser (Chrome on Nexus 7).

The mobile browser experience isn't much better. The text is nearly illegible, but at least the hyperlink to my site appears to be bold, if smaller. Only three tweets are visible and then there is a bar with images I have posted. The worst part is that only one of those is mine (the other five are retweets), they are from July, and the thumbnail, when tapped, loads the wrong image. I don't like my tweets being truncated for this low-value content.

Without the header image, however, the experience is almost no better. I still lose the same amount of space to a header image I have not defined. The only plus is that the text is now legible. See the before photo:

Screen capture of old Twitter header on mobile browser (Chrome on Nexus 7).

Mobile App

Screen capture of updated Twitter app with new header (Nexus 7).

Everything I said about the mobile browser experience with and without the new Twitter header applies.

Except this is even worse.

You can't see my description, location or web site address in my profile without swiping to a second panel. Perhaps in some misguided attempt to make the text more legible by laying down a black overlay on the background header image, Twitter has now made my biographical information and link to my site totally invisible without some user interaction.

Not providing a header image does not save me from this mistake. As you can see below, custom image or not, my information is still a screen away.

Screen capture of updated Twitter app without new header (Nexus 7).

Conclusion

I removed the header image. I see no reason to push all those kilobytes to users to lessen their experience should they stumble across my profile page. On top of that, I don't want to hide any more tweets than necessary nor obfuscate the link to my site (though I have no control over that in the mobile app). Perhaps in the future I'll take time to craft an image to better fit the layout, but I have more important things to do than try to shoehorn something into Twitter's mistake. Not to mention they can just change the rules again at any time.

Frankly, I'd rather Twitter enable Twitter cards for all sites. There is far more value to me as a content creator and as a user in that feature. And that feature leans on the existing Twitter experience, not some vapid attempt to copy other social media platforms.

Update: 2:19PM

I just discovered .net Magazine did a brief piece on the Twitter header image this morning, and the sources they cite say pretty much the same thing as I do.

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