Tag: web design

Stop punishing your users

if-a-user-has-a-problem

I'm gathering some ideas and notes for a presentation on responsive design and I really appreciated this from Brad Frost:

Follow this rule: Don’t penalize users for visiting your site on smaller device. It’s a myth (PDF) that mobile users don’t want/need certain information. Mobile users will do anything and everything a desktop user will do, provided it’s presented in a usable way.

Our students have told us for several years that they use their mobile device mainly for quick information – not for detailed searches. But I've really started to question that as my own web habits have changed over the years.

I'm constantly moving between devices during the day but unless I'm specifically working on a project at my desk, I'm most often browsing and reading information on my phone or tablet.

I'm not going to carry my laptop with me to the break room and I usually don't pull my laptop out much away from the unless I'm doing a lot typing (I'm typing this on my laptop). If I’m at home my laptop is most likely in my bag or docked in my docking station on my desk.

But you can bet I have my phone with me 95-percent of the time and I'll pull it out constantly to view information relevant to what I'm doing.

So while I can look at our stats and see our bounce rates for screens with smaller resolutions remains high in comparison to larger resolutions, I've questioned if it's really the users' preferences or issue with our site.

What say you?

Do you use your phone, tablet or a laptop/desktop most when you're away from your desk?

Zooming with responsive design

Discovered something new tonight.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

is a lot different than:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

When I started building out a responsive site for our organization, I ran into some snags with font sizes and such and kept running across “be sure to include” the top line of code when working with responsive design.

No one gave much explanation – just said it was needed.

You may have already figured this out – but it’s the last two attributes that make the biggest difference.

As I understand it now, initial-scale is the scale the site initial loads with.

Maximum-scale is the maximum size the user can scale the site to. So if you set a max of 1 – well there will be no pinch and zooming on your site.

Or if you set it to 2, 3 or 10, etc – that’s the max zoom a user can use.

So do us all a favor and leave that last bit (maximum-scale=1) off. Don’t limit your users. Let them navigate however they feel best.

new techie goals

I’m working on a new Intranet site for work today. Last week I was working on new WordPress themes for a possible encounter website redesign (you may have seen them on my Flickr stream).
While working on the Intranet site I’m using CasadeBlundell.com for “filler text” and it got me thinking about redesigning that site as well. It’s gotten a little stagnant.
All of this led me to think about a few goals/challenges I’d like to figure out/complete before to long (some of them are personal, others are work related).

  • Finish a redesign of the encounter website
  • Redesign CasadeBlundell.com
  • Redesign our departmental Intranet site
  • Find out how to combine multiple RSS feeds into one – hopefully without using third party software. I’d love to be able to let people subscribe to one RSS feed and get the latest from my twitter feed, Flickr feed and of course my SSL feed. I’d eventually love to have an option to combine all my RSS feeds with Laurie’s RSS feeds as well so people can truly stay up to date with what’s going on.
  • Get a better grasp/understanding of CSS – this is coming slowly as I build these other sites
  • Learn PHP language – coming along even slower

I think those are the main ones for now – but who knows I may think of several more on the way home – you can check my Twitter feed for updates on the way home 😉