@Media WebDirections Conference: Day 1 - Sessions 1 and 2
Following the main keynote the attendees found themselves with four sessions. Within each session attendees were able to select from two presentations. One presentation had a distinctively development slant while the other had a more designer slant. Attendees were free to choose which presentation they wanted to attend. I ended up seeing a mixture of designer and development presentations.
So what did I see?
- Christian Crumlish – Designing for Play
- John Resig – Testing Mobile Web Apps
- Tom Hughes-Croucher – Introduction to server-side JavaScript
- Jonathan Stark – Building mobile apps
And what did I not see?
- Doug Schepers – SVG today and tomorrow
- Rachel Andrew – Core CSS3
- Simon Willison – Building Crowdsourcing applications
- Mark Boulton – Designing Grid Systems
Christian Crumlish
Christian’s talk surrounded how play is important to human beings and how play concepts can be incorporated into design and development. That the social patterns defined by play are important because they have been defined by our end users. He indicated that there are basically four types of play:
- Play Acting
- Game Play
- Musical Play
- Mechanical Play
Play acting is often about giving signs of life, people like play acting because they can engage with others. They find out who else is out there. They can take an identity, that does not necessarily match their own, use a mask to hide their true self. They can introduce an element of make believe where not everything is true. This is the process of re-imagining and allows them to break many of their personal inhibitions. Software can reflect this through the use of profiles, avatars, usernames. They can use buddy lists to show who is available.
Game Play
Games often start with an invitations – “Do you want to play?”, they require explanation the first time – how do I move forward. What makes games work? Mostly rules and Goals/Achievements. Some goals are about competition. Who gets there first wins. When you get there can you stay there. Other goals (although more rarely) are about co-operationg. Epidemic, for example, is a game where either all the players win (the epidemic is eradicated) or they all loose (everyone dies). Software can emulate this through clear welcome screens that introduce the first time user gently. They can clearly state community norms and guidelines and they can give incentive through achievements, collecting and reward.
Musical Play
Learning a musical instrument is an important type of play. If nothing else it helps us remember that the older people are the harder they find things. Learning a musical instrument can be hard but it can give great satisfaction but in many cases adults find that the balance is wrong: too much hard work not enough reward.
There are two types of musical instrument.
- Those that are easy to learn but give little reward
- Those that are hard to learn but can give great reward
The middle ground is an instrument that someone can start easily but can fine tune their experience to define the level of skill they need and the level of satisfaction they gain. Christian felt that a ukulele is a great example of this type of instrument and that Twitter is a great example of software that is easy to start, gives little reward but that allows personal adjustment to obtain the type of reward an individual is looking for.
Christian finished his talk with a commentary on the missing piece. He stated that it is currently easy from people to gather from the internet and equially easy (and becoming easier) to contribute to it. There is, however, little capability to curate, to assimilate all the items that have been collected into a pattern or order that makes sense to the user. Furthermore the current explosion of small interfaces onto the internet gives more immediacy and that there could be a pattern of people making quick trips to the internet to submit or retrieve and that designers may need to look at micro-transactions which means small studs of information which can be completed on a mobile device with the ability to go back later on a larger device to blend together or to expand upon.
John Resig
John started his talk on mobile testing with the quote “Cross-Browser web development is still hard but doing it for mobile phones is just plain crazy”. John is part of the jQuery core development team. Their current challenge is to make jQuery support all popular platforms. This they thought was going to be relatively easy but has turned out to be difficult to even scope. The following questions, for example, come to mind:
- What are the popular platforms?
- Which can support script?
- What Devices and simulators are available?
To answer these questions you need good data. There are a number of sources available (as I indicated in an earlier blog:)
- StatCounter
- Gartner
- AdMob
StatCounter have an on-going project to track market share via usage with charts showing both local and world-wide coverage. Gartner currently track mobile device sales. AdMob is now challenged as a viable source of information as it has been acquired by Google and consequently banned on Apple devices.
It is noticeable that developers have a tendency to develop for their own devices which predominantly means iPhone followed by Android but this is not a reflection of world-wide market share. Today the most popular platform is Symbian with 44% are the market, followed by RIM with 20%. Then Apple and Android currently have 10% each with a smattering of others trailing behind (including Windows Mobile at 7%). This snapshot does not indicate the current rapid growth of Android devices which will soon move beyond iPhone and make moves on RIM.
Knowing what platforms people use is useful and it clearly shows that the latest developments are not reaching the vast majority of users. What is more important, however, and is a complete unknown is what versions of these platforms they are using. Apple currently indicate that their tight control on their phones, operating systems and the way they engage with customers means that the majority of users are on either of the two latest platforms, although the newest iOS will change that. Android is already more fragmented with a variety of phones being owned that use different versions of the platform. Furthermore Google have no control (and no real care for control) of these devices so they cannot force or even encourage upgrading. In fact some of these devices simply cannot upgrade even if the user wanted to.
In addition to the issue of platforms and versions of platforms jQuery has to think about browsers. It is known which browsers are shipped with which phones but there are also independant, cross platform browsers that users may be able to install themselves. Notably Opera (mini and mobile) which can be run on iPhone, Nokia, Blackberry.
The jQuery team have decided that to control scope they have had to put a stick in the ground. That stick states that they will not support any browser/platform combination that preceeds 2007.
What does this mean to the average web designer/developer
- Firstly draw your own line in the sand
- Obtain simulators for the platforms you are willing to support
- Use technologies like TestSwarm to automate testing where possible
- Build a grading matrix that clearly shows the level of support you are willing to give.
This grid should indicate the quality of experience each browser/platform combination should experience. The following code could be used:
- A – top of the line
- B – Nice to support top of the line if resources available
- C – Degraded experience (No Javascript, No CSS)
- F – Fail (No experience at all)
This can be presented to the customer to give them a clear understanding of what they can expect
Testing
The first question here is should testing be physical or simulated? They is no doubt that simulators are an important part of the testing process but they are far from accurate. There is nothing worse that building for a simulator experience only to find that installation on a real device does not give the same experience. Furthermore simulators are unable to provide a clear measure of the true user experience especially when sensor gestures are used (like shake, compass, vibration or orientation).
If a testing kit is required for physical testing it should be something similar to the following:
- Apple 3GS, iPad
- Nokia n97, n96
- Palm Pre 1.4
- HTC Magic
- HTC HD2
- BlackBerry 8900, 9630
- Droid Incredible
The cost of this is probably $5,000 which is a significant budget but necessary to achieve an adequate testing capability.
Overall this presentation was well structured and informative. It demonstrated that the efforts I have gone to over the last few weeks to build a virtual testing environment have not been wrong or wasted and that there was not really an easier way of doing it. John’s perspective is skewed due to the fact that he is only looking at it from a jQuery perspective. Consequently other web-browsing devices outside of the smartphone sphere are of little interest to him (such as Kindle, i-mode, PSP, Wii, televisions). But then again these technologies are generally very basic and investing time on trying to make a good user experience is probably not an effective use of time.
