The iPhone is being applauded as a game-changer, fundamentally changing how people access the (mobile) web. As of January 2009, 0.59% of all web traffic is being accessed via the iPhone and the iPod Touch (up from 0.36% in September 2008). As this number continues to rise, it’s clear that user expectations will result in changes in how we design for the web.
Unlike most “advancements”, this shift is not going to require designers and developers to learn new skills: rather, we may need to “forget” some of our skills and approaches. Yes, the iPhone is causing web design to go backwards.
- Images – Remember building for users on dial-up? While the 3G network is much better than EDGE, visitors to your site struggle with download time. How large (in terms of bytes) are the different files you’re pulling in? Do you need all those images, or do we need return to the days when content was king?
- Flash – No Flash support – information needs to be available in the HTML. Have an all-Flash site? I can’t find your store locator feature.
- Other Interaction – Information (including navigation) that is only available on hover is now unavailable. We need to be careful about the information we hide from the user and how we expect them to explore and discover the sites we build
How are some other ways the iPhone is causing us to rethink some design decisions we’ve made in the past?
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I ran into the hover problem on my Win Mobile phone a while back:
On Tooltips and Affordances
Follow me on twitter: dlambert
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I don’t see it as a “problem” unique to mobile – users of assistive technologies like screen readers have never been able to “hover” over elements. Mobile just helps make people more aware of these design considerations. I’m actually happy that people need to be more conscious of strong design and not haphazardly hiding important information.
Follow me on twitter: afhill262
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Good point. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a “code coverage”-type tool that could show you the parts of your app that any given UI rendering device can’t access?
Follow me on twitter: dlambert
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Hmmm, very interesting idea! I can’t imagine how difficult it would be, but it would be great to have a general idea of the different “gotchas”
Follow me on twitter: afhill262
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And I always thought that a mobile phone was just to phone ….
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Ahill sammelt, wie sich mit dem iPhone das Webdesign verändern wird [link to post] – ein Rückschritt?
– Posted using Chat Catcher
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Is this a case of removing everything except the elephant from web design?
I think occasionally looking at an interface (or algorithm, or room, or anything really) and removing things is probably a good idea. I hadn’t realized just how much I ignore when I go to websites in a full-fledged desktop browser; I really just want to get at my information and get out.
” Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery ”
We’ve spent a lot of time adding. Time to remove before we start adding even more.
Exactly, while “going backwards” has a negative connotation, I think it’s actually an exciting point. Time for us to rethink all the bells and whistles to determine what value they add (and unfortunately for me as a non-Creative, I don’t always appreciate all the nuance!)
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Soo… you could also just leave everything in place as it is… If you’re serious about designing for the iPhone you should be displaying a site BUILT for the iPhone…
If your back end is worth anything it’s built using the MVC pattern and the only thing you have to do is swap your views for iPhone users. Just do a check against the user agent
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