"mobile web" entries

The magic design sauce: curiosity and serendipity

Khoi Vinh on "How They Got There," the cards interaction model, and designers as founders.

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I recently sat down with Khoi Vinh, vice president of user experience at Wildcard and co-founder of Kidpost. Previously, Vinh was co-founder and CEO of Mixel (acquired by Etsy, Inc.), design director of The New York Times Online, and co-founder of the design studio Behavior, LLC. Our conversation included a discussion of career paths; the much talked about new interaction model, cards; and advice for design entrepreneurs.

Curiosity serves designers well

Vinh and I discussed the ever-evolving role of designers. He recently self-published How They Got There, a book of interviews with interaction designers who describe their career paths and offer advice and insight. Vinh explained:

How They Got There is kind of like the book I wish I could have read when I was just starting out in my career. The central thesis is that very few careers are truly planned out, A to B, to C, to Z, and it’s usually a lot of stuff that just happens by circumstance or blind luck, or through someone who knows someone.

“As I became more and more aware of that in my career, I started to find those stories really interesting, really revealing, because they say so much about the character of people who achieve notoriety in their careers; the circumstances that led them to where they are can be fascinating. In a lot of instances, the things that get these people onto these paths are very, very minor events or minor coincidences. … There’s a serendipity, but I think, one thing that comes out when you read these stories is what serves these designers really well is curiosity, a willingness to be available to opportunities, so to speak. They go with the flow. They let one thing turn into another through their ability to acclimate themselves to various situations.

“What’s that old saying from Branch Rickey — “luck is the residue of design”? These careers are somewhat serendipitous, but they are really the result of folks who are very conscientious about making the most of whatever situation they had and working really hard and applying themselves, and looking at the world around them with great curiosity and being really willing to study what it takes to get to the next level.”

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Velocity highlights (video bonus!)

A collection of must-see keynotes from Velocity Santa Clara, with bonus videos of some of the best sessions.

Editor’s note: this post originally appeared on Steve Souders’ blog; it is published here with permission.

We’re in the quiet period between Velocity Santa Clara and Velocity New York. It’s a good time to look back at what we saw and look forward to what we’ll see this September 15-17 in NYC.

Velocity Santa Clara was our biggest show to date. There was more activity across the attendees, exhibitors, and sponsors than I’d experienced at any previous Velocity. A primary measure of Velocity is the quality of the speakers. As always, the keynotes were livestreamed — the people who tuned in were not disappointed. I recommend reviewing all of the keynotes from the Velocity YouTube Playlist. All of them were great, but here’s a collection of some of my favorites.

Virtual Machines, JavaScript and Assembler

Start. Here. Scott Hanselman’s walk through the evolution of the web and cloud computing is informative and hilarious:

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Web performance is user experience

Efforts to optimize your site have an effect on the entire experience for your users

Think about how you search for things on the web. How quick are you to close a tab and go to the next search engine result if a site takes too long to load? Now consider doing that on your phone while waiting in line for your coffee order–you have even less time, so your expectations for a site to load quickly are even higher.

Web performance is user experience. Fast page load time builds trust in your site; it yields more returning visitors, more users choosing your site over a competitor’s site, and more people trusting your brand. Users expect pages to load in two seconds, and after three seconds, up to 40% of users will abandon your site. Similar results have been noted by major sites like Amazon, who found that 100 milliseconds of additional page load time decreased sales by one percent, and Google, who lost 20% of revenue and traffic due to half a second increase in page load time. Akamai has also reported that 75% of online shoppers who experience an issue such as freezing, crashing, taking too long to load, or having a convoluted checkout process will not buy from that site.

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Measuring Mobile Performance

Velocity 2013 Speaker Series: A Sneak Peek With WebPagetest and Appurify

Now that more companies have basic mobile strategies in place, they are turning their attention to the issue of performance.

Mobile developers are thinking about how fast their apps and mobile webpages load and—more importantly—what they can do to make them faster. Consumers have little patience for slow loading apps and their expectations are only going to get more stringent. This expectation likely contributed to Apple making changes so that apps on iOS 7 load 11% faster than on iOS 6.

The challenge is that measuring performance for mobile is not as easy as it is for web. Many of us have used tools like WebPagetest to assess website performance across different browsers/locations and pinpoint areas for improvement but fully functional, equivalent tools don’t exist yet for the mobile space.

This has left mobile developers ill equipped to create the highest-performing mobile apps and websites.
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Top Stories: April 30-May 4, 2012

An open standards battle in the U.K., mobile web development keeps growing, the upside of functional languages.

This week on O'Reilly: We learned how the U.K. government is facing pressure from all sides as it evaluates open standards, Maximiliano Firtman evaluated two years' worth of mobile web developments, and the utility of functional languages was put in the spotlight.

Jason Grigsby and Lyza Danger Gardner on mobile web design

Best practices and common mistakes in mobile web development.

In this Velocity podcast, the co-authors of "Head First Mobile Web" discuss mobile website optimization, mobile design considerations, and common mobile development mistakes.

Mobile web development isn't slowing down

Maximiliano Firtman on mobile web development's recent leaps.

Over the last two years, mobile web development has continued its rapid evolution. In this interview, Fluent speaker and "Programming the Mobile Web" author Maximiliano Firtman discusses the short-term changes that caught his attention.

Mobile web development isn’t slowing down

Maximiliano Firtman on mobile web development's recent leaps.

Over the last two years, mobile web development has continued its rapid evolution. In this interview, Fluent speaker and "Programming the Mobile Web" author Maximiliano Firtman discusses the short-term changes that caught his attention.

Four short links: 16 December 2011

Four short links: 16 December 2011

Underground Map Viz, Teaching Programming, Humanities Visualization, Mobile Browser Test

  1. Subway Map jQuery Plugin — create your own London Underground-style maps. (via Chris Spurgeon)
  2. Webcraft and Programming for Free Range Students — a p2pu class for teachers of web stuff and programming.
  3. Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks 2012 — CFP for a conference in Chicago, looking for visualization and data-analysis papers with a background in the humanities.
  4. How to Go Mo — clever idea. Everyone at a company should be able to say “hey, our site looks like crap on mobile browsers!”, bringing pressure to fix it. 1/3 of people browse the web on their phone.