I am a noob in UX design concepts. Recently I gone through one article about flat design, where they stated that Responsive is so much cared. Usually , when i develop sites, i always tries to make a responsive site. What i want to know is , maximum of people always want their sites to be work in all kind of devices, so that they are giving much importance for responsive design irrespective of the design technique that they follow to build sites. So responsive concepts are common.so why the responsive concepts are included in flat design ?
Almost every new client these days wants a mobile version of their website. It’s practically essential after all: one design for the BlackBerry, another for the iPhone, the iPad, net-book, Kindle — and all screen resolutions must be compatible, too.
In the next five years, we’ll likely need to design for a number of additional inventions. When will the madness stop? It won’t, of course. That's why it's refer to have responsive User Interface.
I hope answer the question.
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"Mobile first" is recommended, I know.
However, I understand this to be because of the progressive enhancement principle.
But when I build a simple site, where I am just scaling/re-arranging items to fit better and have better legibility on smaller devices, can I not just as well start with the desktop design and work my way down to mobile?
It's near impossible to design something perfectly for every possible screen. The basic "breakpoint" as you put it has always been to determine what the client needs, and what they expect. Presently, most clients need a site that meets some basic mobile requirements or at least has a few mobile-friendly pages, even if deeper content is still in a desktop format. There is no one fixed answer for this. However, you should probably be conceptualizing how your design will work in both formats and trying to minimize the amount of rewriting you'll need to do from one to the other, by keeping the layouts as fluid as possible.
So, I worked on responsive sites before but I'm on my way to build my first responsive site now. I opened some articles on the subject, and boom: Mobile First.. I have no idea how I skipped that concept till now. From the beginning I cant seem to understand whole thing (except that number of mobile devices will take out soon desktop computers) and here is why.
How I'm supposed to know how my site will look for desktop version, if I design it for mobile first? I mean, on the smallest device I will have to eventually hide some content etc, how I'm supposed to know what to hide and move things, when I don't know how the site will look on bigger screen? Isn't stripping the things easier?!?!
For me (right now), the Mobile First concept looks to me like building pyramid upside down.
Most implementations actually have two sites: one for browsers and one for mobiles. The webserver redirects the client to m.your-domain.com (or mobile.your-domain.com) if it recognizes it as mobile accotding to the user-agent.
Still, there's room for responsiveness since you might decide to consider different screen sizes, both for mobiles as well as browsers - for example: iPad browser might display things differently than chrome on desktop.
Remark:
Even though we already reached the point where major portion of the internet traffic is done by mobile devices, your site/service might be such that most of its clients will be laptops/desktops. Take Stackoverflow for example :)
You should use google analytics and see what's the split and decide according to that if it's really worth putting energy into it (and if so - how much).
In my opinion. mobile first applies more to apps than to websites. It is relatively easy to make a responsive website, or two versions of a website, to accommodate different screen sizes. It is much more difficult to create an app that works equally well on both small, mostly touch-driven screens, and large desktop screens. In applications the difference is more than just what information you can fit into an available screen real estate. Mobile applications often have a different UI flow and use a different set of components (widgets).
Once you have analyzed your requirements, you have to answer a key question: can a single application/website offer a great user experience on both desktop and mobile devices? If it can, go for it. If it cannot, then you arrive at the mobile first concept: these days it is often better to start with a mobile experience. It will work on large screens too, even though it may look a little strange and it will not take full advantage of a desktop environment. If you app is successful, you can always create a desktop-optimized version.
Note that I said "often", not "always". There are many applications that users still prefer to access from their desktops. If you build one of those applications, there is nothing wrong with going desktop first.
stripping away stuff scaling down your website to a mobile website is not a best practice. nor is mainting two separate websites. starting from mobile lets you focus on what you really need and on the content of your site. don't think "graphics" but think "content"
I am creating a mobile site and working on WAP for the first time and my main concern is that the site should render properly possibly on all handsets.
So,I was thinking to adapt responsive design approach.
But then I came across this sites :
http://www.webdesignshock.com/responsive-design-problems/
http://dapurpixel.com/blog/articles/responsive-web-design-pros-and-cons/
So,please provide some best practices to follow while developing mobile site. I googled it but it showed my tutorial for responsive design and I am not sure that this is the optimum method.
Thanks
It all depends on the website you are creating. Some type of websites (such as blogs) are really easy to make as responsive design. But some other websites (e-commerce, news magazine, deep websites) should be adapted specifically for mobile and tablets. Why? Because making the website adapts its width and column layout is often not enough.
Also keep in mind some features such as mouseover is rather complicated for tablet users. So menus with click that opens an accordion menu is simpler and feels more right. Creating a design that would work for everyone (One design to rule them all) could take more time to implement than simply creating a specific version of your website for handheld devices.
So it all depends on the nature of your website.
I've been developing with XHTML, CSS and Javascript for about 4 years now.
I love it a lot and hate it a little. I've looked into Flash and Silverlight a bit, but as a developer, I'm not too keen on them.
One reason is that they lock you into a vendor and generally, into using that vendor's tools. E.g. Adobe Flash or Microsoft Visual Studio, etc.
Also, Silverlight seems to mix content, layout/styling and behavior and into a single markup language, whereas I like the XHTML way of separating them out in code, but bringing them together in the user's web browser.
I also applaud the usability of the web, e.g. back button, hyperlinks, etc. which are set-in-stone standards that people are used to dealing with.
However, I'm seeing a lot of industry support for Silverlight and Flash. As far as .NET Developer jobs, I'm seeing less jobs for front-end/.NET developers and more jobs for Silverlight/.NET developers.
Will HTML developers still be employable in the future, or should I consider moving to a proprietary platform such as Silverlight?
While Flash/Silverlight skills may be worth developing, I think you will find that general web development skills will still be required for some years to come. Mobile apps in particular seem to place more emphasis on good, basic web design without dependence on plugins and or client-side code. Eventually, I would expect web standards to evolve to subsume the best (or at least most used) features of proprietary plugins. The web, at least, seems to be a place where people tend to favor solutions that maintain independence over lock-in to specific vendor technologies.
No, I think that idea will never fully catch on. The problem is really about the platform being developed on.
Look at how accessible the web is. Almost any machine can get on the web. My phone, my iPod, my laptop, my 11 year old PII machine, my gaming tower, all can access the same web.
The devices I have are not the limit to what can reach the web either. I think just about every gaming platform and cell phone can get on the web, as well as thin terminals running any OS imaginable. I'm sure there are others also.
The big thing looks like it's going to be the mobile market in the next few years. Some mobile devices can run flash, but it isn't used much because of the poor support & performance. The only way that the mobile web can work is by using pure standards based solutions, because that's really the only baseline that can be trusted to exist.
No matter what proprietary technologies come out, I can always rely on the fact that my XHTML pages will still render successfully on whatever device decides to access it. The same can't be said for flash or silverlight.
At the same time, I can also guarantee you that there will be a bigger market for flash and silverlight because the web is becoming more "media rich" in some niche markets (YouTube, Adobe Air, Hulu, Google Gears, etc. to name a few examples). There will absolutely be a market for it, but I wouldn't say it will defeat XHTML and web standards because the web is constantly being redefined.
No matter how much Flash or Silverlight try to take on, the technology will move so fast that the only baseline that I think will remain will be standards like XHTML and CSS.
Flash has been around for years and still hasn't taken over. I think that is one good example of how hard it is to replace XHTML.
Go for server-side development of any kind, but I wouldn't become a Silverlight or Flash specialist.
<CrystalBallMode>
To be honest I can't see it happening. Other than the reasons mentioned by tvanfosson and DanHerbert, the XHTML + CSS + JS stack just grew mature enough so that things like AJAX and jQuery make pretty much all the lightweight client side stuff easy with these tools (as opposed to things like streaming video, heavy computations or sockets etc.)
Common technological inertia will just guarantee that the existing things will stay around. People are much more likely to use something that has been around for a while and has been extended to meet the latest requirements than to use something totally new. Of course there are great paradigm shifts every now and then like the native to managed code transition but I don't see that happening with Flash or Silverlight.
</CrystalBallMode>
My hope is that what comes out of all of this is a new standardized web platform truly suited to building the web applications that people want to see with tools that developers really want to use. I see all of the effort going to trying to shoehorn these legacy web technologies into the "Web 2.0" model and I just wish that this effort could go towards making a truly revolutionary "Web v.Next".
Don't get me wrong, I really like what jQuery is doing to make Javascript client code easier, but it's still Javascript and my personal preference is to work with strongly typed languages with productive development tools.
In the meantime, I think tools like Silverlight and Flash have a lot to offer and help you do things more easily in some cases than in other web technologies, and there are some things you simply can't do any other way. But I don't think Silverlight or Flash or any other technology is the end game, just a step in the right direction.
Consider for a moment that you can manipulate a web page using Javascript, (X)HTML, and CSS with a great deal of overlap in functionality and yet ALL three technologies remain in prominent use today. The reason for this is because all three languages are different tools meant to solve different problems and no one of them can serve as an adequate replacement for the other.
Its the same thing with Flash / Silverlight vs these existing web technologies. In fact, I work in a dev shop that builds Flash based e-learning. One of our current products was originally built to use a purely Flash-based solution for navigation, etc. However, as the product has continued to evolve we have actually moved a lot of the functionality from the Flash-based e-learning module and into regular html pages.
In other words, I don't think that we'll be abandoning the current tools that web developers use any time soon. For the most part I see Flash / Silverlight as additional tools that will solve particular problems better than we were able to solve them previously.
Neither one is going to win out anytime soon. I expect which one is used will depend entirely on the purpose for many years to come.
The reason you're seeing so many job offerings for Silverlight of late is because it's a relatively new technology and just recently gained some momentum.
Though, I do expect Silverlight to make quick work of Flash.
I sure hope so. And yes, I think they will. There will be some development on legacy (XHTML/CSS/JS) apps for re-tuning purposes, but I think there will come a day when new apps are simply not created on those platforms.
Mobile phones are the issue right now. Flash isn't available on many of the major phone models. And their browsers are all over the map. Luckily there's Webkit (iPhone and G1).
If Silverlight makes it to a web platform then it will be a nice viable alternative to the hodgepodge of technologies that are currently in use. FYI, Microsfoft says Silverlight on Android is very possible. On the iPhone, hard to say, Apple is weird about such things.
AOL recently created a RIA version of it's email client in Silverlight. Looks nice and there's no Javascript errors to worry about. From a developer standpoint, that's huge.
I'm trying to determine what kinds of interactions a mobile website can handle. For example, I obviously can't track page-level dragging operations because this scrolls on mobile browsers. So, I'm looking for demos that can tell me what interactions work, how well, and hopefully for information about how consistently that is across mobile devices. For example, I'd like to know if I had a page that fit on the screen, would my page elements receive mouse move events when I drag my finger? I could test that myself, but I figure there are probably lots of things that could be tested, so I was hoping there was something like the ACID test, but for mobile UI interactions.
I don't think I've ever seen such a thing, but the thing to remember is the browser is just one key factor in the interaction between your application and the user. The capabilities of the device itself is a large part of what you can and cannot do. For one, the iPhone has a full JavaScript stack and CSS rendering ability as well as the ability to "click". However, on a BlackBerry you're going to lose a lot of that CSS and JavaScript functionality. Also, with Nokia handsets you're going to be dealing with a different beast. The best way to develop for something like this would be to either use a framework/device template like the ASP.NET Mobile platform, or to go as close to basic HTML as you can.
There is no silver bullet, and you're just going to have to try to cover as much market share as you can. One thing I can share, is that the more standards compliant and semantic your markup, the better it will render across the devices. Sometimes, you can even get away with just coding the site once provided your site degrades well when CSS and JS are not available.