My latest work assignment is a major technical and product revision of hemmings.com, the web presence Hemmings Motor News’ excellent automotive magazines.

As a warm-up to the project I worked with Hemmings’ developer, Jeremy Meerwarth, to create a simple mobile-viewable version of the site. The majority of the current site usage consists of people viewing Hemmings’ premium classified ads so our initial approach was to satisfy the need for a basic mobile-viewable classified ad. In this scenario we were considering a probable entry point of a “Share this ad” email or Facebook post. A user shows up on a classified display page, we detect user-agent and render the mobile page as needed. We knocked this out in a day with some simplified templates and they looked fine. This is great if someone shares a classified ad by email or social media but otherwise it’s an isolated page with no way to navigate and explore other content.

Creating a navigable mobile classified site with multiple entry points was a different problem altogether.

Initially we explored how to modify the site’s main templates to send the site into a mobile template ‘mode’ via user-agent detection. Light prototyping here showed this to be a trainwreck of dependencies. All of the content on the site was formatted for a 960px viewable screen width. The nested conditional spaghetti needed to accomplish merging the mobile site into the main site was way out of scope – and it felt wrong.

Our conclusion was that we needed to send mobile user agents to their very own version of the site (a typical approach across the web). Through Apache’s mod_rewrite we can detect mobile user agents and send them to our sub-site and use some easy cookie checking to let people jump to the full site as needed. Now that we were working with a blank slate we started looking for formatting and design options and any libraries that might help us.

Enter IUI – originally developed by Joe Hewitt to solve the exact same problem we were facing. It’s a lightweight javascript dispatcher pattern that uses styles to transform simple divs and lists into a user experience nearly indistinguishable from iPhone app design conventions. Animated navigation and mobile-friendly design and readability are built-in and the ramp-up time was less than one day.

The resulting site allows users to navigate from a stripped-down home page to search and browse classifieds with a familiar iPhone-like user-experience. The amount of nesting and navigation needed  leaves something to be desired but this app is so fast, loading only div content via ajax rather than refreshing the whole page, that load times are acceptable even on Edge networks. We could definitely use some polish but the bones are solid and it looks and feels great on any webkit mobile browser. Huge props to the maintainers of this code, it helped us produce something very polished in a brief period of time. Check it out.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mobile Media

Media companies are now focusing heavily on mobile content distribution and looking for new revenue models on mobile devices. Understanding the unique opportunities and constraints of this medium isn’t exactly intuitive. The device landscape and trends seem to change bimonthly  and there isn’t a ‘no-brainer’ template for companies to adopt and invest in. Everyone just has to jump in the water and start swimming or be left behind. New business models, design patterns and user interactions are all still being sorted out in this evolutionary process.

What makes mobile application usability different from the traditional website equivalent? In short: small screen, limited input devices, and infinite variability of social and environmental contexts encountered by mobile users. You can’t regurgitate your website onto a small screen and call it a day, you have to give some thought to the wants and needs of a user are as they pull their mobile device out of their pocket and open your app to interact with your brand. You have to evaluate what makes your brand special in the mobile context and play to those strengths with a polished and easy-to-use application. “Usability” has lately catapulted into a long-deserved limelight role in product creation. The promotion of usability has created a new vocabulary for customers to differentiate “good” software and it can no longer be a secondary consideration.

So what attributes make a news media company’s application truly excellent and usable?

Read the rest of this entry »

This was a paper for Randolph Bias’ usability class at University of Texas School of information.
It’s a very light look at mobile usability considerations in mobile contexts.

Recently, revolutionary devices such as Apple’s iPhone and the Palm Pre have illustrated how important usability is in creating distinction in an otherwise commoditized marketplace of mobile devices. Studies have shown that in terms of barriers to users’ acceptance of mobile computing applications, usability is second only to security (Casper & Gonsalves, 2005). The emerging consideration of mobile usability is a topic deserving focused attention.

Mobile usability diverges from other usability interaction research in a couple of important areas. In this whitepaper I will address the interactive limitations of small-form factor devices as well as the challenges posed in creating viable research methods for devices used in many different environmental and social contexts. Read the rest of this entry »

Sorry for the sensational title – I had an IA class assignment to critique the homepage of a website I find useful and this title looked great on my opening powerpoint slide. After receiving the assignment I decided I would search for a site to critique while doing my daily laps of the internet. I found a lot of junk but most of it was too boring to criticize. Coincidentally a recent violent hailstorm in Austin piqued me to go look in classifieds for deals on nice cars with hail damage. I pulled up Craiglist and my UX disaster klaxon went off! Paydirt

We all know that Craigslist is one of the great class acts on the internet. They helped me sell my dusty treadmill for 40% of retail and scored me a dedicated beer fridge for $40, delivered. Very efficient. Besides that they’ve also stuck to their original plan and avoided the temptation of overt or even reasonable monetization. They’ve kept their old-school internet design intact, wrangled 2.6% of the traffic on the internet and helped millions of people and things find each other –  all while slowly destroying the newspaper industry’s classified revenue models.

Read the rest of this entry »

The group I work with is a technology incubator group within a larger company. We are tasked with making new products with revenue roadmaps but we  also consider ourselves as a testbed for new technology that can be spun off and used by other divisions.

When it came time to decide our hosting model for our shiny new business information platform EC2 was just really hitting a tipping point in terms of reliability. In this case tipping point means there was about a year of data showing the service works as advertised and there was a shortage of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt hanging over the thing. Our project was complicated but finite with a modern API design so it was a good demo for this. I did some testing and talked with smarter-than-me peers and decided it was stable enough to run with. We examined it from a business perspective and came up with hedge logic that “if for some reason we don’t think it will work then we just move it on to local unix boxes – nothing lost”.

Read the rest of this entry »