➤ Don’t Dick Me Around
I like mobile devices for the same reason I like viewing mobile sites on the desktop which is the same reason that I like native clients over web experiences: there’s no room to dick your users around.
When I open up the AP News mobile app, I know I will see news content. No intercepts, no obtrusive ads, and no noise around the article — not even other featured articles. It’s an experience that respects my time due to the massive array of constraints it has to work with: bandwidth (a.k.a. my data plan), screen size, CPU speeds, lack of multitasking (or at least the awkwardness of it on a mobile device), etc. etc.. Not to mention where and when I choose to use it, too.
Desktops/laptops have become so powerful, and bandwidth so plentiful, that most people forget how to create satisfying optimized experiences. Mobile designers haven’t forgotten because they’re still hungry — they have to think hard about all the principles of interactivity because the platform is less forgiving. Desktop designers are more willing to let certain optimizations slip by because users “can just {do something else} instead.” But there are still constraints with desktops — WCAG, privacy, re: the “library scenario” — that many designers just don’t want to deal with.
It’s the constraints that matter, and what separates a craftsman from just an artist. I worked through the transition of the dot-com bust, and it was the artists that changed mediums, and the craftsmen that stuck around and slogged through the recovery. Some people want to just make “cool” (sometimes called “engaging”) experiences online, and others want to deeply explore the boundaries of the medium, its barriers and limits, its appropriateness and efficiencies, its strengths and weaknesses. The true believers understand the potential and implications of semantic markup and browser agnosticism. The others choose to do something in Flash because Adobe says it has 98% browser penetration.
When I see a site like Tumblr, I can tell these guys “get it,” because their main page isn’t that different for a mobile version. In fact, it’s the same page with only a tweaked font-size. I don’t have to look for a mobile version of their site to load on the desktop because it’s just as focused (same with Google, Twitter and others).
I can tell who doesn’t “get it,” like Silicon Alley Insider when it said that Tumblr hasn’t done much with its investment money because it has only seen “small design tweaks,” there’s no obvious revenue model, and well, it just doesn’t look like anything’s changed. It is, however, deeply optimized in its use cases, accessible in increasingly different ways (via IM, email and hell, even telephone for audio posts), and no one has ever had any revolting performance issues with the product. Perhaps its streamlined experience, rock- solid reliability and eye on highlighting fun and amazing content is why it “crossed 50m visitors last month, hitting 800k posts a day and blowing the doors off” according to its President.
But I suppose it could have thrown in some roadblock ads, a bunch of content cruft around the edges, and a few Flash movies to boot. (If it wanted to dick its users around.)
