Mobile

I want to go back to the 1950s of Web Development

October 5, 2016 Leave a Comment

These posts hit a nerve across the community.

Some violently agree, and others argue that diversity is good and that life isn’t that bad!

I find that there is truth to both sides, and it reminds me of folk who talk about the golden era of the 1950s in the US. It isn’t hard to look at the current political climate and long for another time. Remember the white picket fences? Life was so good! Those glasses sure are rosy though, and when you take them off you see a society that had huge problems, some of which we have made important progress with even though we can see that we have a long way to go. Is 2016 really so bad when you look at the data?

There was a time in which we could develop for the desktop browser and reach our users. It was a great time, especially if we put those glasses back on. There was some level of simplicity that was very useful, but what about the fact that:

As great as the reach of the desktop web was then, it is a FRACTION of who we can reach globally today
We couldn’t bring the Web with us wherever we went, we had to go plug into the matrix like battery sucking animals
The browser capabilities were weak, and thus many of the experiences were also far inferior to what we have today. Remember when we were pioneering desktop web apps and the pain we had to go through to make something great across the variable browsers?

The problems that we have to solve now are far broader and the UX bar is much higher. We now have a vast array of form factors and capabilities to deal with and all of this change has happened while we pivot an underlying browser platform that was built for very different purposes.

It has always been hard to do complex experiences on the Web. When I use the frameworks of today, while I understand that there is a paradox of choice, I also feel so grateful.

If I could show Dion Of Web Past time travel debugging, with real user errors coming in that I can capture and clone a version of that world and see what was going on…. opening up Chrome DevTools to see rich information to debug?

We went from throwing up some code to a few servers that we monitored, to a mature world where we have a deep understanding of scaling, A/B testing, rich monitoring, and progressive primitives to allow us to improve our experience using all of the capabilities available to us.

The parts that resonate with me though are still there:

The getting started experience is too hard.
Going from prototype to production involved a lot of work, littered with choices.
The system is evolving quickly under you, with layers upon layers.
It needs to be easier to make performant UI.
Having something work well on mobile, especially mobile for the next billion users, takes an immense amount of work.

We need to work together as a community to attack these issues and up level us all so we can be productive at meeting “what’s possible”. We are still going through the growing pains of mobile on the Web so it makes sense that there is still much to do across the board.

We need to violently debate as a community, but we also need to push each other here as we can’t wait for one person to make the Web great again, and sometimes I wonder when I see certain storms…. are we missing something bigger?

Ode to the Desktop

September 23, 2016 Leave a Comment

I feel a lil bad for Desktop. As soon as it’s younger brother, Mobile, came on the scene everyone has been fawning over how quickly it has grown and how many friends it has. I can see why, but there are many things to like about the older brother too.

I ran an experiment where I worked and lived for a week without using my laptop at all. At first I was impressed at the fact that I could do my job this way, and the level of access and capability, but by the end of the week I felt different. I learned that:

I got very tired of using mobile input

Keyboard have gotten better, but it is still far from the same experience as typing on a large computer keyboard. On my laptop the words keep up with my thoughts and I don’t even have to think about it. On my keyboard this is far from the case and I spend more time in corrections mode.

This has an obvious effect on the content. Everything is shortened. It can work somewhat fine in chat, and writing a to-the-point email can be a feature, but I would sometimes take a short cut and not put down everything that I needed too.

And then it comes to writing something like this post. Long form. It compounds. It isn’t just getting content down, but also manipulating it. Moving around ideas has so much more friction that you sometimes give in and just don’t do it. You stop improving.

I got tired of the small screen

The smaller screen wasn’t as big of an issue for me as the input challenges, but it did cause problems. As I laid out ideas I was able to make the space to do so. I felt constrained, and a little akin to my early augmented reality experiences where the field of view was such that you have to move your head around in a fog of war.

One interesting side effect was that I cheated at times, and moved to pen and paper for some of my organization of thought activities.

I consumed more and created less

This was really troubling. I found that my ratio of creation vs. consumption time changed. The extra friction on the creative side changed the types of behaviors. I would find that I would sometimes play tricks on myself: “Instead of coding on that, I will watch the tech video!”

I have noticed this in general with mobile and technology and it concerns me. When I look at “screen time” with my kids I try hard to understand that all screen time isn’t equal. It is very different watching my son create a world vs. watching someone talk about their world on YouTube.

This will cause me to plug my phone in more, and actually spend more time on my laptop. I know that I should have a “no tech in the bedroom” policy, but I find that hard, so I tried “only the laptop in the bedroom” and found that I got more productive work done, and when done I could then get to sleep!

When all was said and done, I found myself irritable at the entire experience.

Rebalancing the force

As an industry we have undervalued the desktop. It is easy to see why we would do this though. When something new comes along, and something as revolutionary as mobile, you see a rush.

Picture sands of engagement falling down, and a machine splits it up so a percentage goes left to desktop and right to mobile. At the very beginning mobile was a small percentage but it ramped up quickly. As you watch this you have to wonder: where will this end? Will desktop be totally eclipsed and be driven to ~0? What is the point of equilibrium?

We rushed to build mobile experiences so we could capture the engagement, rightfully so. At this point I think we are at an interesting point in time where we can see where things are potentially settling. Now that we have cross device experiences in the market we can compare our usage and make smarter guesses on where we are going from here (and thus where the investment is).

When you ramp up from zero it is easy to think that the younger will run away with things, that TV will totally eclipse radio. Sometimes we are truly onto something new and that happens (ham radio, headphone jacks ;)) but it isn’t always the case.

It seems somewhat obvious that we will get to a world where the various input and output modes will be separable. Right now we tend to group “laptop” with: larger screen, keyboard, mouse-y thing, and we group “mobile” with: touch and really the more fluffy capability that is “always close to human”. Capabilities such as voice and location appear on both. and touch even appears on laptop screens.

Library Computer Access/Retrieval System (LCARS), the OS for the Enterprise

It seems obvious because we have seen it in sci-fi such as Star Trek, and we are to a point where it has shown up in our lives at various stages of completeness.

Progressive on the desktop

So, while I look forward to a future where technology doesn’t get in the way, and creativity can blossom even more, I also remember the role of the desktop. Imagine a world where we take a mobile device and give it a larger screen and extra input methods? That seems like something quite useful, especially for actually getting stuff done.

If your business revolves around bite size consumption that is one thing, but if needs more, and if you want users to engage in complex ways, here’s to pushing the boundaries on great desktop experiences.

We often focus on mobile when we think about Progressive Web Apps. A lot of the core technology was required to bring the Web up to snuff in the constrained world of mobile. The foundational tech has been created in a way that it also offers much value on the desktop. I see a lot of people pushing their experiences with service workers and friends, and I think there is much room to have the desktop browsers do more to surface PWA functionality (e.g. “add to home screen”).

I also applaud Microsoft for the work they are doing on the desktop, including the support for PWAs in their desktop store.

It’s Friday, so tonight I will raise a drink to the Desktop’s out there.

Expectations

September 6, 2016 Leave a Comment

Someone sits looking at their home screen and goes to push on an app icon. What do they expect to happen?

Congrats to the housing team on their new pwa!

That seems pretty obvious. They expect the app to load quickly and get them into a reliable experience.

But you quickly get caught on the particular context:

Did the user just add this to the home screen and has expectations on how it is “the same” as the browser version?
e.g. “I have added mobile twitter to the home screen because I prefer that experience”
Is the user coming back to this after several months and just wants “something that feels right”?
Does the user want a URL bar at the top, or accessible?
Jeremy Keith and other users may want one, but many will not
Does the user experience this service on desktop and beyond? Do they feel connected and understandable?
Is this a brand where the user has a lot of engagement and understands that context vs. ending up on a new site where they prefer to fast track through “this is how I buy something, and this site maps to that mental model?”
If the experience was launched via a URL vs. tapping on the icon what would the user want to see?
…

How the user has been trained by their usage (both in general, and by this service) will greatly change their expectations. If the app hasn’t worked well offline in the past the user may know that and not even go to launch it when in a spotty area. I find myself doing this all the time. For example, I would record into the default notes app and then transcribe over to the other app later. I don’t do that for “web” apps, I do it for any app that has been flaky for me. E.g. Asana used to not work well offline, but it has since been fixed, and I am building up trust to go directly to it.

As you watch people using apps there is a complicated set of expectations at play, and many of these are changing.

The platform is adding new behaviors and ways of working that apps need to consider (it is somewhat obvious that core capability such as being able to manage a PWA vs. a “native” app should be unified)
The developer needs to both add capability and also nudge users when appropriate (e.g. how early offline capable web apps are more explicit about their connectivity)
The user keeps changing and learning.

One thing users aren’t doing when they go to tap on the icon is think “I wonder what technology is used to build this app?” They care about output vs. input. Does it feel good for them and solve their problems. Is it fast enough and accessible.

As a community we are working on the challenges of new platforms and the fact that users are coming to us from many angles. We have browsers and apps and bots and various screens and on and on. We engage with these services in different ways and from different entry points. Tapping on a home screen icon is one of them, but launching via links, or push notifications, or voice may vastly out number that method.

Thus, it is interesting to read the thoughts of Jeremy or Owen or Jason (who has been going very deep!).

As we see the platforms that users use evolve, and as we see more PWAs shipping, it will be fascinating to experiment and see what works well and what doesn’t.

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