Designing for future technology

[Drwyd]

Hmm I'm not sure I would agree with him/her. That's like saying all books should have lots of pictures and few words. Whilst that would be fine for children's books it would not work for all. I imagine the reduction of average time on site has a lot to do with how much rubbish there is out there and people are adapting their ways to quickly sort the wheat from the chaff.

To continue the book analogy, what do you do when you are browsing for a book in a library ? You look at the cover, title, back, read the preface, table of contents, flick through and get a feel for the pitch and style. At all points you are assessing the book and working out if it is worth your time and effort. If it, at any time, fails this test you put the book back on the shelf. With a site you have just seconds to convince the visitor that it is worth progressing to the next step and as long as you keep delivering the goods at each stage then the depth and complexity is immaterial. They will only leave once they have found what they want or you run out of content. Define your target and build your site/page just for them.

[Cloud]

I'm partly in agreement with the lecturer as I recently created a website with a photo driven navigation bar ( http://www.theheadmasterbradford.com/) and this is very quick and easy to use on a phone, but I also have a smaller navigation bar as well. I believe that above the fold is very important, the home page should have information on what you do and a call to action, and cater to people with a 5 second attention span. Also remember that the landing page from google is not always the home page. If someone lands on a secondary page they must still be a call to action somewhere above the fold.

And no to contradict myself. How many people have iphones and ipads compared to people who have laptops and desktops? I think we are getting ahead of ourselves, there are designers who are designing sites more for portable devices than personal computers because they want to be seen to be designing for future technology, according to my google analytics for my site less than 6% of visitors are from phones and ipads. We need to stop buying into the hype.

[xtom]

I actually read this post on my phone sitting in the living room. I find in the last year or so I'm using mobile technology more and more for web browsing, even at home. It's so convenient and comfortable to just pull out my android phone or tablet, much more so than even using my laptop or netbook. It's great for general browsing, reading forums etc. but if I want to participate/interact more with a website I still prefer to use my laptop with real keyboard and mouse. So all my forum posting, online ordering etc. is done mostly on laptop at home. This is just my experience though, and a new age of internet users might be just as happy to do all of this on a mobile device like there phone, and maybe I will too some day soon. I think it makes sense to bear this in mind when designing a website these days.

I just had a quick look over a few of my site stats and mobile usage varies between 3% to 13% from site to site. I think this will increase quite a bit more as smart phones and tablets become more common. Right now there's a ton of people around the world using older phones with crappy browsers, when that old tech phases out and people move to newer phones with better browsers the numbers will go up.

According to statcounter mobile internet usage is doubling year on year...
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobi...g-year-on-year

[Drwyd]

Just checked my stats. Tablets and phones around 6.78% with IPad accounting for 3.22% of that.

I'm not worried yet but eventually I can see myself building three versions of style sheet. One each for lap/desktops tablets and phones.

Doing this in Xara wont be easy

[gwpriester]

Abi

One thing I have learned over the years is everyone has an opinion and most people are partially right.

Too many websites are crammed with way too much stuff. Too much blather.

But I do not think you can be so general. Some sites require more explanation than others. Some lend themselves to pictures and others lend themselves more to words. Though visual aids are never a bad thing. If they are appropriate. And if they help to communicate your point.

A website for a lawyer or an accountancy site that is all photos would not provide much information. How do you do a case history in pictures? Charts or graphs or happy smiling people. But you still need good, clear and well crafted copy to fill in the blanks.

I believe you have to ask yourself as a designer, what is the product or service I am designing this site for? What will visitors be looking for when she or he visits the site. And how can I in the most direct manner possible, make it easy for him or her to find the content he or she is looking for, and how can I let these visitors contact the site owner.

[jeb]

Interesting -

But is not the reason for so much text (content) on sites these days the direct result of Googles change to their search engine which relies so much on that content? For some period of time now, content has been the main ladder to the top of Googles heap. - jb