Browser Sniffing on the Mobile Web

Browser sniffing holds a level of stigma in the web development/design world, as we have been spending years and years creating cross-platform, cross-browser sites that use more robust techniques of singling out browsers, rendering engines, or platforms as a last resort through our knowledge of what's supported - CSS conditional comments, JS object detection, and various tricks and (if needed) hacks both client and server side. It has long been our practice to create a solid separation of presentation, content, and functionality in a way that degraded gracefully (or more recently, progressively enhanced).

This has worked well on the desktop platform, from desktop workstations to notebooks to tablets.

The Age of Rich Mobile Computing

So the question becomes, what to do with the mobile platform. For years, there have been very basic mobile-specific pages for basic phones with tiny viewports and browsers that couldn't handle much more beyond HTML, with notable omissions of support in areas like CSS and Javascript.

But ever since the iPhone brought fully-featured mobile browsers to the mainstream, there has been this huge trend of companies creating iPhone-tailored sites designed for the width of their viewports, and guaranteed to work on W3C standards-compliant browsers, including Webkit-based ones like MobileSafari, and soon after the ones on the Android and webOS platforms, which currently also have devices with similar viewports. Consequently, these iPhone-tailored sites generally automatically work well with most modern smartphones with full browsers, effectively creating a second tier of mobile sites for smartphones.

For the iPhone initially, it seemed both sensible and insensible simultaneously that people were creating sites that fixed themselves to a specific viewport width. One of the great abilities of MobileSafari on the iPhone was that zooming on small screens was finally easy with the pinch gestures, so coupled with the full HTML/CSS/JS browser, there would be little reason not to experience the same full website used on the desktop platform. Even considering this, however, people still designed sites that negated the pinch zooming.

Still, with a smartphone version of the site, you would ideally be served the same information you need in a way that didn't require any zooming at all, because the user is still otherwise pinching his way into a zoomed out preview of the page that he can't initially read. But sometimes smartphone sites aren't thought out as well, and information or features end up missing.

In some cases though, desktop versions of sites are so mobile-unfriendly (Facebook desktop site) that we pretty much have to rely on mobile sites or native applications to access them on mobile devices.

But there's a lingering question that we may all face in the coming years - at what point is a device considered a "mobile" device and not a desktop computing device?

Drawing the Line at "Mobile"

In late 2008, I had this discussion in an iPhone development forum where I wanted to know how to allow a user to use a link to exit a mobile page back to the full desktop site, without cookies and without having the desktop site's mobile browser detection causing an infinite cycle between the desktop and mobile sites. In other words, just as many sites were doing, I was automatically directing all appropriate mobile devices to the mobile site, but wanted to offer an option to return and remain at the original version.

We came up with a solution, but not before having a heated discussion over whether browser sniffing on the mobile platform was a forgivable exception. My point was that most phones beyond the iPhone did not possess easy pinch zooming, and magnifying with a trackball one square block at a time was not a pleasant experience. Beyond that, there were functions most mobile devices could not yet handle so smoothly, such as click and drag, and general mobile-specific features like data detection (phone numbers, addresses for maps, etc).

But the best counter argument I heard that makes me reconsider is that the line between desktop and mobile computing is not as clearly defined as we think, especially if you think about the smaller 7" netbooks in the middle of the spectrum with screen resolutions in the 800x480 pixels.

It's possible this gap could shorten and fill over time with in-the-middle devices like these and other devices with smaller resolutions. For comparison, the iPhone family of devices sports a 3.5" 480x320 pixels screen.

It's also possible this gap might remain as sparse as it is today, if we assume that the 7" netbooks are roughly the smallest non-niche form factor the mainstream is willing to bear on a desktop platform with a two-handed QWERTY keyboard, and that today's smartphones with thumb-based QWERTY keyboards (hard and touch-based) are in the upper bound for mobile to remain pocket-friendly.

Ideally, we do want our fluid layout pages to scale down well to the current mobile category of devices, and not to serve and maintain special mobile versions of our sites. As it stands, the gap still holds, and for the sake of the user experience in the present day, this is how many of us will approach it. We'll see where the future takes us from there.

The Global Inbox versus the Distinct Inboxes

When it comes to organizing multiple accounts on an email client, there are two major approaches - one is to send them all to a shared inbox, generally called a global inbox. How emails get filtered or sorted at that point varies, whether by folders or by labels. The other approach is to keep separate inboxes and sent/outbox/junk/trash folders for each mail account set up in the application.

Most desktop email clients offer the option of both inboxes global and separate, but it gets trickier with the constraints of the small viewports on mobile screens.

The way the iPhone OS has been doing it these past couple years seems to be consistent with the way the original iPods menus were done - you start a root level menu, and drill your way down (visually to the right) until you reach the level you wanted to visit. For example, on the original iPods, playing a song from the main screen involved: Music > Artists > Jack Johnson > All Songs > Upside Down, and going back (up one level) was done by the menu button (or the equivalent home button on the iPhone OS devices).

This was part of the foundation of the famed ease-of-use menu/clickwheel navigation of the iPods, and to the extent of the menu/home UI breadcrumbs, the iPhones and iPod touches. However, for tasks where switching quickly between two children-level items, heavily nested levels can hinder that. For example, one classic task is to switch between folders in two separate email accounts. From the first inbox, this requires going back two levels up emailone@someprovider.com > Accounts > emailtoo@someprovider.com > Inbox. That's four steps.



Now try this on the Palm Pre's webOS. For those maintaining separate inboxes, the accounts are listed in collapsed folder lists, so if both accounts's lists weren't expanded already, two taps for expanding both are required, after which both inboxes are just a scroll away from each other, and one tap for going back to the accounts list. If that's not enough, this mail client allows adding folders from various mail accounts into a global favorites list on the accounts list page, reducing even the need for a scroll.



The fact that there's a global inbox view while preserving the separate nature of the accounts ("All inboxes" on webOS) is a huge side perk, and actually excels beyond what many desktop applications offer. This is a shining example of a solid mail client implementation for both global/distinct inbox camps that scales well onto the mobile platform.

The Case for Too Many Mobile Apps

One point of contention with my usage of the iPhone is that I'm one of those people with so many apps, to the point of reaching the nine screens limit characteristic of the OS prior to the version 3.0 release last week.

One of the common rhetorical questions laid about before me was whether I actually use all the applications on my smartphone. This is a fair question, and the answer remains that it indeed comes down to a handful of applications I can honestly categorize under frequent usage.

The Desktop Analogy and Occasional Use

But that's the thing - frequency of use. Users like myself like to treat their smartphones more as portable computers than just powerful phones. That is, people like me want all the occasional-use applications on the phone, just in case. It would be analogous to the myriad of applications installed on a Windows, Mac, or Linux desktop environment. I may not burn DVDs or CDs on a daily basis, but I'm not going to reinstall Nero Burning ROM every other month for each time I need to burn an optical disc. Likewise, I'm not going to reinstall an ATM Hunter app or Starmap app every time I occasionally need it.

The last thing a user wants to do the moment a task needs to be done is to install and configure settings. (In general, desktop software and mobile apps lose some or all customizations and data upon removal.) Essentially, it's all about the convenience of having the tools and resources you need available to you, even if you only use them once in a while.

It can seem overwhelming to an observer seeing a user swipe across eight or nine screens of apps on an iPhone, and it's certainly valid that it can look like a random mess. It requires relying on memory of where a particular app sits (turns out to be easy for the primary user, but slower for guest users), as well as reorganization of their icon order on the pages. For example, there seems to be this trend of people sorting by a gradient of usage frequency, with the most used apps on the home screen, and gradually sorted towards the least used apps on the last screens.

Search versus Browse, and Low-Use Applications

In the case of this phone, there's no function to sort all apps by name or any attribute, but the default behavior is that any new app gets placed at the end, or in the first gap on a screen's icon grid. That effectively sorts by last added. If you're installing all applications in a huge batch, such as if syncing for the very first time with apps all sync-ready in iTunes, then they install in alphabetical order by name. Beyond that though, it's all manual sorting.

So when version 3.0 released with its Spotlight global search feature and removal of the cap on number of apps, the iPhone OS seemed to step closer to this desktop computing behavior. The search versus browse mentality is very much like the live global search on a desktop platform, such as with Spotlight on the OS X menu bar and Windows Search in the Windows Vista/7 taskbar. You still browse for applications (and anything else from emails to calendar events), but for anything further out of reach, such as low-usage applications, the search part of the hybrid system comes in handy.

Linear Browsing versus Planar Browsing

It's also worth noting that another suggestion I've come across is to allow vertical swipes for vertical pages/screens, whereas the iPhone OS maintains a horizontal row of pages that only move left and right, with dot indicators at the bottom to show the current position. This is a linear approach. It has its cons, but it's arguably easier to keep track. Typically, most other phones offer a single tall vertical page with scrolling for all applications, and movement is also linear, with the scrollbar being the indicator of position.

The Palm Pre takes a different approach with a grid of screens of icon grids. This could potentially mean less swipes when browsing, provided the user can keep track of position. There are stick indicators showing where you are on the grid. This remotely like organizing by workspaces in Linux or Spaces in OS X, and its only limit is how much the user can remember about the position of a specific app in a cartesian plane instead of a linear. The question then becomes what the threshold is for how much we can handle - 2x2, 3x3, 4x4? Will a user remember that the Pandora app was on the Marsha part of the Brady Bunch grid? Or was it the Cindy part of the grid? We risk confusion, but it's an expense for the gain of quicker movement on a 2D plane. In some ways, this kind of planar browsing is much like that of desktop computing, except with a much more limited screen size to do it, so we'll see how that plays out.

Convergence

For years and years, people and the media alike have been talking about the convergence of many different kinds of devices into one, for better or worse. In the case of the mobile devices, its evolution towards becoming more desktop-like is one part of this continual convergence, not necessarily towards one single device for all, but certainly towards the further blurring of the lines between them all.

Blast from the Past: Oversights in the Motorola Razr V3 Interface

Before any organized effort like Bleuprints, I wrote these scattered design muses under the label "blurbs".
Here is one I wrote in 2007, towards the end of my experience with the Motorola Razr V3, and prior to owning the Razr V3xx (a future device that would finally fix some of the issues I mentioned). The iPhone solved many of the gripes I had with mobile phone UI's in general, which was largely why I loved it so much. Its announcement prompted me to write out what had been frustrating me about the status quo during my ownership of the Razr's.

"Oversights in the Motorola Razr V3 Interface"
August 3, 2007, from yours truly, Gordon

The following are some highlighted interface oversights I noticed when I first got the now widespread Motorola Razr V3 back in 2005. I've upgraded my firmware multiple times with the hope that perhaps Moto developers had addressed these issues since then, but to no avail. I've contacted Motorola directly, and they respond as though they don't see these as shortcomings.

Why is this important? Well, first off, Motorola clearly isn't listening, and hasn't provided easy feedback channels to their developers, and that's a shame because the shape of this anodized aluminum exterior and its keypad design are absolutely gorgeous. Yet more importantly, this mobile operating system appears to be used on most other Motorola phones, like the clamshell V551 that my sister owns.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Above: Clock hidden from view during phone call

During a phone call, someone might ask you if you can meet them at 4pm. You check down at your phone, your sole time piece nowadays, only to discover that the "Calling" half-screen is blocking the clock from view. Yet Motorola does not allow you the option to move the clock anywhere beyond the lower right hand corner. With all that space at the top, they could have allowed the time to be positioned anywhere at the top, where the date currently sits.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4

Above and Below: Inconsistency - Inability to rename pictures in viewing mode menu

You've taken some photos with your camera phone, and you want to name them. Yet sometimes the tiny thumbnails in the main pictures gallery (Fig. 3) are unidentifiable for naming, so you select a picture and "View". Now that it's clearer what this photo was (Fig. 5), you access this individual photo's menu (Fig. 6), only to realize that there's no "Rename" option. In order to name this photo, you must select "Back" twice, access the menu, and rename from this main menu (Fig. 4). That's two extra steps every time. If you're naming the last ten photos you just took, that amounts to a lot of wasted time and finger movements.

Fig. 5

Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Above: Extra steps in saving freshly taken camera pics

Every time you've just snapped a photo with your camera phone, a screen (Fig. 7) pops up asking whether you want to "Store" or "Discard". This decision has some logic behind it, because you'd want to discard bad takes immediately. Some cameraphones prefer to save your snapshot right away and let you decide how to use it later, such as with Nokia. That way, you won't lose your snapshot if someone happens to call you right as you're trying to save it. Saving is not even a one-step process because Motorola assumes that you want to send every photo you take in a text/e-mail message. So to save a photo, you must "Store", arrow down to "Store In". If it's a passing moment you're trying to capture, you can forget about making the subsequent shots in time. Or let's take it up another level - about half the people I see on vacation snap photos with their phones. Imagine if you asked someone to take a photo of you, and then you wanted the conventional "one more" shot. Unless they're familiar with this Motorola interface, you're in for some extra minor hassles - "Did I take it? How do I save this?".


Exterior: Gorgeous and well thought-out

Quirks in the interface aside, this device's innards are housed in a slim exterior (finally, reduced pocket bulge), an anodized aluminum surface like the iPod Mini and iPod Nano 2G (finally, grease resistance and easier to the touch), no bulgy stick antenna on the top (finally built in as part of the look on the bottom), and a styled keypad (notice the consistent typeface usage, the green button symbolizing "talk" with a telephone icon with an emanating wave of talk, and the red button symbolizing "off" with the hung-up handset resting on the body of the phone), to name a few. Sure, there are a few decision quirks on the exterior end as well, such as the "Internet" key, which most people would find less useful than a "camera" key (later adopted on other Razr models). You can tell that the designers behind this weren't sloppy with the curves, as you can tell by how how neatly and naturally all the lines sweep and come together at the hinges/camera and battery door, and the between the top lid and bottom antenna. Nothing juts out, not even the integrated loop for string-attached decorations. This was the phone that melted away my original perception of the flip phone as a bulky, generic grease magnet of gray boredom, and I thank you Motorola for getting that part right. Now about that interface...