See your site like the rest of the world does. On the Nokia X2-01

http://generatedcontent.org/post/31441135779/mobileweb-row

by gulbrandr • 14 years ago

80 32 14 years ago

If you care about keeping the World in WWW, and ensuring the content you create is accessible to all, then it will be a reality for you as well. ... If you publish information on the Web, I can’t encourage you enough to try design your site with these devices in mind.

The idealist in me (especially circa 2004 when I had Wikipedia-mania) wants to agree.

It depends on what the goals of a site are. Is it Wikipedia? Yes, it should absolutely look good on 128x160 screens.

Is it a business? Well, then it depends on who your customers are. If your customers are worldwide and from a diversity of economic circumstances, yes, design for the small screen. But if you can reasonably assume that most of your customers use desktops, laptops, high-end smartphones, or tablets, then I don't think it needs to be high on your list of priorities.

buro92• 14 years ago

If you really want to make your content available in Africa, make it accessible via SMS.

zachalexander3• 14 years ago

Yes, taking it even further!

And I find that discussion totally exciting, for websites where it's relevant. I just think it's silly to make this kind of thing (postage stamp screens or SMS availability) a norm for every website in existence ever.

davycro6• 14 years ago

Nah, make it available through a browser. For pre-paid users, SMS costs far more then data which is why WhatsApp is so popular in the developing world.

soneill• 14 years ago

Agreed, it's really a Know Your Market situation. I think most business start-ups (that aren't mobile oriented) can reasonably assume that their customers won't be using those kind of devices, and don't need to design with that in mind. No reason to waste money designing for a market you're not planning on competing in.

davycro6• 14 years ago

I agree with your points. However, I think that this market is underserved and ripe for some form of profitable innovation.

notatoad• 14 years ago

>If you care about... ensuring the content you create is accessible to all

why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all? The content on my website would have no relevance to somebody browsing in africa or asia. Furthermore, despite the fact that small-screen phones with web browsers exist, that doesn't mean that people actually use them to browse the web. I'm not going to waste time and energy targeting a browser that there's approximately 0.00001% of somebody actually viewing my site with. and it's not like the prevalence of 100px-wide screens is increasing.

instakill• 14 years ago

Of course people use them, what a fucking stupid thing to say.

grey-area• 14 years ago

Please try to keep your responses civil and add value; if you disagree, why not tell us why (for example point to some stats for mobile browser usage)?

ktizo2• 14 years ago

I also thought it was a fairly fucking stupid thing to say, but perhaps saying bluntly that it is a fucking stupid thing to say is also a fucking stupid thing to say, given that people often react quite badly to being told that what they are saying is fucking stupid.

Therefore logically, this whole post is also a fucking stupid thing for me to to say, but once I had thought of it I felt compelled to post it anyway, due to a deep love of both recursion and swearing.

robryan• 14 years ago

If you believe sites are missing out by not supporting these phones there would be an untapped market for you to get into.

Personally, running a ecommerce site with low resources, places with high fraud and average shipping support aren't high on our list. So when developing for phones we aren't going to bother with the real low end that is common in these places.

lnanek2• 14 years ago

Even more than that, if you are ad supported, often the ad networks have nothing worthwhile to run in places where these phones are used. If you are freemium in many cases the people using these phones don't tend to spend money on premium features, and certainly are not the rabid buyers that iPhone users with their credit cards already entered and ready to go are on app stores. Sometimes it just doesn't make any sense from a business perspective to adapt a site or an app to cheaper phones or different markets where the profits are not worth the expense.

objclxt• 14 years ago

Often the ad networks for non-Western countries are different, so you really need to look to domain-specific partners.

For example, AdMob may be a great choice for your app in the US and Europe, but a terrible choice for distributing an app in China.

Expect to see more Western ad networks acquiring or partnering region-specific ad providers (I speak from experience, my employer owns both a popular EU/US mobile ad network and one of the larger Chinese networks).

ktizo2• 14 years ago

why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all?

Lots of reasons, depending on what you are doing. You don't have to though, and if you don't care then the advice on that site isn't for you. But that doesn't mean it isn't useful advice.

If I was setting up something like a global payment network, or any other service where accessing people with minimal browsers would be useful, then I would care about it a lot.

davycro6• 14 years ago

> Furthermore, despite the fact that small-screen phones with web browsers exist, that doesn't mean that people actually use them to browse the web.

Actually they do. Over 90% of African's use their mobile phone for internet access. Around 5% of African's have an internet connection and computer. For people in the developing world, a mobile phone is 'good enough'. It provides them will access to email, facebook, and google.

I understand that you do not intend on making your content to African's-- my website has not been optimized for these devices. But, keep in mind that by doing this, both you and I are restricting our content from roughly one billion people.

tagawa• 14 years ago

>why should i care that the content i create is accessible to all?

"The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." - Tim Berners-Lee

hallvors• 14 years ago

So..how do you know that your content will never ever be relevant to for example one of the children in this video? http://my.opera.com/ODIN/blog/2012/09/06/educating-banglades...

ksherlock• 14 years ago

And don't forget all the people still using WAP/WML!

dendory• 14 years ago

It's more than just the lowest end browsers tho. Just take something that's low powered, a couple of years old, and right away you can start seeing sites that slow down. Just on my iPad 1 any time I load a heavily dynamic site nowadays it seems like they load slower and slower. I feel like many sites are becoming bloated just like software did in the 90s.

dm8• 14 years ago

But it won't be like that in 2015. Android is already dominating in developing world. Low-end devices powered by Android is the future. In India for example, maid at my friend's house didn't have mobile phone till 2007. Now she has mobile phone but she wants to buy "smart phone" with few thousand rupees (equivalent of 100 odd USD) and saving money for it. When my friend told me about it, I was stunned.

In the hindsight, it looks like Android was masterstroke from Google. It wiped out MSFT from OS market for handheld devices.

zachalexander3• 14 years ago

Funny how history seems to be repeating itself. Seems like Mac OS vs. Windows all over again, on phones.

To go down that tangent for a minute -- I've been wanting to bounce these thoughts of HN for awhile.

I always heard people argue (when I was a wee lad) that Apple not licensing their OS freely like Microsoft did was a terrible mistake, as proven by their rapidly diminishing market share.

You could argue that, well, they're doing better now, but I wonder if this is a short term aberration. Their recent success seems to have been propelled by their innovation in the mobile space (much as their early desktop success was propelled by... their innovation in the desktop space), but I wonder if history will repeat itself: Apple does well at first, until competitors roughly catch up in terms of features, for cheaper, and with a more thriving market of third-party apps, and more and more people switch to the new platform and Apple's marketshare shrinks.

I'm sure many people have made this observation before, and have much more insight into the situation than I do.

logn• 14 years ago

It's not a fair comparison and never was. Apple makes appliances: the hardware and software. When they let hardware clones into the market they cannibalize their business. Power Computing made great Mac machines and much cheaper than Apple. But Apple didn't want to be outsold on hardware and be reduced to only a software company (like Microsoft). You're right: Google is now the Microsoft in this scenario, the software company (although they're moving into hardware now but we'll see how that goes).

davycro6• 14 years ago

I just spent the last three months developing a mobile app for the South African market and I disagree. In South Africa, Android phones cost USD $200 and higher. I bought a Nokia X2-01 for USD $50. Android phones must drop into the USD $50 range before they will have traction and I am not sure this will be possible.

Moto7451• 14 years ago

I'm not an expert on South African carrier economics but decent to good Android phones do exist in the 70-100 dollar range on prepaid carriers like MetroPCS and Cricket. I'm pretty sure that means a $50 USD android/other smart phone (maybe Firefox OS) wouldn't be too hard to produce. I'm under the assumption that these carriers do provide a small subsidy (even though they're contract free) which may or may not make sense for your country's carriers.

baklava• 14 years ago

This is probably well-intentioned, but a load of crap.

People in third-world countries don't care about the average U.S. site, and if they did, they would find someone with a computer that probably is 5-7 years old, possibly older, therefore they wouldn't be using that resolution.

What will be important, if you do care about them, is speed of load. Unless you are using GWT or other server-side user-agent sniffing to determine what to produce, then unless you have a mobile version of the site that the user probably won't use, then they will more likely than not be slowed down by your CSS3 and Javascript crap, that is- if you really give a shit.

Trying to provide usable news sites, etc. in the remote chance that you are the BBC is one thing, but 99.999999% of the time no one will care that your site looks good on a Nokia X2-01 and similar. They probably will care if it uses Flash and they can't view it on an iPad, or if it uses Java, or if it renders poorly, is hard to navigate, or is just too slow.

Most shouldn't obsess over low resolutions like that, and shouldn't use GWT or other methods of server-side user-agent sniffing to render content. And your CSS3 isn't going to jive with a Nokia X2-01 and the like, so don't even try that.

davycro6• 14 years ago

> People in third-world countries don't care about the average U.S. site, and if they did, they would find someone with a computer that probably is 5-7 years old, possibly older, therefore they wouldn't be using that resolution.

The most popular websites in the developing world are Facebook and Google. American culture is huge in Africa. Africans visit websites with information about American movies, celebrities, and rap music. However, less than 5% of Africans own a computer and of these, few can afford an Internet connection. Over 90% of Africans rely entirely on prepaid mobile phones to access the Internet. They do not use computers. I estimate that a billion or more people are using these devises to browse the Internet.

joahua• 14 years ago

Love this article. As someone who builds mobile websites for a news organization (not the BBC, but prominent in my country) the prospect of properly assessing a website in terms of its global accessiblity is daunting but incredibly exciting.

The 'why should I care' question is writ large in a community of people obsessed with growth and efficiency — but, as much as I appreciate those aspects of HN's culture, assessing site performance on low quality devices provides a great opportunity to reach for the 'universal access' the web promises.

ricardobeat• 14 years ago

None of those phones rank high for sales in Brazil. Despite average income still being low, smartphone sales are skyrocketing (77% up in first-half of 2012).

In addition, most feature-phones these days are actually pretty decent (webkit browsers, > 320x480 res). With S40 and Firefox OS set for growth I think we won't need to worry about the odd ones much longer.

metalruler• 14 years ago

You could also argue that designing for the average phone may be holding others back.

My Nokia N900 has a screen 800px wide, supports CSS, can display inline images, execute flash, execute javascript. Yet a lot of the time I get redirected to the "m." version of a site, with bland default-font single-color text, perhaps an image or two thrown in if I'm lucky. I would guess the majority of the sites have just copy/pasted a list of mobile user-agents and use that to decide when to redirect to the mobile version. It's a pity that there's no simple way for the phone itself to tell the site what it is capable of rendering.

See your site like the rest of the world does. On the Nokia X2-01

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