5 ms·

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

80 points by gulbrandr 14y ago

zachalexander 14y 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.
- buro9 14y ago
  If you really want to make your content available in Africa, make it accessible via SMS.
  - zachalexander 14y 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.
    - buro9 14y ago
      It doesn't work for everything sure, but content is content and a web site is merely one possible interface. As soon as that sinks in, if the format fits it isn't so weird to think of how other interfaces can be used for the same content. SMS could work really well for wikipedia... a paid interface to obtain an article for a given query for example.
  - davycro 14y 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 14y 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.
- davycro 14y ago
  I agree with your points. However, I think that this market is underserved and ripe for some form of profitable innovation.
notatoad 14y 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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mikemoka 14y ago
  I agree, in order to considerate spending an extra-effort for an inclusive design you should first consider the following points in my opinion: -does your site targets any of the nations listed? -what is the ratio between desktop and mobile users in that country? what are the most used mobile devices to browse the web in that country? how long are they used on average?
- instakill 14y ago
  Of course people use them, what a fucking stupid thing to say.
  - grey-area 14y 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)?
    - dools 14y ago
      Stats on browser usage are in the original article ...
  - ktizo 14y 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.
ksherlock 14y ago
And don't forget all the people still using WAP/WML!
dendory 14y 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 14y 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.
- zachalexander 14y 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 14y 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).
- davycro 14y ago
hk_kh 14y ago
Today I bought a Nokia 1280[1], it's pretty good. You do not need to adapt your site to its screen, though. [1]: http://www.nokia.com/in-en/products/phone/nokia-1280/specifications/ http://www.nokia.com/in-en/products/phone/nokia-1280/specifi...
baklava 14y 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.
- davycro 14y 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 14y 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.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ricardobeat 14y 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 14y 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.

80 points by gulbrandr 14y 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.

buro9 14y ago
If you really want to make your content available in Africa, make it accessible via SMS.
- zachalexander 14y 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.
  - buro9 14y ago
    It doesn't work for everything sure, but content is content and a web site is merely one possible interface. As soon as that sinks in, if the format fits it isn't so weird to think of how other interfaces can be used for the same content. SMS could work really well for wikipedia... a paid interface to obtain an article for a given query for example.
- davycro 14y 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 14y 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.
davycro 14y ago
I agree with your points. However, I think that this market is underserved and ripe for some form of profitable innovation.

notatoad 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mikemoka 14y ago
I agree, in order to considerate spending an extra-effort for an inclusive design you should first consider the following points in my opinion: -does your site targets any of the nations listed? -what is the ratio between desktop and mobile users in that country? what are the most used mobile devices to browse the web in that country? how long are they used on average?
instakill 14y ago
Of course people use them, what a fucking stupid thing to say.
- grey-area 14y 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)?
  - dools 14y ago
    Stats on browser usage are in the original article ...
- ktizo 14y 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.

ksherlock 14y ago

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

dendory 14y 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 14y 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.

zachalexander 14y 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 14y 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).
davycro 14y ago

hk_kh 14y ago

Today I bought a Nokia 1280[1], it's pretty good. You do not need to adapt your site to its screen, though. [1]: http://www.nokia.com/in-en/products/phone/nokia-1280/specifications/ http://www.nokia.com/in-en/products/phone/nokia-1280/specifi...

baklava 14y 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.

davycro 14y 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 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ricardobeat 14y 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 14y 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.