Luke is at An Event Apart in Atlanta to give his presentation: It’s a Write/Read Mobile Web. He begins by showing us where he lives in Los Gatos in Silicon Valley. Facebook is up the road in Palo Alto. Yahoo is down the road in Sunnyvale, next to a landfill. In between, there’s a little company called AOL. Then there’s Google and YouTube just off Highway One.
So you have a bunch of internet companies in close physical proximity. They are also the top sites in the US when it comes to time spent on the web, by a very wide margin. You would think that the similarities would end there, because they all provide very different services: social networking, email, messaging, search, and video. But they have something in common. They are all write/read experience. They don’t work unless people contribute content to them. You post updates, you send emails, you type in searches, you upload videos.
Tim Berners-Lee said that his original vision for the web was a place where we could all meet and read and write.
This isn’t just a US-centric thing. Looking at the worldwide list of most popular sites, you’ve got the ones mentioned already but also Twitter and Wikipedia, where all the content is contributed by their users. Even Amazon is powered by reviews. This is what makes the web so awesome. It’s not a broadcast medium. It’s a two-way street. It’s interactive.
So what’s the biggest factor that’s changing for all of these sites? Mobile. 67% of Facebook users and 60% of Twitter users are on mobile. If you look at the stats for Facebook, you can see that their growth is coming from mobile. Desktop usage is pretty flat: mobile usage is soaring. Facebook also has a growing segment of mobile-only users. Zuck has defined Facebook now as a mobile company.
When people hear about the growth in mobile, they assume it’s all about content consumption: reading status updates, watching videos, and so on. There’s a myth that small devices are not good for content creation. But if that were true, then wouldn’t that be a huge problem, given the statistics for growth? Facebook and Twitter would have almost no content. But it’s simply not true. Three hours worth of video are uploaded to YouTube every second from mobile devices.
People think that mobile devices are for games, social networking, and entertainment. And it’s true that those are popular activities. But that kind of usage is actually going down. Where is that time going? The fastest growing category is utilities: finding and buying things, financial management, health services, travel planning, etc. Basically, mobile is anything. So if mobile hasn’t effected you yet, it will.
How do we think about this write/read experience? We imagine that 100% of people are consumers: reading, browsing, etc. Then 10% are curators: liking, faving, etc. Finally there’s the 1% that actually create stuff. 1.8% of users provide almost all of Wikipedia’s content. So we naturally focus on the content consumption in our designs, because that’s the biggest number. But Luke thinks it makes sense to flip that on its head. That 1% are your most important users.
Facebook redesigned their content creation flow multiple times, trying to make that “write” experience as good as possible. Same with YouTube’s uploading interface. They both focused relentlessly on the content creation.
So as we shift our attention to mobile, we should be asking: how do we design for mobile creation?
1. One-handed use
Like Luke’s old adage about “one thumb, one eyeball”, this is literally about testing content creation with one thumb. For his startup, Polar, Luke tested the interface with one thumb and timed how long it took. It was tested and designed for a thumb.
“But Luke”, you cry, “Not everyone just uses their thumb on their mobile device screens!” Well, observing 1,333 people using mobiles on the street showed that they pretty much do.
Dan Formosa says we should design for extremes. In Objectified he talked about designing garden shears for someone with arthritis. If it works for that user, it will work well for everyone.
“But Luke”, you cry, “Aren’t you falling prey to the myth of the ‘mobile context’ where the user is in a hurry, using just one hand?” Well, it is true that lots of people use their devices in the home. But even when you’re not out on the street, you’re still using your thumb: using your phone while watching TV.
Focusing on this use case means you can rethink a lot of interactions. As a general principle, Luke advises “don’t let the keyboard come up.” That is, only provide a virtual keyboard as a last resort. Use smart defaults. Let people tap on links or checkboxes instead of typing. If the user needs to enter a location, they could do so by tapping on a map instead of typing in a place name. Provide a date-picker instead of making people type out dates. Let people use sliders for setting values.
When you design for one-handed use, you’re designing for an extreme case. It also forces you to challenge your assumptions.
2. Visually engaging
When you aim to avoid the keyboard, you often come up with more visual solutions, which can be a great opportunity.
Take Snapchat. People express themselves through photos. The Line app is chat, but with a huge amount of emoticons. Chat becomes visual.
The lesson here is not that society is collapsing into sexting, but that images are very powerful on mobile.
Hotel Tonight’s mobile experience is based around big beautiful images.
“But Luke”, you cry “Why are you advocating big images? Isn’t performance the most important thing on mobile?” Well, yes. But instead of just abandoning images, let’s get really creative about how we serve up images. Take, for example, the experimentation around increasing image dimensions while reducing quality, which results in much smaller files with no noticable loss of fidelity.
3. Focused flows
Dwelling on one-handed use and visually engaging imagery are techniques you can use, but you should really focus on simplifying the processes you put people through. Foursquare have drastically simplified their check-in process.
Creativity is all about focusing on something until you find the simplest way to do it.
The Boingo wireless service used to require 23 inputs. They got rid of 11 of them and increased conversion by 34%. That’s great, but they didn’t go far enough. You can always simplify even more.
Hotel Tonight got their flow down to three taps and a swipe. The CEO says that’s a competitive advantage. Just compare how long it takes to book a hotel with their competitors.
It takes big changes to go small.
When taking about forms and input, this might seem like standard design advice: focus and simplify. But keep focusing and simplifying even more.
4. Just-in-time actions
So we’ve seen three different ways to make things simpler, faster, and more focused. But isn’t that really hard on a small screen, with so little real estate?
Instead of providing intro tours (which are more like intro tests), why not provide introductory information only when it’s needed? Apply the same approach to actions. On Polar, there’s an option to hide the keyboard, but that action is only visible when the keyboard appears.
On long pages on Polar, people wanted a way to get back to the top. If you start scrolling upwards, the navbar from the top is overlaid. It detects that you might be trying to get back to the top, and provides the actions you want.
5. Cross-device usage
Everything Luke has talked about so far has been specifically focused on one kind of device: mobile. But we need to keep our eyes on the multi-device write/read web that is emerging. Creation is happening across devices …sequentially and simultaneously.
The simplest example is access. If you’re on a desktop browsing Luke’s site on Chrome, and then you move to Chrome on the iPhone, there’s Luke’s site.
The next cross-device pattern is flow. We want our processes to work across devices. So if I’m on my laptop and I do a search, then I pick up my phone, I want that last input to carry over. On Ebay, you can save a draft listing on the desktop and pick it up later on mobile. On Google Drive, editing is synced simultaneously between all your devices.
Control is another pattern: using one device to tell another device what to do.
Luke hates log-in forms; that’s no secret. Five years ago, he worked on Yahoo Projector which used a scanned barcode to take control of a TV screen with a phone. He wanted to use this to replace log in, but that never happened. But there’s a service called OneID which is tackling the same use case: you can control log-in across devices.
The last example of cross-device usage is push. Going back to that draft listing on Ebay: take a picture on your phone and have that picture show up on the desktop browser view.
People talk about mobile versus desktop, but these are all examples of these different devices working together.
This was just a taster. We’re just getting started with this stuff.