A FEW QUICK NOTES from the first hour of A Day Apart: Mobile Web Design, an all-day learning session led by Luke Wroblewski (aka Day III of An Event Apart Seattle), Bell Harbor Conference Center, Seattle, WA:

Audience questions for Luke

1. How to take a website for desktop to mobile?
2. Do we need to care about non-Webkit?
3. Trade-offs between native and web
4. How to navigate differences between different versions of Webkit?
5. Mobile e-commerce: best practices
6. Challenges with different cultures/languages
7. Media queries
8. If no budget, what can focus on web to make mobile ok?
9. How to take a website for desktop to mobile?
10. Mobile e-commerce best practices
11. Multiple screen sizes and pixel densities
12. Time for one project: go mobile or tablet (in e-commerce)
13. CMSes and mobile—sigh
14. Best practices for page load

WHY MOBILE? Convincing clients/bosses to care

• Of the 50% of total mobile commerce in the US, 70% of it is coming from one iPhone application (eBay).
• eBay: global mobile sales $2 billion in 2010, $600 million in 2009. Real commercial opportunities emerging on mobile.
• Best Buy: mobile web users doubling every year: 30M (2010), 17M (2009), 6M (2008).
• PayPal: mobile transactions increased six-fold in 2009: $25M to $141M.

SOCIAL

• Double-digit (28%) rise in social networking on mobile web.
• Twitter: 40% of tweets sent via mobile, 16% of new users start on mobile.
• Facebook: 200 million active mobile users.
• Instagram: iPhone only app took three months to hit one million users. Six weeks later they hit two million users.
• Mixi (Japan): 85% of page views on mobile vs. 14% 4.5 years ago.

PRODUCTIVITY AND MEDIA

• Google: mobile searches grew 130% in Q3 2010
• Pandora: 50% of total user base subscribes to the service on mobile
• Email: 70% of smartphone users have accessed email on mobile device

“I don’t want to be the record executive clinging to CD sales.”

ADDITIONAL USAGE

Yelp: every other second a consumer calls a local business and generates driving directions from a Yelp mobile app.]]27% of all Yelp searches come from their iPhone application, which had 1.4 million unique users in May 2010.

Zillow.com: Viewing active listings 45% more often from mobile devices (audience is primarily active buyers, on location or scoping out neighborhoods)

Facebook: People who use Facebook on their mobile devices (200M active) are twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users.

Shift in Usage

Let’s look at Gmail:

• Visitors to web-based emails sites declined 7%.
• Visitors accessing email on mobile devices increased 36%.

But what about mobile web usage?

Twitter Usage

40% of tweets sent via mobile.

16% of new users start on mobile.

Mobile web usage

• Mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common web access devices worldwide by 2013.
• 600% growth in traffic to mobile websites in 2010.
• Facebook and Twitter access via mobile browser grows by triple digits in 2010.
• Average smartphone user visits up to 24 websites per day.
• Top 50 websites constitute only 40% of mobile visits.
• Opera Mini traffic up 200% year/year.

For more…

Follow the live tweets at afeedapart.com.

Filed under: An Event Apart, Applications, Best practices, business, Design, mobile, Standards, State of the Web, Surviving

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“In his opening keynote at An Event Apart in Seattle, WA 2011 Jeffrey Zeldman provided a historic perspective on the development of the Internet, Web, and Web standards culminating in today’s exciting opportunities for Web designers and developers.”

LukeW | An Event Apart: Web 2.1 The Medium Comes of Age.

Filed under: An Event Apart, Design, Web Design History

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I’m enjoying An Event Apart Seattle 2011 and you’re not. Despair not, help is available:

• For real-time Twitter aggragation, watch afeedapart.com.
• Enjoy AEA Seattle photos in our Flickr group.
• Watch Luke Wroblewski dance.
• Watch An Event Apart dance for Luke Wroblewski.
• Nod along to the interstitial audio playlist.

Filed under: An Event Apart, Code, content, content strategy, CSS, CSS3, Design, HTML, HTML5, mobile, Platforms, Seattle, The Profession, Typography, Usability, User Experience, UX, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Websites, webtype

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KRISTA STEVENS (@kristastevens) is our guest on The Big Web Show Episode 43, recording today, March 24, before a live internet audience on 5by5.tv/live at 3:00 PM Eastern. (New time!)

Krista is an Automattician. A reader, writer, editor. Geek. Four-eyed bookworm. Hopeless introvert. True believer.

The Big Web Show (“Everything Web That Matters”) records live every Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Edited episodes can be watched afterwards, often within hours of recording, via iTunes (audio feed | video feed) and the web. Subscribe and enjoy!

Filed under: A Book Apart, A List Apart, content, content strategy, Design, E-Books, editorial, Education, wordpress

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I WISH I had written Adactio: Journal—Sea change. I advise every web designer who hasn’t yet done so to read it.

Filed under: Design, links, State of the Web, Themes and Templates, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Websites

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This ad appeared on the back cover of the SXSW Interactive 2011 guide, given to all 20,000 attendees of SXSWi in March, 2011.

An Event Apart SXSW Interactive 2011 ad on Flickr

Filed under: Advertising, An Event Apart, Design, SXSW

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Jeffrey Zeldman Signs a Contract the Modern Way from Monkey Do! on Vimeo.

Filed under: "Digital Curation", Adobe, Formats, glamorous, Usability, User Experience, UX, Zeldman

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1. Jeremy Keith – HTML5 For Web Designers
2. Dan Cederholm – CSS3 For Web Designers
3. Erin Kissane – The Elements of Content Strategy

First three A Book Apart books | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

Filed under: A Book Apart

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“WE KICKED OFF WITH a discussion on web platforms, perhaps the most widely-changing aspect of the web in the past 18 months. Zeldman began with a story about his efforts to check in to his upcoming flight to SXSW from a taxi cab in New York. He entered his details into his airline’s mobile app and clicked the ‘log in’ button, only to be taken to their desktop website which required Flash to log in, which inevitably, his iPhone didn’t support. How did this kind of user experience failure occur? …

“Moving on, the panel began to discuss publishing. The advent of plugins like Readability and a new product Roger Black is working on called TreeSaver allow readers to specify how they want to see content, and the advent of web standards means that content is generally separated from presentation, to the benefit of the reader. Zeldman made the point that the entire platform is for content, which makes it odd when some products are designed with the content being the last thing in mind.”

“The paywall quickly came up and the overwhelming ethos from the panel was “if you have exclusive great stuff, people will pay for it”. Dan Mall suggested that traditional publishers didn’t understand alternative modes of publishing and were attempting to price them at the same rate as their paper-and-ink versions. Mandy Brown joked that many publishers saw the iPad as their saviour, just like they did with the CD-ROM back in the 90s. She also made the point that despite its web-savvy audience, the A Book Apart project’s sales were 75% print. …

Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel (13/03 @ 5PM)

Paul MacInnes is the editor of the Guardian Guide and Matt Andrews is a client side web developer at the Guardian. Full coverage of SXSW 2011 at guardian.co.uk/sxsw

Filed under: Acclaim, Appearances, art direction, Design, Publishing, SXSW, zeldman.com

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ON SUNDAY, while leading a discussion on the future of web design and publishing, I noticed a slightly confused look appearing on some faces in the audience. The discussion had been billed as “Jeffrey Zeldman’s Awesome Internet Design Panel,” and I thought perhaps there was a disconnect for some in the audience between “design” and such topics as where content comes from and who pays for it.

So I asked, “Who here is in publishing?”

A few hands were gently raised.

Uh-huh. “And how many of you work on the web?”

Every right hand in the room shot up.

“You are all in publishing,” I explained.

Now, I like a good rounded corner talk as much as the next designer. I’ve given my share of them. Also of line height and measure, color and contrast, how to design things that don’t work in old versions of Internet Explorer, and so on. In the practice of web and interaction design, there will always be a place for craft discussions—for craft is execution, and ideas without execution are songs without music, meaningless.

But right now (and always) there is a need for design to also be about the big strategic issues. And right now, as much as design is wrestling with open vs. proprietary formats and the old challenges of new devices, design is also very much in the service of applications and publishing. Who gets content, who pays for it, how it is distributed (and how evenly), the balance between broadcast and conversation, editor and user—these are the issues of this moment, and it is designers even more than editors who will answer these riddles.

Filed under: "Digital Curation", Advocacy, Appearances, art direction, Authoring, Best practices, business, Community, conferences, content, content strategy, Design, development, editorial, Education, engagement, Ideas, Micropublishing, Molehill, Platforms, Publications, Publishing, Responsibility, Standards, State of the Web, The Essentials, The Profession, Usability, User Experience, UX, Web Design, Zeldman

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