IN The ‘trouble’ with Android, Stephanie Rieger points out the ludicrous number of Android screen sizes on a typical UK client’s website and comes to this conclusion:

If … you have built your mobile site using fixed widths (believing that you’ve designed to suit the most ‘popular’ screen size), or are planning to serve specific sites to specific devices based on detection of screen size, Android’s settings should serve to reconfirm how counterproductive a practice this can be. Designing to fixed screen sizes is in fact never a good idea…there is just too much variation, even amongst ‘popular’ devices. Alternatively, attempting to track, calculate, and adjust layout dimensions dynamically to suit user-configured settings or serendipitous conditions is just asking for trouble.

I urge you to read the entire article—it’s brief yet filled with rich chocolatey goodness.

Responding to it, Marc Drummond concludes that responsive web design default breakpoints are dead and urges designers to “use awkwardness as your guideline, not ephemeral default device widths” and return to fluid design. (I believe he may actually be thinking of liquid layout—the kind we practiced back in the early mid-1990s when cross-platform and multi-manufacturer desktop screen sizes and pixel-per-inch ratios—not to mention strong user font, size, and color preference options—made fixed-width layout design challenging if not impossible. As I understand fluid design, it is merely another word for responsive design, in that it relies on CSS3 media queries set to breakpoints.)

We’ve lost our compass

Rieger and Drummond are hardly alone in feeling that “our existing standards, workflows, and infrastructure” cannot support “today’s incredibly exciting yet overwhelming world of connected digital devices” (futurefriend.ly) and that something new must be done to move the web forward. And of course ppk has been warning us about the multiplicity of platforms and viewports on mobile since 2009.

Agreed: that is an exciting and challenging time; that fixed width layouts do not address, and adaptive layouts (multiple fixed-width layouts set to common breakpoints) do not go far enough in addressing, the challenges posed by our current plethora of mobile screen sizes, zoom settings, embedded views (i.e. “browser” windows inside app windows, often with additional chrome) and what Rieger calls “the unintended consequences” that occur as these various settings clash in ways their creators could not have anticipated.

As consumers, we’ve all had the experience of seeing the wrong layout at the wrong time. (Think of a site with both mobile and desktop versions—whether these versions are triggered by CSS3 media queries or JavaScript and back-end magic is beside the point because technology is beside the point—good user experience is all this is supposed to be about. On a Twitter app on a mobile device, the user follows a link; the link opens in the browser built into the Twitter app. Which version of the site does the user see? The mobile one or the desktop? Often it is the desktop, and that can be a problem if the app’s version of the browser does not permit zoom. Even if it is a mobile version, it may be the wrong mobile version, or it may not fit comfortably inside the app’s browser window.) Considering our own experiences and reviewing Rieger’s chart, it is easy to share Drummond’s conclusion that breakpoints are dead and that all sites should be designed as minimally as possible.

If breakpoints are dead, responsive design is dead

Of course, if breakpoints are dead, responsive design is dead, because responsive design relies on breakpoints both in creative workflow and as a key to establishing user-need-and-context-based master layouts, i.e. a minimal layout for the user with a tiny screen and not much bandwidth, a more fleshed-out one for the netbook user, and so on.

But responsive design is not dead; it has only begun. It is not a panacea but was never intended to be. It is simply the beginnings of an approach.

I respect those colleagues who say breakpoints are dead, understand how they reached this conclusion, and am eager to see where it takes them in the coming months as they experiment with new methods, perhaps developing wonderful and unforeseen best practices. I hope design will be a brilliant part of these new methods, not something that gets abandoned to create a bland but workable lightweight experience for all.

But I also believe it is possible to draw a different conclusion from the same data. It is even possible, I believe, to say the present data doesn’t matter—at least not in the long run.

Tale of the chart

There was a time in the late 1990s when industrious web designers showed how atrocious CSS support was in browsers. Eric Meyer’s Master Compatability Chart for Web Review, formerly at http://www.webreview.com/pub/wr/style/mastergrid.html, was one of the best, but is no longer available for your historical viewing pleasure—not even at the mighty Wayback Machine. That’s too bad, as it would have perfectly illustrated my point. The chart used a variety of colors to show how each detail of the entire CSS specification was or was not supported (and if supported, whether it was supported correctly and completely, partially and correctly, partially and somewhat incorrectly, or completely incorrectly) in every browser which was available at the time, including, if memory serves, close to a dozen versions of Netscape, Explorer, and Opera.

Looking at that chart induced nausea and vertigo. It was easy to draw the conclusion that CSS wasn’t ready for primetime. (That was the correct conclusion at the time.) It was also easy to look at the table and decide that table layouts and font tags were the way to go.

That’s what most designers who even bothered looking at Eric’s chart decided, but a few (Eric and me included) drew a completely other inference. Instead of trying to memorize all the things that could go wrong in each browser, we created general rules for what worked across all browsers (e.g. font-size in px, floats for layout) and advocated design based on the things that work. This, I believe, is exactly what the futurefriend.ly and Move the Web Forward folks are doing now: trying to figure out commonalities instead of bogging down in details. (This is why some in our community have labeled futurefriend.ly and Move the Web Forward “WaSP II.”)

The other inference Eric, I, and others in the 1990s drew from Eric’s chart was that browser makers must be petitioned to support CSS accurately and correctly. We and many of you reading this engaged in said petitioning, and thanks largely to help from with the browser engineering community (from people like Tantek Çelik and Chris Wilson and organizations like Mozilla) it came to pass.

Of mice and markets

We cannot, of course, petition all the makers of, say, Android devices to agree to a set of standard breakpoints, because there are over 500 different Android devices out there, many of which will fail in the coming months—or if not outright fail, simply be replaced in the course of planned obsolescence AKA upgrading that drives the hardware segment. And each new product will in turn introduce new incompatibilities (AKA “features”).

In the short run it’s going to be hell, just as the browser wars and their lack of support for common standards were hell. But it is the short run.

500 standards is no standard. Give a consumer 500 choices and the price-driven consumer picks what comes with her plan, while the selective consumer begins gravitating toward a handful of emerging market leaders. Eventually this nutty market will stabilize around a few winning Android platforms (e.g. Kindle Fire) and common breakpoints will emerge. What The Web Standards Project achieved with browser makers, the market will achieve with phones.

Until that time, designers certain can abandon breakpoints if they can find a way to do good design under purely fluid conditions—design that pleases the user, satisfies the client, and moves the industry forward aesthetically. But designers who persist in responsive or even adaptive design based on iPhone, iPad, and leading Android breakpoints will help accelerate the settling out of the market and its resolution toward a semi-standard set of viewports. This I believe.

When I see fragmentation, I remind myself that it is unsustainable by its very nature, and that standards always emerge, whether through community action, market struggle, or some combination of the two. This is a frustrating time to be a web designer, but it’s also the most exciting time in ten years. We are on the edge of something very new. Some of us will get there via all new thinking, and others through a combination of new and classic approaches. Happy New Year, web designers!

Filed under: Applications, apps, Responsibility, Responsive Web Design, State of the Web, The Essentials, UX, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, Websites

In which our intrepid reporter is unable to download and reinstall Adobe software he owns and paid for because Adobe.

I REMOVED Adobe CS5 from my studio Mac after it took on water damage during tropical storm Irene. Just as I was going to replace the machine, the water damage seemed to go away. (It actually never did go away, and as I write this it’s pretty bad, but for a week it seemed okay so I didn’t order a replacement.) As I need Photoshop this morning to work on a website, and as I’m still a registered CS5 owner, I logged into Adobe.com to download a “Trial” version of Photoshop. For all the good it did me, I could have eaten my own head.

Clicking “Download Photoshop” put an “Install Adobe Download Assistant” app on my desktop instead of downloading Photoshop. To download Photoshop from the web, you can’t just download Photoshop from the web. You have to download an installer that installs a downloader. There’s no benefit to the user for jumping through this extra hoop, but I guess Adobe Corporate wanted to show off its AIR-based software.

To download trial versions of Creative Suite software, you need to install the Adobe Download Assistant. After installation, the Adobe Download Assistant will start your product download automatically,

the website says. This is a lie.

Once installed, the downloader asks me to sign in again. Which is only logical. After all, between the time I clicked “download Photoshop” as a signed-in user and now, I might have been knocked unconscious by Photoshop pirates. Without a redundant double sign-in, the pirates would win.

So I type in my login and password again—same as I just did on the website to download this meshugah downloader installer in the first place—and guess what? Adobe says my login and password don’t match.

The login and password I used to download the installer downloader are unacceptable to the downloader. If you’re following this gibberish, God bless. If not, Adobe is telling me that the login and password I just used to install the downloader are no good.

Like a pimp pretending to help a runaway teen, a link in the unhelpful downloader now asks, “Having trouble signing in?” There being nothing else to do, I click the link, which takes me to a “Reset your password” panel. Only I can’t reset my password in the “Reset your password” panel; I’ll only be able to reset my password on a custom web page, whose address I will only learn once I receive an email from Adobe sending me a custom link. Excitingly, that “Reset your password” page (the one that will actually allow me to reset my password) will be generated on the fly via Adobe’s famous and ultra-reliable ColdFusion software.

I’ve now lost 30 minutes of work time but Adobe is not done with me. Oh, no. This is where the fun begins.

I spend long minutes reflexively checking my email, like a junkie scanning the corner in search of his busted dealer. The custom link email finally arrives, but the link never works. (It’s the cream of the jest!) Here is a screenshot of Adobe’s Chinese Japanese website, powered by ColdFusion, which is unable to generate a “Reset your password” page, allowing me to reset my password and use the AIR-based downloader software to download the software I already own.

Mission: not accomplished. Total time wasted: 45 minutes (not counting the writing of this blog post, which I do in the faint hope that Adobe will improve its customer experience). I still have no working copy of Photoshop and it’s clear I won’t get one today. The installer disks are gone from my office because I’m moving to a new studio soon and have been packing important pieces like installation disks ahead of time. (After all, I had reasoned, Adobe lets you download software from its website, so why keep disks around?)

To be fair, Hurricane Irene was not Adobe’s fault, and lots of people suffered much worse than a water-damaged iMac. Nor is water damage to my Mac Adobe’s fault. My decision to remove CS5 from the Mac was based on fear that if the Mac died and I hadn’t removed CS5, I would not be able to install it on the replacement machine I intended to purchase, as Adobe licensing (and the software itself) requires you to uninstall from Machine A before installing on Machine B. Adobe CS5 costs more than the computer I intended to buy, so it seemed prudent to remove it from the damaged machine, but of course I regret that decision now, because Adobe’s website won’t let me update my member information, and its downloader won’t let me download.

So I’ll be working from home tonight, doing what I should have done today. Five little letters: ADOBE.

Breathless Update!

Apparently Adobe’s entire membership section, powered by ColdFusion, is now down. Trying to do anything inside the member section leads to a Chinese “Sorry” page. This might be why the “downloader” failed to authorize my credentials. How much simpler it would be if Adobe simply provided a link to download its software (like in the old days) instead of forcing registered users to jump through broken hoops.

Filed under: Adobe, Usability, User Experience, UX

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Jeffrey Zeldman – The Medium Comes of Age from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

Filed under: CSS3, Design, mobile, The Profession, Touchscreen, Typekit, Typography, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, Working, Zeldman

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LUKE WROBLEWSKI: “For many of us, logging into websites is a part of our daily routine. In fact, we probably do it so often that we’ve stopped having to think about how it’s done… that is, until something goes wrong: we forget our password, our user name, the email address we signed up with, how we signed up, or even if we ever signed up at all.

“These experiences are not just frustrating for us, but are bad for businesses as well. How bad? User Interface Engineering’s analysis of a major online retailer found that 45% of all customers had multiple registrations in the system, 160,000 people requested their password every day, and 75% of these people never completed the purchase they started once they requested their password.”

“To top it off, visitors who are not logged in do not see a personalized view of a website’s content and recommendations, which reduces conversion rates and engagement. So, log-in is a big deal — big enough that some websites have started exploring new designs solutions for the old problem.”

New Approaches To Designing Log-In Forms

Filed under: Design, User Experience, UX, Web Design

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WHILE VIEWING STATS on TweetMeme, I noticed a banner ad that said, “New York—explore it again like you used to.” Intrigued, I clicked the ad. It took me to the web page shown above. (Click to view full size.) At the top was a message thanking me for subscribing. Ouch! I had not subscribed, I had merely clicked a link. Opt-in subscription without notice or warning is about as dark as a user experience pattern can get and still be legal.

Beneath the notice was an ad for a women’s strip tease class. I don’t think I’m the intended demographic. Facebook would know that. Why doesn’t Google?

The offer had a time limit; the script on the time limit froze my browser, prompting a force-quit and restart.

If “Don’t Be Evil” is still Google’s slogan, I wonder if folks who work there say it with a straight face.

Filed under: glamorous, Google, User Experience, UX

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FROM MY TWITTER STREAM of late:

• The Heads-Up Grid is an overlay grid for use during in-browser website development, built with HTML + CSS + JavaScript. http://t.co/EcgTkcD #
• Golden Grid System – a folding grid for responsive design. h/t @malarkey http://j.mp/mZnVJi #
• Nice responsive redesign! Well done, Meltmedia! http://t.co/tQQGW8J #
• RT @jasonsantamaria: I’m writing a book about typography for @abookapart! Lucky number 7: http://t.co/7CkSz0l #
• I love how everything Apple does, even slipping on a banana peel, is perceived as strategic. #
• Paul draws a napkin map of London. http://t.co/p4co2ZM #

Okay, that last one isn’t a web design link and the Apple comment could go either way, but that’s how I roll. Follow me on Twitter for more snarkeractive funucation!

Filed under: business, creativity, CSS, CSS3, style, The Profession, Tools, twitter, Typography, Usability, User Experience, UX, Zeldman

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“UPDATED SERVICE ADVISORY – EAST RIVER FERRY CAPACITY LIMITS – PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ,” the top banner on the East River Ferry’s website nervously advises. Immediately below this warning comes the gentle and slightly vacuous headline, “Relax. We’ll Get You There.” The two headlines tell contrasting stories that completely contradict each other. No print art director would place these two messages on the same page, let alone in such close proximity or with treatments that compete for the reader’s attention. Yet this is how we treat content on the web.

Elsewhere on the page, care has been taken. An interactive map! With rollovers! Be still, my heart.

But when it came time to determine a content strategy, no one was in charge (or the wrong people were). Instead of the kind of headline that actually works on the web, a committee approved a soft print advertising headline—the kind that might appear in a quarter-page ad in the back of the playbill for a regional theater company’s production of Guys and Dolls. No thought was given to how that headline would play if the ferry developed service problems. Apparently no substitute, contingency headline was created. And not much thought (if any) was given to how the design might change if a problem arose.

Thus at the last minute a slightly hysterical “over capacity” headline that makes the “Relax” headline look ridiculous was jammed on top of the primary headline, using design techniques that give the warning primacy of place, and add shrillness by using all caps, only to defeat their own urgency with a low-contrast teal-on-blue color scheme that is difficult for people with normal vision to read and may be invisible to people with certain kinds of color-blindness.

This is what we do. We have meetings, we reach consensus, we make templates, we approve inoffensive headlines and copy, and we fumble contingencies. Avoiding these problems is what content strategy and user experience design are all about.

Dueling messages | Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

Filed under: content, content strategy, Design, Usability, User Experience, UX

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YOU FIND ME ENSCONCED in the fabulous Buckhead, Atlanta Intercontinental Hotel, preparing to unleash An Event Apart Atlanta 2011, three days of design, code, and content strategy for people who make websites. Eric Meyer and I co-founded our traveling web conference in December, 2005; in 2006 we chose Atlanta for our second event, and it was the worst show we’ve ever done. We hosted at Turner Field, not realizing that half the audience would be forced to crane their necks around pillars if they wanted to see our speakers or the screen on which slides were projected.

Also not realizing that Turner Field’s promised contractual ability to deliver Wi-Fi was more theoretical than factual: the venue’s A/V guy spent the entire show trying to get an internet connection going. You could watch audience members twitchily check their laptops for email every fourteen seconds, then make the “no internet” face that is not unlike the face addicts make when the crack dealer is late, then check their laptops again.

The food was good, our speakers (including local hero Todd Dominey) had wise lessons to impart, and most attendees had a pretty good time, but Eric and I still shudder to remember everything that went wrong with that gig.

Not to jinx anything, but times have changed. We are now a major three-day event, thanks to a kick-ass staff and the wonderful community that has made this show its home. We thank you from the bottoms of our big grateful hearts.

I will see several hundred of you for the next three days. Those not attending may follow along:

• An Event Apart Atlanta three-day schedule
• A Feed Apart – live tweeting, Monday through Wednesday
• AEA Atlanta Flickr Group
• An Event Apart Facebook page

Filed under: An Event Apart, Announcements, Appearances, apps, Atlanta, Authoring, Best practices, business, cities, client services, clients, Code, Community, Compatibility, conferences, content, content strategy, creativity, CSS, CSS3, Design, Designers, development, editorial, Education, eric meyer, events, Fonts, Formats, glamorous, Happy Cog™, HTML, HTML5, Ideas, industry, Information architecture, interface, IXD, Jeremy Keith, Platforms, Real type on the web, Redesigns, Responsive Web Design, Scripting, speaking, spec, Standards, State of the Web, The Profession, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, webfonts, webkit, webtype, work, Working, Zeldman

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SOME IDEAS SEEM inevitable once they arrive. It’s impossible for me to conceive of the universe before rock and roll or to envision Christmas without Mr Dickens’s Carol, and it’s as tough for my kid to picture life before iPads. So too will the internet users and designers who come after us find it hard to believe we once served web content in boxy little hardwired layouts left over from the magical but inflexible world of print.

I remember when the change came. We were putting on An Event Apart, our design conference for people who make websites, and half the speakers at our 2009 Seattle show had tumbled to the magic of media queries. One after another, CSS wizards including Eric Meyer and Dan Cederholm presented the beginnings of an approach to designing content for a world where people were just as likely to be using smart, small-screen devices like iPhone and Android as they were traditional desktop browsers.

Toward the end of the second day, Ethan Marcotte took what the other speakers had shared and amped it to 11. Suddenly, we had moved from maybe to for sure, from possible to inevitable. Ethan even gave us a name for his new approach to web design.

That name appears on the cover of this book, and this book represents the culmination of two years of design research and application by Ethan and leading-edge design practitioners around the world. Armed with this brief book, you will have everything you need to re-imagine your web design universe and boldly go where none have gone before. Happy reading and designing!

Jeffrey Zeldman,
Publisher,
Responsive Web Design

Filed under: A Book Apart, Authoring, Best practices, Design, Responsive Web Design, The Essentials, Tools, Usability, User Experience, UX, Web Design, Web Design History, Web Standards, writing

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ONE GLORIOUS AFTERNOON in March, 2006, as a friend and I hurried past Austin’s Downtown Hilton Hotel to catch the next session of the SXSW Interactive Festival, a young stranger arrested our progress. With no introduction or preliminaries, he announced that he was available to speak at An Event Apart, a conference for web designers that Eric Meyer and I had launched three months previously. Turning to my companion with my best impression (which is none too good) of Mr Burns of “The Simpsons,” I asked, “Who is this brash young upstart, Smithers?”

The brash young upstart quickly became an essential colleague. In the months and years that followed, Aaron Gustafson created dazzling front- and back-end code for some of my agency’s most demanding clients. Just as importantly, he brilliantly tech-edited the second and third editions of Designing With Web Standards. The job largely consists of alerting Ethan Marcotte and me to the stuff we don’t know about web standards. I’ll let you think about that one. For five years now, Aaron has also been a tough but fair technical editor for A List Apart magazine, where he helps authors succeed while ensuring that they are truly innovative, that their methods are accessible and semantic, and (thanks to his near-encyclopedic knowledge) that they give all prior art its due. Moreover, Aaron has written seminal pieces for the magazine, and, yes, he has lectured at An Event Apart.

Given my experiences with the man and my admiration for his knowledge and abilities, I was thrilled when Aaron told me the premise of this book and began letting me look at chapters. This isn’t just another web design book. It’s an essential and missing piece of the canon. Our industry has long needed a compendium of best practices in adaptive, standards-based design. And with the rise of mobile, the recent significant improvements in desktop and phone browsers, and the new capabilities that come with HTML5, CSS3, and gestural interfaces, it is even more vital that we who make websites have a reliable resource that tells us how to take advantage of these new capabilities while creating content that works in browsers and devices of all sizes and widely differing capabilities. This book is that resource.

The convergence of these new elements and opportunities is encouraging web professionals to finally design for the web as it always should have been done. Adaptive design is the way, and nobody has a wider command than Aaron of the thinking and techniques required to do it well. In these pages you will find all that thinking and those methods. Never again will you lose a day debating how to do great web design (and create great code) that works for everyone. I plan to give this book to all my students, and to everyone I work with. I encourage you to do likewise. And now, enough preliminaries. Dive in, and enjoy!

Adaptive Web Design: Crafting Rich Experiences with Progressive Enhancement
by Aaron Gustafson
Foreword by Jeffrey Zeldman

Filed under: Authoring, Best practices, books, Compatibility, CSS, Design, E-Books, editorial, The Essentials, Usability, User Experience, UX, W3C, Web Design, Websites

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