Mobile Last?
jonathanstark.com
jonathanstark.com
I mean I get it. I also think it's insane to not support mobile. Everyone should be supporting mobile. Let's just not lie and say it's easy. It's a bunch of work that everyone should be doing. But it's still work.
If you have some reason to ignore mobile (and there are many good ones) then go ahead and make an exception.
My issue with desktop-first in RR is that because of the nature of the situation, there were no good reasons to make that exception.
The idea is that you are designing for responsiveness. You are removing the worry about what should be on the left or the right or how wide things should be. You are focusing on what things are related, the relative importance of different things, and the content/interaction.
If all you're doing is designing a simple website (like a blog - not exactly that complicated), then yes, mobile might not be that hard.
If you're designing a web app though, that's a whole another story. If you want everything to work properly, from user interface to the actual features (one could think that cross-browser compatibility is really good these days, but in practice there's still a surprisingly large amount of places where things differ and you need to account for it), then that will mean a lot of testing across browsers and devices, which will increase your development time a lot. Hell, just getting cross-browser compatibility with common up-to-date desktop browsers is a considerable time investment with web apps.
So with that said, I must agree with the organizer quoted in the post - when all you have is 48 hours, you can't really blame anyone for not spending the time making their web app work well on mobile. Hell, I probably wouldn't spend that much time on cross-browser compatibility either (probably latest Chrome & Firefox compatibility at most - and even that can be surprisingly involving), since the time really is quite limited, and if you end up with something cool (incidentally, as the blog post says, they didn't win, and spent time making things mobile & desktop -friendly) then you'll have all the time in the world to worry about compatibility and making it truly "production-ready" after the hackathon is over.
EDIT: Not to mention that depending on what kind of web app you're building, it might not even make that much sense on mobile - generally speaking, you don't use mobile devices for serious productivity, so if you're building a serious productivity app, full mobile support could be a waste of time when no-one would even use it seriously on mobile. If you're storing data server-side with user accounts, though (as in, your app's not purely client-side), then you could probably get away with a limited mobile version that only gives read-only data or something. Of course, this all depends on what exactly you're building and should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
As far as the long standing argument of whether building mobile-first or desktop-first, I honestly think that's up to developer preference so long as the whole team is building with the same mindset. Building responsive, mobile-ready sites/applications isn't free, but a lot of web developers/startups seem to make it out to be much more difficult than it actually is when done consistently and right.
Having personally worked on responsive redesigns for ew.com, techcrunch.com, and timeinc.com, I know as well as anyone that designing a full scale responsive site can be hard. Really hard.
That said, the hard parts are not the technology or the implementation. Rather, the hard parts are organizational dysfunction, legacy CMS software, integration with non-responsive 3rd party services like ad networks, and so on.
The complete lack of those sorts of challenges in something like a hackathon means that devs are free to design in a way that maybe they can't do at work or for clients. My shock was that given such freedom, they choose to basically ignore mobile.
Oh, I completely agree with this. I'd say that even during hackathons, mobile is definitely something you should keep in mind when you're building your design, markup, etc. just like you normally would so that things will be easier in the long run. However, the key thing is that when you hit something that would be easy to deal with on desktop but hard on mobile, you should just go the easy desktop route and leave the mobile solution for later (post-hackathon). And when you're building web apps, those kinds of moments will pretty much inevitably come because mobile is hard - compared to desktop, you will generally speaking always have less screen real estate (and input elements need to be larger, making it even smaller), a lot less processing power, lack of precise pointer input and hover (touch vs mouse), etc etc.
Again, the point here is the difference between building websites and web apps. With websites, your biggest concerns are generally that the site scales nicely to various screen sizes and that links are comfortably clickable (and that it all looks nice). This wouldn't be all that hard to do even under time constraints. Web apps on the other hand generally feature a lot more (single-page) interactivity, and getting that right is a lot harder.
How well does the "mobile-first" solution work on a Nokia N95 browser? (let's not forget that not everyone visiting a webapp is doing so from latest version of Chrome, FF, Safari, Opera, etc.).
While I understand your concern, it feels misplaced given the context (Rails Rumble). Of course. Unless it is a front-end heavy hackathon, it is only natural that the business problem being solved has more weight that whether or not the site is functional on mobile.
I do agree with the general sentiment that we should consider mobile. But desktop isn't dead. (I assume you probably didn't write your submission on your phone).
You mean it would have large, clear text, with links that are easy to click because they're not this >< close to the link next to them? Perish the thought!
Part of why "desktop is dead" is a big meme in the valley comes from the fact that the valley is dominated by big-money venture capital. To VC, anything not growing at double digit rates simply does not exist.
BTW... I do wonder if we'll see another leg of desktop growth at some point in the future as the developing world becomes more developed and starts wanting to do more of the things people do on desktops...? We might indeed be in an era when "mobile first" describes the order of computing device adoption by a culture.
The boat people are totally missing is this: sure, mobile is growing like crazy, but what we're seeing isn't the death of PC. What we're seeing is the filling out and explosive diversification of the computing ecosystem. The future isn't a "next platform," it's a whole ecosystem of devices serving specialized functions or function domains. For PC that's "personal computing" -- doing "big" stuff and "real work." For mobile that's mostly communications along with navigation, etc., the sort of thing you want an ultraportable micro-communicator for.
I own a tablet, a smart phone, and a laptop, and of the three the tablet is probably the one I could do without. The smart phone and the laptop are used constantly. But the tablet is nice for reading and note taking.
Printers are a good analogy. Look around most any office and note that the number of printers has drastically decreased. This is a sign of work products changing - i.e., people don't need to print out as much stuff on paper to get our jobs done. The same is happening with desktop/laptops now. It's industry specific currently but the trend is clear.
Laptop: essential like indoor plumbing
Phone: very useful, major time-saver, but could live without
Tablet: nice for reading but dispensable
Tablets are the only endangered class that I see. They occupy an uncanny valley: too small and restrictive for what you do on laptops, too big to be as portable as a smart phone.
However, apps are a different ball game. I'd rather focus on usability, experience, and functionality. I'm not going to try and hobble the app by trying to beat a round peg into a triangle, square, whatever shaped hole. I find that most web applications which have large swathes of functionality benefit from native code, so I usually skip mobile-first design and just do a native app (Xamarin or Titanium works). Why? Because I don't want to sacrifice usability, experience, and functionality. Most apps, I've found out, have different experience, usability, and functionality on difference devices.
Responsive design, at least when it comes to web applications, is just lazy. Sure, your layout will totally shrink, but that does not make it "mobile ready".
The set of UI conventions that work and have worked for a long time on desktop won't work on tiny touch-enabled screens.
And if you really care for the user experience of those 2 billion mobile users, you'll have to rethink and redesign every widget and every interaction for fat,lazy and impatient fingers.
So I have to disagree with the notion that supporting a wide rage of devices requires an extremely low additional effort. That's simply not the case if you care about user experience both on mobile and desktop.
I'm guessing that, while on a hackaton, you'll have to choose.
I've made this mistake plenty of times before myself. I've dwelled on the the actual real life issues my concept would face and come away at the end of the weekend with a well-considered concept. But what people want at these events is a catchy, flashy demo that wows attendees and that can be tweeted/Facebooked/etc.
This is part of the reason I don't bother sacrificing my weekend to hackathons these days, but still. You're optimising for the wrong use case.
And then what? Opened on a mobile phone where the demo doesn't work? Mobile is where people are reading facebook/twitter so if you want to optimize for catchy/flashy for sharing in social media, you should definitely focus on mobile-first.
I would bet that a node.js or a MEAN stack hackathon would have a higher percentage of mobile friendly results.
That said I wonder what the root cause of the incompatibility. Are these people using a fashionable client side framework that doesn't work on mobile? Or is there a problen with ror?
I can say lately I have made sites using java on the back end and very simple front ends (as little is as possible, very simple html, CSS for formatting and without trying at all these work great on tablets and phones.
It's impossible to say how hard this would be without discussing a specific web app. But if the benchmark is simply "usable" rather than "elegant", I don't imagine it would be very hard for most web applications.
Second comment,Cordova/Phonegap make it really easy to build mobile friendly apps that can be extended to the desktop web, all in pretty much 1 codebase.
http://kevinsuttle.com/posts/the-right-questions-to-ask-mobi...