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Judging the book by its cover

Creating expectations is what a designer does. We tell you what you are looking at, before you make a decision to read more and delve deeper. We are asking you to “please, judge this book by it’s cover.” While this may not be the best practice in life, it’s a commanding force in our consumerized society and it is the way of the trade for designers.

For good or for bad, we designers carry a responsibility. At Object Adjective, we dedicate a good portion of our time developing web applications. The question of how true the cover should be to the book, is one that comes up often when we’re designing applications targeted for early beta. There are two general considerations we make. The first being, and this is typically the one a favored by designers, is the need to create an enticing and marketable design. The second, which is primarily a consideration for the end user, is to avoid creating false user expectations by designing something much slicker on the outside, than the insides can live up to. In other words, making sure the cover fits the book.

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So how does one make time for everything one needs to do? Seriously, the past 2 weeks have put me in a spin. Am I still alive?

That muck aside, I’ve got some exciting news I wanted to share, even at the expense of my right hand. For those of you following the development of Sidereel, you may have noticed our recent beginnings of integrating the skin for the site.

Well, the exciting thing is there is much more to come. First and foremost, we are starting the process of integrating the NEW and Improved WatchBox. No more crazy-ass lists!

Launching an early Beta for a new application has both advantages and disadvantages. The first being, getting your name out there. The second being, discouraging return users with a very primitive product. We chose to launch with an Early Beta, having faith in our users, but the challenges are still the same. It’s been a learning process indeed, but it’s also put us in a position where things are only better. 1,000,000 and counting.

The new, improved Watchbox will be comprised of a much “prettier” layout, designed by none other than Lauren “I play with my food, I play with my code” Scime and a pretty kick-ass Ajax interface. Stay tuned fellow Reelers. Things are about to get all Chuck Norris around here.

The buzz around town for the last year or so has been all about mobile web and for the first time, we’re really starting to see some interesting things in this area of web development. In December of 2006, Read/WriteWeb published their predictions for Web Technology growth in 2007.

Among those predictions, they listed that 27% of people surveyed thought that Online Video and Internet TV would take the lead in growth, while 22% thought Web-based Apps would continue to lead and 15%, Mobile Web. With Companies such as Google, Yelp and YouTube all optimized for Mobile use, the number of people accessing the internet via their trusty hand phone is rising rapidly.

I’ll take mine to go

I wanted to take a look back at these predictions because over the last 6 months I’ve found myself more and more inundated with web application work, that specifically takes advantage of mobile technology. Not necessarily mobile website, but applications that are bridging the gap. In fact, the top 3 areas from the Read/WriteWeb predictions pretty much fill my plate these days.

Despite past claims that Asia is years ahead of the U.S. and U.K. in mobile web use, a recent survey taken in March, by Online Publishers, claims that mobile web use in the U.S. is actually higher now.

The fact that more people are accessing the web from mobile devices, means designing for mobile web is increasingly important. The conundrum for us designers is, “how do we do that?”

I can certainly relate. Design for mobile web? A joke right? The support for CSS among mobile web browsers is abysmal at best, but there are things you can do and things you want to consider, when designing for mobile devices. If you are tasked with designing for mobile devices, the first thing you can do is jog over to Patrick Grifith’s mobile media test page and see what css media types your mobile device supports. This, of course, wont give you an accurate overview of mobile devices at large, but you can see what options are available. The key to designing for mobile devices is simplicity. Regardless of the advances in technology to come, when your workable real estate is smaller than a business card. The second thing you should do is read Cameron Moll’s series on mobile web design. He provides an excellent background and very useful tips.

However, if you need something quick and dirty, to just make your website more accessible from mobile devices, Google has a bare-bones tool that will make your website, a mobile website in a click (and it’s not that bad, at that). If you want to see it in action for this site, go to http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http://www.repeatpenguin.com/ on your mobile device.