How The Mobile Web Has Forced Me To Re-think Interface

I read a good article tonight by Snook on “What does Accessibility Mean?“. What he put into words, I’ve been mulling over in my head for a while now. This web 2.0 (for lack of a better branded term of what has happened over the past few years) movement has really raised the barrier to entry for users in a lot of web apps. Expectations are that when you click something you’ll go to a new page, so when things start popping up and moving around, it tends to freak people a bit. It surprises even me and I would consider myself a power user.

Simplicity

One of the things I’ve noticed since getting an iPhone is that I love the simplicity of Mobile apps. Take Google Reader’s mobile version for example.

I have three choices for reading my feeds — all merged together in one reading list, individually by feed or individually by tag. I don’t know about you, but I have a crap load of feeds which means that I will never read by individual feed. This leaves me with two options — by tag or all merged together. I love it. Two options. One or the other.

If I have time, I simply meander through my reading list. If I don’t, I start with the tags that are most important to me, like friends or ruby-and-rails. Call me old school but I actually prefer this to the full ajaxy Google Reader scroll version that you get if you visit google.com/reader.

Take a sec and look at the two images I have added to this post thus far. Which one do you prefer? I choose the mobile version for a few reasons:

1) Light on Resources

Extremely light on resources which means all the browser has to do is load the html which means it’s lightning fast, even on my phone. I don’t need pretty. This doesn’t mean I need ugly, it just means that simple design is ok (and is most often better design, flashy design masks crappy skills).

2) Context is King

When I’m reading my feeds, I just want to read my feeds. I think too often we (app developers) are forcing users to multi-task or, at least, are rewarding them for multi-tasking (which is just as bad) with the interfaces we create. Let’s start rewarding people for single-tasking. Let’s reward those who have the ability to focus and attempt not to distract them. Or, another way to look at it might be, let’s starting teaching those who are in a state of continual partial attention (newsweek, linda stone) to actually focus.

3) Expectations

As Snook puts it, “the web is founded on a limited set of interactions: links, buttons and forms…Once we’ve created a barrier to usability, either through understanding or technology, we have to work to eliminate those barriers while still maintaining the new interaction.”

Usability, at least in the terms I’m talking about in this post, has a lot to do with expectations. The more a user is surprised by an interaction, the more afraid they are to explore. I guess what I’m trying to get at is I would like to see a lot more web apps using standard interactions and a lot more work on slowly introducing new ones. Let’s start focusing on context and expectations rather than scriptaculous and wow factors (not that they don’t have their place). If you aren’t sure where to start, I would recommend Garrett Dimon’s absolutely fricken amazing slides on Application Interface Design.