Category: Mobile

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Mobile

E-Readers Are Dead and Tablets Are Cheap

The Verge reports consumers in general are bailing on so-called “e-readers” for more robust devices.

I conducted research at ATK in March 2013 with a cross-section of our online membership customers. Of the 14 customers interviewed on-site, 100% of them owned an e-reader in the past, but had stopped using it completely. These customers all owned (and liked) the Kindle Fire HD, reporting that it’s like their old e-reader device, “but better”. Some also owned an Apple iPad or iPad Mini for iOS games.

With the Kindle Fire HD starting around $200, these customers reported that a color display for video and web browser is worth the extra $130 (over the original Kindle with ads) for customers looking to purchase a casual device.

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Mobile

Android Gaining Steam in Tablet Share, Expected to Pass iPad by the End of 2013

amazon_bezos_kindles

News out of IDC this week reporting that they expect Android tablets to to outsell iOS tablets by the end of 2013.

This is in line with my usability research being conducted at ATK.

Of the 41 customers I’ve brought in recently who self-identified as being not very technically savvy (0-5 on a 10 point scale), 100% of them own a Kindle Fire or Kindle Fire HD.

When asked why, price was the #1 determining factor. The Kindle Fire HD starts at $199 while Apple’s cheapest iPad starts at $329.

Of users who also had an iPad in their home, it was chastised for being too big and heavy compared to the Kindle Fire HD.

Most users also understood that the underlying system was technically Android, but used the name “Kindle” when discussing the tablet. When asked to name another Android tablet, no user could name one.

Semi-related, GigaOM has an interesting article wondering where Windows plays into the tablet game.

(Photo via allthingsd)

Categories
Design Mobile Web Design

Time.com Brings Responsive Web Design to the Iconic Brand

time

Ranked around the 600th most popular website on the Internet, when Time.com wants to change something as fundamental as the bones of their website, it makes news.

But what’s particularly interesting about their most recent change is that they are now on a completely responsive framework: ads and all. From the article on magazine.com:

One thing that we took as a given was that the advertising in a Responsive context is pretty far behind. We were not only one of the first major news sites to go Responsive, but also one of the first major consumer facing publishing sites in terms of the scale of our site and the extent to which we were rolling out the redesign. We’ve been developing the expertise for very complex ad delivery internally, but we didn’t have a perfect solution right out of the box. That would have added a significant amount of time upfront in terms of trying to understand the potential solutions that the ad community could deliver.

What we ended up doing was making sure there was a 1:1 correspondence between the various breakpoints that we were delivering. We design for six different breakpoints across devices, from desktop down to tablet, all the way down to mobile. So we asked ourselves, if we’re delivering leaderboard and rectangle on desktop, what would the corresponding units be on tablet, on both portrait and landscape mode, and then down to smartphone? What happened was at a couple of the breakpoints we realized there wasn’t a perfect fit. For example, 7 inch tablet devices in portrait mode didn’t have an analog to a 728×90 leaderboard, so we elected not to serve a leaderboard for that scenario, and instead serve only the rectangle ad. We’re working with our desktop ad server, DFP, for most devices, and we use our mobile ad server on smartphone devices, switching between both depending on the user agent. This allows us to provide advertisers a highly effective responsive program. Advertisers get the great Time.com branded user experience and their ads fall into place properly.

The end result? Mobile and tablet traffic are up and now make close to 25% of all traffic. Mobile pageviews are up 23%. Homepage uniques are up 15%. Most importantly, the mobile bounce rate is down 26%.

Read the entire article on magazine.com

Categories
Mobile Reading List

Design Challenges, Mobile and In-House

Filed under “debunking future Apple products that haven’t even been announced“, 5 Design Challenges That Could Derail Apple’s iWatch:

“Culturally, a watch is very tricky,” Poupyrev says. “A watch is not a functional device, no one carries a watch for functionality. You carry a watch as a status symbol, because you’re a snowboarder or a diver or you want to impress someone.”

UX Booth with a write-up about how your company actually needs in-house designers. What they’re not pointing out is that the only difference is where (and who) is playing politics:

Everyone likes to ‘be creative,’ to get involved with what we do. But you often find out that what they really want is control. If you can show people that you are still listening to them and what they do, no one gets freaked out.

LukeW with his notes from Jeremy Keith’s In his Spirit of the Web talk at AEA Atlanta. Included is a great tip about building a mobile lab and using it as a way to network with your surrounding web community:

You don’t have to optimize for every device but you might want to test on different devices. Starting a community device lab will give you access to more devices and help others with testing. Open it up to the community to share their devices.