Mobile Site Interstitials

With a rapid rise in the user of mobile devices for browsing and a lot of sites publishing their own site specific apps there’s been a trend towards mobile site interstitial pages. Having your own app poses an interesting dilemma for some sites, but these interstitials are just part of a larger trend of problems with browser aware home pages that attempt to serve mobile content.

In the early days of mobile content, a lot of sites would redirect mobile browsers to a mobile specific home page. This may seem sound in theory, but in practice links that are sent out through Twitter and other social media posts were broken: clicking on a link for a specific article would, instead, take you to a home page and you’d have to find your article all over again—if you cared. The Georgia Straight did this for a long time, though I think they’ve since stopped.

Next was the interstitial pleading with you to download a site’s app. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked by IMDB to download their app. I refuse every time, but they keep asking. This is exactly what persistent cookies are for friends: stop pestering me into a form of behaviour I’m not interested in.

The other day I clicked a link and saw the interstitial pages above, with an app download button so large and a continue link so small I couldn’t actually select it. I’m not entirely sure what the point of this sneaky little trick is: downloading the app requires several more steps, so you’re not going to fool me into it. If I can’t click the link I can’t continue and you’ve just lost a page view, and a probably a bunch more from other people in similar situations.

Really though: are there that many people who need to check FailBlog every day that you should even be distributing an app?

Sometimes the land rush to the new mobile world demands a bit of careful consideration, and I don’t think it happened in this case.

Merry Christmas (soundtrack by Six Shooter Records)

What Child is This by Justin Rutledge and The Beauties

Oh Holy Night by Jenn Grant and The Beauties

Silent Night by The Beauties

Millions of Dollars of Usability Research…

…and the crazy kids at Google apparently didn’t think that they needed a selector list that displayed more than three lines when you add a video to your YouTube lists. Go figure.

In general, selector lists should have some relationship to the average length of the list that’s on them and I suspect that most YouTube users don’t even have playlists like this. Of course with a user list that runs in the tens of millions, it’s hard to imagine that most YouTube users share anything in common.

There’s a basic principal of lists like this that they should at the very least provide a reasonably sized view of the list so that it can be scrolled easily. The problem with a three item view is that a small scrolling movement shifts the list entirely and you lose the context of what you’re doing. It’s too easy to get lost.

Five items is a reasonable minimum—this is what Apple uses for the dials that show up when you choose a list like this on your iPhone. Shift the list by one on a five item list and you’ve still got some sense of context.
I’ve said before that I sort of think of Google’s interface design as non-design really. I think they spend so much time not thinking about things that they wind up just deploying a lot of user interface elements that are coded without much thought.

This is all kind of boring, so why don’t we watch the video in the screen shot above instead. It’s the latest from Kendel Carson’s Belle Star project, and it’s pretty awesome.

Blind Pilot at the Wild Buffalo

A couple of weeks ago, I popped down to the Wild Buffalo to catch Blind Pilot a couple of days ahead of their show in Vancouver. A good time was had by all, and I reviewed the show for No Depression.

Kathleen Edwards: Change the Sheets

Despite my best attempts, this space does occasionally seem to slip into being a music blog. When the music concerned is Kathleen Edwards’ new track Change the Sheets is that really a problem?

Voyageur comes out on January 17th. Get it.

Ryan Adams - New York, New York

Radio Buttons that do Nothing

Designing interfaces for large software projects isn’t easy. As an interface designer you can paint the broad strokes of button placement, list layouts and the like but when push comes to shove and thousands of pages of code have to be written it comes down to software engineers to implement them consistently and well. This inevitably leads to mistakes and problems that crop up in spots. Many of these are minor and acceptable, others are just weird.

This one falls into the just weird category.

This is a pick list in Salesforce’s admin pages that allows you to select the data type for a new field when you create it. At the very top of the pick list is a radio button that allows you to choose the None Selected option. I was sort of curious what would happen if I chose it, so chose it I did.

An it turns out that—you guessed it—it throws an error every time.

Just weird.

My Desk on the Cover of a Nickelback Album

In a moment I can only describe as…exciting might not be quite the right word…my office has made the cover of the new Nickelback album and right there, in the fissure running vertically through the album cover you can see the desk I sit at right now (though that’s likely to change.)

I think if you look closely enough you can see me expressing my thoughts on Nickelback as a band in the window.

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