💾 Archived View for sdf.org › icemanfr › 2023 › 18.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:46:15. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-12-28)
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I have read an article on User eXperience (UX) for Chinese Web and the conclusion was everything goes to Wechat or mobile browsers. A large majority of users haven't got any PC and won't have one in the future. Just a smartphone and that mix of instant messenger, social network and pay/ID app that is Wechat now in China.. I think it will be the same in most of the African and south American countries where 4G and 5G network are more used than an ADSL or Fiber network. That's why I made the choice of a very light HTML and a mobile friendly website. But everything is written and tested on… a desktop PC.
I know the option in Firefox to view a site as a mobile and with limited bandwidth : Shift+Ctrl+M and I have used it when I was in the setup of the website. I have also made some speed tests and HTML compliance tests in both modes : Desktop or Mobile. That's why it is simple with a simple menu and a limited amount of links, sometimes. The use of the internet today is not the same than in the 90s or 2000s. Most of the websites are so bad, so heavy, so buggy. Most of the users are not using simple HTML links but prefer buttons, images, videos. I often compare this type of use to TV vs Books. But I'm not the last one to read books on my smartphone. I'm not a fan of videos because it takes more time to reach what you are looking for. It's very useful for tutorials or to show examples. For me, the two ways can live side by side and cooperate.
But the subject is the length of the text. I often write more 1000 words in a post. It's more than many can read. I'm looking at myself and how I read on the web. It depends on what is the subject, on the style of the writer, on the hour I read, .… I don't like too shorts posts in newspapers. I don't like too long posts to say little, or post where the writers stands out more than his subject (many reviewers are like this...). But I'm OK to say that I'm «old school», not using social networks anymore after years of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and every try during the 10 last years. I like to write on my laptop because it's awful to write something long on a smartphone or a tablet. And so I like to read on the same terminal. I sometimes test my articles in a small windows like a smartphone but I don't realize if it's suitable for a common reader.
I don't want to fall into that trap : Writing what the reader expects. It's a common trap for news medias, looking for trends and writing on it, in the way the reader is considering to love it. That's what made me flee newspapers and paper magazines and many websites (and some blogs who wanted to make money). So if the future is mobile, I will just adapt the interface to make it readable on every terminal of that planet. That's all. (And also for disabled and partially sighted people). No complicated CSS, no pictures everywhere, just something easy to look at, to read, to share, to copy. That's also a paradox of Gemini because it's the idea but only informed persons can read it with the right browser (or proxy) on a smartphone.
I think the internet is divided between the rich and the poor, in terms of terminals, bandwidth and of course information. It's maybe time not to forget that in UX, webdesign, and content. I'm not an influencer at all and don't want to be. I don't consider human above all species. But sometimes, it's useful to remember that we all share the same planets, despite all our differences. It's the same for what we call Internet, a big planet of data, networks that we can access quite everywhere now but we an awful amount of different protocols, rules, interfaces, languages, reinventing sometimes the same thing in different ways. We just forget the initial idea of that tool. The way it is designed now is not progress, it's division by the money (look at how much memory a browser is using now and for what).
To answer to the initial question, it's not a question of mobile or desktop. It's a question of finding the lowest common denominator, the simplest way to share to everyone, in the most confortable way to create and to read.
or by a reply on your blog