I really like the way all users differ. How they use the web. Everyone has a different way of working on the web. Someone might use it to get information, others do online purchase, the social media user then you get my mother. My mother heard about Facebook, she doesn't know twitter but she knows you can send a email but she thinks the browser is the email. She know something, but not enough yet.
So how do we make things easier for people who are afraid of exploring. Do you use images, but some images might not make sense to them, do you use copy, keep in mind they might not be able to read it, it might be to small.
Now what? What about a talking web for non experienced web users. Do you think that will work? It might.
How will you do this, do you create a special browser for them, or do you add more functionality for them on your website. Will it be a popup that will ask you a question if you are a non experienced user or experienced. Will they even know what to do when they get this popup.
Don't know, what will you do?
Tell them to go to the grand sun and ask him to do what they want to do, or do you tell them just to give up. That might be the easy way out.
I think if you can create a special browser for them that can read for you, even tell you where to go next or even indicate via hotspot what to do or where to click next. An intelligent browser, how about that. Even better, maybe an intelligent OS, that can help guide users like this how to go about the day to day tasks on a computer.
I know my mother is very keen to learn, but it sometimes take a while for her to catch what you are trying to show her, so I think with a system like this it might help people like my mother to learn quicker visually.
So who is keen to build something like this or who have already built something like this, let me know so I cn show my mother.
A fter a few weeks of research I came to the conclusion that you can do responsive back-end coding, but I need to do more research on this to see what the best solution is. The way I see it working is depending on what device or screen is viewing the page the back-end system must display the components accordingly so it can load the correct format style sheet and images.
I'm still continuing my research so I will keep you up to date with my research.
I'm currently using Joomla as my back-end cms, and I'm trying to load certain modules and plugins depending what screen or device is viewing the pages.
W ho of you have heard of responsive design?
There is a few resources I have found on the net with regards to this. You can have a look at what I have found:
- http://colly.com/
- http://www.bostonglobe.com/
- http://www.alistapart.com/d/responsive-web-design/ex/ex-site-FINAL.html
- http://earthhour.fr/
- http://mediaqueri.es/
- http://foundation.zurb.com/
- http://csswizardry.com/inuitcss/
- http://getskeleton.com/
- http://lessframework.com/
- http://html5boilerplate.com/mobile
It's a very cool concept, but what about if you have big photos, a-lot of photos or even just a lot of content and you want to use this for the low end phones, like the Samsung G250. The catch is you don't want everything to download for this phone, so you want to block certain content on device detection before it loads all the html.
Is this possible? I would like to think so, but how?
Please post your comments with regards to this and let's see if we can find a solution.
Here is what I'm thinking, I've been reading more on the script response.js, and here is something interesting direct from the site:
"Response JS is a lightweight jQuery plugin that gives web designers tools for building performance-optimized, mobile-first responsive websites. It provides semantic ways to dynamically swap code blocks based on breakpoints and serve images (or other media) progressively via HTML5 data attributes. Its object methods give developers hooks for triggering responsive actions and booleans for testing responsive properties."
After reading this, it really made me think. It might be a lot of if statements that you might end up writing, but I really do think if you plan it right and if you can customise your cms so that it outputs the correct media according to the correct viewport, this will work. I will be trying this out over the next week or so. I will keep in touch.
PS: Here is an interesting slide-share presentation, have a look.