A big thanks to our guest speaker, Jeremy Pennycook. Here are his slides, and below I’ve noted a few highlights from our conversation:
There are 1.5 billion people on the Internet, and the next billion are expected to come online almost exclusively on mobile devices. Their screen sizes are totally different. Designers and developers for mobile have to think about them holistically and not get bogged down on which devices is what. So to start, there are a few key categories and definitions.
Mobile is something you can hold in one hand, whether the device or phone is big or small. Designers group them so they can think about them as one unit and focus on users and what they’re doing, so we might know what they’re doing at the same time.
Traditional: laptops, desktops, servers, stuff with a keyboard.
Connected: toaster, TV, car, appliances connected to the Internet.
Wearables: Stuff you can put on your body. Watches that communicate with phone to give you notification if you’re texted. Sensors for fitness tracking, glucose monitoring. You can be on that person’s body. Do you want to read an article on your glasses?
The questions for each device’s usage vary. If you’re making a website and they’re browsing on their fridge, why is it there, what do you want to use that information for?
The audience is diverse. And a radical departure from where we were.
Non desktop views of the audience are more than our desktop audience. Two years ago it was 20 percent. Just a few years ago, people didn’t think people would want to consume content this way. Asia and Africa have higher rates of traffic from mobile devices than the US. But, the average person in the US is spending 34 hours of month on their smartphone.
That means we must adapt content to screens. Enter responsive design.
Responsive design: Using the flexibility of webpages to make sure they adapt to diffferent widths and sizes. You can’t design for every screen size and width, so you have to build a flexible system that will respond effectively to whatever device is on. The grandfather of responsive web design, Ethan Marcotte, found that one of his responsive pages could run on an old Apple Newton, revealing that the way they made the site was so flexible and simple that it worked on a machine no one runs anymore.
Mobile is focused on personalized experiences.
Netflix and Pandora, Amazon are kings of this kind of personal experience. These organizations know how to present different experiences based on behaviors they’ve seen. For example, Netflix thinks you’re a father, and shows you some Lego movies. Build a profile of you and give you something back in return, something immediately that you want.
And people share links like crazy. But maybe the way we account for social traffic is missing a huge chunk of traffic. Read more about that “dark” traffic in this piece from The Atlantic, Dark Social: We have the whole history of the web wrong.
How do we pay for this?
There are three open programmer jobs for every one qualified candidate in the US. Doing this stuff is expensive. There are two main ways mobile work is paid for:
Advertising: Sponsorship is competitive. 116 bb dollars spent on Internet advertising last year, which is dwarfed by print. So the potential advertising gains on mobile are staggeringly high. The ad sales for print are only going to go down. Mobile is going up. Something is not right here. A huge opportunity exists for figuring out how to monetize mobile usage through advertising. But, people haven’t universally figured out that banner ads on moblie are stupid. Newer products, like adhesion banners are harder to ignore. They stick to the bottom do well. It’s hard to sell them. Because advertisers are like, no. So far, there are no new standards for mobile advertising, because the industry is taking a long time to catch up to the culture of Web development.
App-purchasing: Selling your app is the way to go, giving your app for free and then selling inside it is the best, because it removes the barrier of downloading originally. But getting people to buy something inside the app is even better. In games, it’s really popular to sell new badges or things for characters to wear. Elise likes buying new clue sets for her Heads Up game.
Where do we go from here?
1 – Effervescence
There’s a big trend toward things that don’t last, like Snapchat. When we put things on the Internet, they have a permanence. Now, the question is, how do we make it non-sharable? How do we make stuff less timeless? There are apps moving toward that sensibility. You have your public persona, you have your more family friends oriented things. The volume of this kind of growth is huge. 700million snaps are sent per day.
People are moving back from the idea of the Internet as a megaphone to the idea of a forum for communities. Sometimes a community is two people. There will be a lot of stuff about making things more pseronalized and giving your more control of how long they last and who sees them.
2 – Internet of Things
Everything is connected, everything has a sensor. Is there weight in this chair or not? How many people went through the street? How many were biking or walking or in a car? We can use that to change traffic lights. More and more things connected to the cloud and can see the data in there. Privacy questions loom large, but civic gains are interesting.
3 – The Next Billion
The BRIC nations of Brazil, Russia, India, China are leading the growth of Internet adopters. When there are more internet users in China than there are humans on the planet that speak English, what happens? Dominance of US on making products on the Internet is still clear, but we don’t know whether it will continue. Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba had huge IPO but probably none of us Americans have used it. In the future, will there be a separate Internet, or one Internet that we figure out how to make interoperable. Can we talk to other folks on other languages?
Smartphones are often the first thing we see when we wake up and the last thing before we go to bed. They’re already huge but growing to become even more common.
Digital Essentials 