Making the Student Handbook mobile-friendly

Duncan Stephen
Friday 13 August 2010

Yesterday I wrote a post about our first steps into the mobile web. Today I will look at what I had to do to make it happen.

Learning about the principles

The first step was to think about the principles behind mobile web design. I am well versed in the principles behind desktop web design, but mobile is a different ball game. The focus is even more strongly centred on a streamlined approach — less is more.

The only other thing I really knew is that there are no easy answers. I had to do my research.

The first question to ask myself was, is a three year old book about mobile web design still relevant? Gareth let me borrow this book, and while parts of it feel out of date, there is still plenty of insight to chew over. It is particularly useful when thinking about older or non-‘smart’ mobile devices. There is a tendency nowadays for articles about mobile to be heavily focussed on iPhone and Android. While this book does feature the iPhone, it is much more about the wider principles of mobile web design.

I also found it useful to take a look at Patrick Lauke’s slides about the mobile web, which he delivered at IWMW. These are more up-to-date, and it was useful to refresh my memory about what I had learnt.

There are three major approaches to tackling mobile:

  1. Do nothing and hope for the best.
  2. Create a separate mobile site.
  3. Adapt what already exists.

Option 3 was the only one really open to us. This option requires compromises to be made. It probably also leads to the largest file sizes. But it is easier, and if you use web standards and code your website well, it should work well enough on a mobile device.

The stylesheet

The first step was to create a stylesheet optimised for mobile devices. A decision was taken early on to focus on the current generation of browsers, as mSaint is designed primarily for smartphones. Mobile Safari, Android and Opera Mini and Mobile all ignore stylesheets with the attribute media="handheld". Modern mobile browsers like to think of themselves as a cut above that sort of thing. They try to render a webpage more or less as you would expect it to on a desktop.

(Handheld stylesheets have always been shakily supported anyway. I have created one nonetheless as a fallback for any mobile browsers that prefer to deliver a webpage in this way.)

But accepting that modern mobile browsers will render the desktop version was not an option in this case. The technique around this is to use CSS3 media queries, which allow us to dictate which stylesheet is used based on the width of the device or browser window. Perfect for adapting content for mobile!

There is a good tutorial on how to use media queries. Guess which browser doesn’t quite like it? Internet Explorer’s issues were the source of some of the biggest puzzles I faced. But since I figured out how to make IE play nicely, it has worked well.

Design

So that it integrates well with mSaint, we have removed a lot of the devices that you find on a standard University webpage. The header, main navigation, left hand navigation and footer have all gone. Basically, everything except the content has gone. Thank goodness for display: none;!

Much of the rest of the stylesheet has been lifted straight from the existing stylesheets. So it should look and feel pretty familiar to regular users of the University website. The other major change I made was to lay out all of the content so that it sits in one mobile-sized column. So any items that appear in the right hand sidebar on the desktop version of the Student Handbook will appear beneath the main content on the mobile version.

When deciding on the ideal width of the column, I settled on a maximum width of 480px. This is the width of an iPhone in landscape mode. But I did not just make this decision with iPhone goggles on. Looking at standard screen resolutions for mobile devices (QVGA, HVGA, VGA and WVGA), 480px is the dimension that comes up the most.

Viewport

The main thing that I have learnt that I was not aware of before is to do with the viewport. The iPhone automatically displays every webpage as though it were 980px wide, and this becomes the scrollable area of the webpage. But if you have optimised the content specifically for mobile display, this is no good. The text is zoomed out and unreadable. The user must manually zoom in, even though there is absolutely nothing on the rest of the page.

The answer is to use the viewport meta tag:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />

This tells your mobile browser to automatically zoom in as though the web page were as wide as the mobile device. You can also set a specific width, as well as setting an initial scale and control how far the user can zoom in and out. Originally introduced by Apple for Safari, it seems as though most modern mobile browsers recognise and support this — though this hasn’t been without its problems.

I have been a bit iffy about including the viewport meta tag on these standard web pages. From what I gather, its presence is supposed to indicate that the webpage has been optimised for mobile, which ours hasn’t. It also appears to alter the behaviour of Opera Mobile (by disabling the mobile view option). However, it appears to have no effect on the way desktop browsers display the page, while making it look much better on mobile devices. So we are sticking with it for the time being.

But just when I had got my head around how to control the viewport, imagine my shock when I discovered that a pixel is not a pixel. That is to say, the number of pixels on your device is not the same as the number of pixels that appear to be displayed. Accommodating different screen sizes and resolutions seem complicated at first, and unfortunately it only becomes more complicated as you learn more!

Apple have a very useful guide for developers called Safari Reference Library. It was hugely useful in helping me understand about the viewport and a lot of the other quirks of Safari for iOS, such as automatic text resizing. I think Safari tries to be too clever for its own good sometimes. This makes it a brilliant mobile browser overall, but it is quite frustrating as a developer to try and work out precisely what it is doing.

Incidentally, Opera also have a good mobile web optimisation guide.

Testing

Testing for mobile is notoriously difficult. There are hundreds of different devices, operating systems and browsers out there, with radically differing capabilities. Testing every possible combination is even more impossible for mobile. It makes designing for desktops look like a piece of cake.

The book Mobile Web Design by Cameron Moll contains a highly interesting section about Yahoo!’s procedure for testing their 2006 FIFA World Cup mobile site. By selecting a range of 5-10 devices from top- to bottom-end to test on, they felt that they had covered a wide enough range for the website to work on most mobile browsers. The technique paid off for them as it was a hugely successful website, attracting a peak of 290 million page views in one day. And that was four years ago. Incredible!

We are not aiming for that sort of audience, so our testing has been an even more modest affair. I used my own iPhone to test it in Safari and Opera Mini. But this has been quite frustrating as it is very difficult to get a signal in my office. Upstairs, my colleague has also been testing on an Android emulator.

The Opera Mobile emulator has also been hugely useful, particularly for comparing different screen sizes. How important Opera Mobile actually is, I am not sure. At the end of last semester, around 1% of visits to the University website were on a mobile device. Among those users, Opera does not appear to figure as highly as I had expected.

There is more information about mobile emulators here. These are highly useful tools for finding out how a mobile browser will render a page. But unfortunately they tell us little about how it genuinely feels to use a website on a particular type of device.

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