Essentially there are three options for going mobile, you can make your current website optimized for mobile by implementing a responsive design, you can build a dedicated mobile website or you can create and deploy mobile applications.

The first option for businesses to consider is implementing a responsive design. This involves optimizing your website to work on a wide range of devices by designing it on a fluid grid. The site reformats to fit the size of the browser window. We have a great eGuide on this topic that you can download for more information. If your site was built using modern web standards, making it responsive is not a huge investment. It allows for your site to reach any user, on any device with a design that’s optimized for that size screen. Implementing a responsive design requires some careful planning but most sites only really need three core designs (a desktop, tablet and mobile phone version) and transition behaviors. A well-designed responsive site will save you the time and effort of having to maintain separate websites for every device you want to target.

The second way to support mobile is creating dedicated mobile website. With this option, organizations build a separate mobile version of the website with a different code base from the desktop version. User detection recognizes the visitor and delivers the right experience.  This approach allows businesses to streamline the mobile experience to the most common user tasks by mobile users. This can be beneficial for some businesses, but can be extremely limiting for users that want the full meat of a site. The key advantage with designing a separate mobile site is that you’re able to make it much more lightweight than the desktop version. Since mobile users generally have much slower connection speeds than desktop users, a difference of a few seconds to load your site can make or break their experience. However, be careful not to frustrate your mobile audience by removing important information from the mobile site.

While all businesses can benefit from a mobile web presence, those that directly interact with consumers have the most to gain. According to Google Canada, nearly 40 percent of all searches have local intent, meaning they are by people searching for things physically near them. Businesses with a site optimized for mobile, either via a responsive site or a dedicated mobile website will be able to capture this traffic and reap the benefits.

The third option for businesses is to create a mobile app. While this provides many benefits, such as exposure for your brand in the various app stores and better ability to leverage the unique features of each device, mobile apps only makes sense when there is a use case for frequent content access in a mobile context. In order for an app to be regularly used, it must provide value or unique functionality. While apps offer many benefits, they also create challenges, as they must be built for at least three platforms: iOS, Android and Windows Phone to reach the majority of the mobile population. And there is the added breakdown between mobile phone and tablet, which each require unique approaches for user interface design. There are tools such as Titanium and PhoneGap that make cross-platform development easier, but you still have to manage and update multiple apps, and the costs will add up quickly. With over 500,000 apps in the Apple App Store alone, there is a lot of competition for attention, making it challenging for your app to stand out.

Regardless of the path, it’s clear that businesses need to build and implement their mobile strategy now. If you are interested in more information about mobile design, I would encourage you to sign up for our free Demystifying Mobile Design webinar on June 6, 2011.

After sitting through several sessions at the Adobe Digital Marketing Summit last month, it became clear to me that there are two distinct camps in marketing. There are those that get it and have intricate systems in place to measure and act on the intelligence provided by multi-channel metrics, and those that view metrics as a check-box item on their list of requirements – something they know they need but they really don’t know how to leverage effectively.

Collecting metrics today means going beyond tracking the transaction and the business objectives. Solutions like Google Analytics do a good job in gathering and consolidating metrics to track conversions and aggregate data. However this is just the first step for success.

In order to leverage metrics strategically to create loyal and engaged clients, businesses need to look at creating consolidated, personal views of their customers that span channels. They need metrics that can come together to help paint a picture of the end-to-end client relationship and show how to better target messaging to drive engagement. More robust solutions, like the ones packaged under the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, can provide this insight, but they still require expert implementation and know-how to extract the right figures and create this unified view.

Marketers need to find a way to break down the silos and connect the data sources today. Only then can they get a complete view of client interaction and transactions and leverage this data to build strong relationships. After all, it’s only going to get more complex as new engagement models and interaction channels emerge.

We worked closely with Paulina to understand her users and how they leverage her sites. Designing a gesture-based mobile app involves different challenges such as dealing with limited on-screen real estate, and subtle considerations of context and ergonomics. In order to provide mobile users with the simple and efficient experience they expect from their handheld device, we storyboarded all interactions and came up with a progression of screens that allows users to contact a sitter in three steps. In order to make the interface easy to scan, we used appropriate icons and pulled only the essential info from the site. We integrated the standard phone and email features so parents could connect with sitters directly from within the application.

The French version of the application, SOSgarde, officially rolled out this week and is available as a free download in the App Store. The English version, SOSsitter, will be released shortly.

Do you have a mobile project that we can help with? If so, contact us.

With responsive web design, designers and developers can embrace this inherent fluidity from the ground up. As the size of the browser window changes, the content can simply reflow, resize and re-position itself on a sliding scale from the smallest phone to the largest desktop computer.

An example of responsive design. The look of the site changes to fit the visitor's resolution.

My colleague, Kent Rahman, recently authored a great eGuide explaining this approach and providing some guidance around the topic. I would encourage you to download the eGuide today and read more about how you can create engaging experiences for the desktop, web and everything in between.

Check out our own INM.com website for a live example of a responsive design. Our site is built to work on virtually every device, from a mobile phone through to a desktop screen.

A few months ago, USA Today speculated that Apple would become the first $1 trillion company. Earlier this week, Apple made great strides toward this milestone when it surged ahead of ExxonMobile Corp to capture the title of world’s most valuable company.

Whether Apple lives up to this prediction or not, it has already achieved what seemed impossible. The company saw a 300% increase in stock price in less than three years, in a very difficult economic climate.  Today, Apple exceeds Microsoft in market capitalization ($213 Billion for MSFT vs $302 B for AAPL) although, just 14 years ago, Microsoft had to inject $150M into its bank account to keep from going out of business.

These facts are extremely unlikely and unpredictable, but don’t come as a surprise to anyone who has observed the last few decades with objectivity and, amongst other trends, paid attention to principles such as The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.

The most remarkable observation of all, in my opinion, is that Apple achieved this overwhelming success using the exact same strategy as the one used the 80′s with the Macintosh. The company continues to design technologies that best interface with humans and thus empower them in their ability to learn fast and feel gratified by increased accomplishments and productivity. This is the essence of addictive technologies and products; concept that Apple has mastered. The first buyer is already standing in line for the iPhone 5 – a product that has yet to even be announced.

In other words, Apple remained firm on its course to cater to fundamental human needs and instincts: It’s the world that has evolved around it.

The interface borrows heavily from the Flash UI.  So Flash users will be up and running in no time with Edge.  There are five main panels: Tools, Properties, Elements, Stage and Timeline. 

Elements are added to the stage either by creating them from the tools panel, or by import (SVG, PNG, JPG, GIF).  For now the tool set is limited to text, rectangle and rounded rectangle but that will certainly expand as the product develops. 

Animation within the UI is done using keyframes and tweens that are graphically represented on the timeline.  Unlike Flash however, tweens are generated automatically between two keyframes, and the concept of “blank” frames is removed entirely. You can also select and modify the length of all the tweens for one element simultaneously, something that I found myself using constantly.  Layers have changed as well, with each element in the animation becoming its own layer, so no ability to create empty layers and group elements at all.  The result is a greatly simplified and streamlined experience.  Think of it as Flash lite.  We’ll see how this handles the increasing complexity of successive releases, but for now it works quite well.   Within a few hours I was able create an animation that would have otherwise taken much, much longer had I coded it by hand.  In this respect, Edge is already on the right track.

The animation is rendered using JSON, the JQuery javascript library and CSS3.  Despite being billed as an HTML5 tool, Edge doesn’t generate HTML5 code at all.  That means no SVG or Canvas (you can import SVG, however).  According to Adobe support for HTML5 animations will be included in future releases. 

One of the major drawbacks in this release is that Edge outputs non-semantic HTML.  For example, there is no way to assign <p> or <h1> tags from within the UI.  All elements are wrapped in meaningless <div> tags, to be manipulated externally via Javascript.  This poses a number of problems in terms of accessibility, browser rendering, validation and SEO.  According to Adobe, they are aware of the problem, but chose to sacrifice semantics in order to get this version out quickly and accumulate feedback.  We’ll be following closely, as this is certainly a deal-breaker in its current form.

Another important feature that didn’t make the cut is interactivity.  Currently there is no way to add links or other interactive elements to your animations without modifying the Edge-generated code externally.  Again, this being only a limited preview, we can certainly expect to see this functionality added as development continues.

Since Edge uses the latest CSS3 animations, only newer Webkit browsers and mobile devices can render the output.  This means no IE support below version 9, making its use impractical for most production scenarios today.  That being said, this puts Adobe in a much better position moving forward, as more and more people adopt standards friendly browsers.

Despite the drawbacks, Adobe Edge is an important first step towards a future of cross-compatible, standards based web development.  It will be interesting to see how Edge will be incorporated into the Adobe family; whether it will be released as a stand-alone or simply amalgamated into future products.  And let’s not forget about poor old Flash.  What impact with this have on Flash in the long term?  Is this a signal that Adobe is ready to transition away from one of their core products, or perhaps narrow Flash’s focus into an area where it can maintain its competitive advantage, like gaming, for example?  In any case, there’s no question that Edge has the potential to be a game-changer.

With the introduction of Edge, Adobe is taking a huge step outside its comfort zone and embracing a vision of the future of the web that many people have been advocating for quite some time.  Let’s hope that they continue moving in this direction.

A few weeks ago, WordPress announced that it was dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. For now, this will only affect blog writers and publishers, but this could soon affect viewers and readers of these blogs as well.

WordPress is definitely not the first to make this kind of announcement. Google announced that it will not support IE6 when it makes new improvements to its YouTube, Gmail Notifier and Google Docs services. Facebook, White Pages, Digg and many more sites are also on-board.

Microsoft, the maker of IE6, has been actively promoting its website http://www.ie6countdown.com to encourage and explain why people should move away from the browser. IE6 is two-months short of its tenth birthday, making it a real relic in a technology landscape where new browser versions are announced every 3-4 months. In fact, trying to load most websites on IE6 will bring up a very intrusive graphic encouraging the user to upgrade.

IE6 Compatibility Warning

Since many of our clients are concerned with how their site performs and how it looks across different browsers, I’ve kept up-to-date with this ever-growing list of companies that are no longer willing to support older browsers. Most modern websites and online applications take advantage of newer technologies and formatting capabilities that were not around 10 years ago, making it nearly impossible for older technology like IE6 to provide full functionality or even render the pages properly.

Unfortunately, 10% of the connected world still uses IE6. This means that a good portion of internet users do not even realize that their web user experience is being compromised. They don’t know that the website they’re viewing isn’t supposed to look strange with overlapping graphics and missing components. They also don’t know about features like tabbed browsing, the omnibar (a unique bar for entering the URL or the desired search terms) or even about the world of plug-ins and extensions available to maximize productivity and enhance their user experience.

The truth is, however, that it is rarely the individual’s home or small business computer that is stuck on such an old browser. For consumers, Microsoft has a good way of pushing updates. It is typically large organizations like pharmaceutical companies, banks, and governments that choose to impose a closed technology environment, where the general culture is not to adopt new solutions. Company-wide upgrades are deemed too costly, and very often, other inter-connected applications come into play where those other applications do not support newer browser versions.

Even though we are discussing a 10-year old piece of software, it is definitely a very hot topic in the industry. With broader support for HTML5, we could finally see the real death of IE6. With HTML5, standard browsers are now able to embed and recognize tags such as “video” and “audio” without complicated coding or third-party player integration. When applications and sites start taking advantage of these functions, suddenly it won’t just be the design of the pages that displays incorrectly. Vital information will be missing and the user experience will be compromised on some of the most popular websites.

This doesn’t come as much of a surprise to me, as I never really understood Apple’s reasoning for forcing subscription model changes. Asking publishers to change a successful multi-channel subscription model just wasn’t realistic, even for Apple. This to me is parallel to Apple’s initial requirement that all iPhone applications had to be natively built using Objective C. The company soon realized that while this approach would protect the application quality and user experience, that the trade-offs were too high in terms of limited developer adoption. They simply needed to open up additional options for building iPhone applications to ensure that there were compelling titles available to sell the hardware. 

Apple’s subscription changes come hot on the heels of the Financial Time’s announcement that it was abandoning its native iOS application in favor of offering a paid web application (in turn circumventing the 30% Apple fee). In addition to the Financial Times, many smaller publications were looking for other ways to package and deliver their content without surrendering one-third of their revenue.

Now, Apple is giving publishers the choice. For some publishers, the Apple subscription model, even with its 30% fee, does make perfect sense. It provides a ready-made subscription handling process and it offers significant opportunities for promotion through iTunes and the upcoming Apple Newsstand. But for publishers with an existing, successful multichannel strategy, there is now a choice to make.

This is where the Adobe CQ5 platform comes into play. The technology, acquired by Adobe last year from Day Software, is a robust, modular platform that encompasses web content management, digital asset management, and social collaboration. It is truly an enterprise caliber solution that delivers a balance of effectiveness, improved client experience and multi-channel optimization. 

What’s really impressive about CQ5 is the platform’s capability to deliver great user experiences at a reasonable cost. It natively supports rich content, and leverages standard components for organizations to easily craft rich experiences and deliver contextual content to different user profiles.

CQ5 is like the Mercedes of web technology. It’s refined, finely engineered, robust, and economical to operate. Everyone would love to have the power and prestige it delivers, but it won’t be a fit for every client, or every project budget. But we with this in our toolbox, it does equip us to serve a broader range of clients on web projects and it will enable us to push the boundaries further for certain projects.

There are several different paths to building a mobile application, including:

• Native Development: This involves building a separate application for each platform using the recommended native language.  
• Titanium Appcelerator: An open source platform that allows developers to build mobile apps in Javascript and to package them for delivery on different platforms (Mac, Windows, mobile).
• Open Plug: A software developer kit (SDK) to build cross-platform native mobile apps using ActionScript/Flex.
• QT: A cross-platform application and UI framework that enables developers to build once and deploy across many platforms.

Native development provides the broadest scope of functionality and ensures that an app is adapted to work well for the specific OS/device. However, development requires specific expertise in proprietary technology (Objective C for iPhone/iPad/iPod, C#/Silverlight for WP7, Java for Android and for Blackberry), and creating a cross-platform app means essentially starting from scratch each time.

For organizations that are looking to package websites and web applications as native apps, solutions like PhoneGap may be a good fit. This open source framework wraps your application to create a native app that leverages a web viewer component. Organizations can also take the web application route, where they build an HTML5-driven application that will run on most systems and devices. This can work if the application is very simple and leverages only the common denominator functionality of HTML5 that is supported across all browsers.

Titanium, Open Plug, and QT all provide efficiencies as they leverage existing skills and allow developers to use a common base of code to package an app for each platform. They also allow for programmers to work in the language they know best, which means fewer errors and faster coding. However, the features they support are the “lowest common denominator”, which limits the functionality of the applications you can create.

Adobe is also releasing more mobile support with its next generation of Flex/AIR and will have tools to cover all mobile platforms.

The best path for an organization really depends on the team’s expertise, budget and time-to-market requirements. While native development offers the most functionality and more options, alternatives like Titanium, QT and OpenPlug provide massive advantages in leveraging a team’s existing skills to deliver an application that is faster-to-market and ultimately cheaper to build.

The answer is not black and white either, as you can use a mix of tools to accomplish your business objectives. For example, you can build an application for one platform using native development and use a tool like Titanium to deliver to other, less important platforms. Or you can use Titanium to quickly deliver a prototype or first version app of an app to the market for user validation and feedback while you are working on a more full-featured native application.

So, which is best? This will depend on the desired functionality of your app, the team you have working on it and their programming knowledge, your budget, and your time to market strategy. There really is no one-solution-fits-all option.