A morning with John Allsopp

With the dust settling on Web Directions 2014, the team had a quick top up with John Allsopp dropping in for a couple of talks.

The first; Satisfying Movements: animating User Experiences with CSS was a good talk to get both designers and developers on common ground as to what was both possible and feasible in web animation. Better yet, it was animation that required no JavaScript. John then finished up with a demonstration on how to get your interaction with the DOM as minimal as possible, perfect for ARM devices (mobiles and tablets).

And for the second; Offline first: better, faster web experiences with offline technology was the surprise of the two for me. Pitched at a more technical crowd, for a humble interaction designer such as myself, it was a great eye-opener to ‘what does responsive mean?’ Responsive isn’t just detecting the screen width (maybe height if you’re fancy) and adjusting the page to fit.

Responsive is responding to anything we can discover from the user, their device and their environment.

In the case of smart phones, that’s quite a bit of data. Not only do we know the screen width; we might know if the device is online or offline; we might know the bandwidth; we might know if the user is in the suburbs or in the city.

An idea popped into my head…

We always fight the fight of ‘how long should the registration form be’? The savvy clients let us build a long and short form for different pages, usually a campaign landing page vs the rest of the site. However, what if we could detect the bandwidth of the user? What if we could detect that they have limited bandwidth and we send them the four field form now and follow up with a ‘complete registration’ email tonight.

All possibilities…