Here’s my comments on Zeldman’s excellent post ‘State of the Web’

http://www.zeldman.com/2011/12/29/state-of-the-web-of-apps-devices-and-breakpoints/

This is a very different time to that of the browser wars, and we need to be careful that we don’t apply lessons learned then to the situation we are now in.

The number of and variety of devices and viewports which need to be supported can seem overwhelming, as can the job of making websites work on them. I think we need to take a step back, though, and focus more on the user experience. What kind of experience do we want to deliver to people in specific environments. I have conducted thousands of usability tests, and no-one has every said to me “the trouble with this website is that it’s not been optimised for this viewport.” I do, however, often come across people who get pissed off when they can’t get the full ‘desktop’ site on their smartphone. Unfortunately, many ‘mobile-optimised’ sites apply web app user experience patterns which often do not work on content driven websites.

The whole situation is dire for users.

If we focus on the user experience, then the situation becomes much simpler. There’s a great document on mobile web best practices:

http://www.w3.org/TR/mobile-bp/

So, as well as thinking about breakpoints, I urge developers to also consider how we create a consistent user experience. For example, how do we create a consistent navigation for mobile devices in portrait mode? We can’t use mobile app patterns, because they don’t work on mobile websites. And some solutions may work technically, like converting the nav into a form select, but I’m not convinced they are the optimum user experience.