Swiping on smartphones and tablets

[coevolving]

Given that at Nov. 1, 2016, StatCounter announced ...

Internet usage by mobile and tablet devices exceeded desktop worldwide for the first time in October according to independent web analytics company

... should we consciously be giving smartphone and tablet users more love, on federated wiki?

The "How to Wiki" pages says ...

Tip: Use arrow keys to scroll left and right.

... which isn't an affordance available on my Android smartphone or tablet. The only control on a touch screen browser is the back button.

[WardCunningham]

The whole notion of editing a knowledge network doesn't fit well with touch devices and is an even worse fit with audio assistants. This is, I believe, why people who seem to know lots about mobile have been unable to sprinkle "useability" on the app as we now know it. Their repeated failure does not encourage us to try again.

Lets start with some basics:

• page width scaled to device width
• horizontal scroll detent on page boundaries.
• ballistic vertical scroll

All this should be approached with a cross-platform approach without placing additional burden on current developers.

[coevolving]

@WardCunningham perhaps the presumption of "editing a knowledge network" on a smartphone or tablet may be a step too far.

Recently, I'm reminded of “The 90-9-1 Rule for Participation Inequality in Social Media and Online Communities” | Jakob Nielsen | 2006 | Nielsen Norman Group at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/participation-inequality/

Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

We might differentiate between a better web app interface for reading on smartphones and tablets via a browser, as opposed to fully-developed native apps (practically Android and iOS versions are implemented separately, because device behaviours of different). As an example, Wordpress has both an Android and an iOS app available, but I don't use that to read blogs.

A recasting of Nielsen's 90-9-1 rule for federated wiki users could be: at some time, 100% of us are lurkers (since we're reading the personal sites of others, not editing our personal collection); 9% of us might become forkers (seeing a page worth curating into our personal collections); and 1% of us become editors of a particular page.

Personally, I actively try to reduce my WWW time sitting in front of a computer. My smartphone and tablet are alternative devices for reading, not for editing. (In addition, I tend to read in bed in a horizontal rather than vertical position, and an Android device that will maintain the desired portrait or landscape position. The lightweight device has proved to be an alternative better than my Thinkpad X230T tablet computer which is too heavy to hold in bed).

The standard Android browser automatically invokes a mobile version for most websites, and there's a dropdown "Desktop site" checkbox that more faithfully shows what a laptop user would expect. The only time I had regularly used a "Desktop site" option was uploading photographs to Flickr, because the provided app wasn't replicating the behaviour that I was accustomed to on the web. That's an edge case use, and I think that most Flickr users would just use the Flickr app (and not a browser for uploading or editing).

So, the user stories I would suggest (not to be all implemented at once, if at all) are:
(i) reading federated wiki on a smartphone or tablet, with gestures presumed by the >50% readers who are on mobile devices, who we define as 100% lurkers;
(ii) forking a wiki page from a neighbour onto a personal collection on a smartphone or tablet, which could be 9% intermittent contributors but practically might never be done because this would really require a native app to be constructed; and
(iii) a full federated wiki app that runs natively on Android and/or iOS, for the 1% heavy contributors at some point in the future that federated wiki is so widely adopted that the demand becomes sufficiently high.

If there's someone in the community who is a specialist in UI work, getting a better reading experience on a mobile device could target the 90% lurkers (or 100% lurkers, as we all are, at some time).

[dobbs]

I took a run at this too in my earliest days with federated wiki. Here were things I remember:

There are a number of affordances in the desktop experience that don't align well with mobile interfaces:

• hover
• drag-and-drop
• holding the shift key down
• arrow-key navigation
• side-by-side displays

I think almost all of the mobile interactions are drag-and-drop with clever gesture recognition to distinguish a swipe left from a swipe right and from scrolling up and down. It has been a couple years since I last looked, but the touch events available in browsers were very low-level... not at the level of gesture recognition. I believe that Apple and Google both are interested in steering developers to their mobile app platforms and probably exclude convenient gesture recognition from the browser development on purpose.

[dobbs]

A quick search: https://www.google.com/search?q=web+page+touch+gesture+code

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/design-and-ux/input/touch/

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Apps/Fundamentals/User_input_methods/Touch_Gestures_and_Events#Pinch

Maybe waiting a couple years was a good strategy. There's at least some prior art or work in progress.