LinkedIn's App Is...

[Richard Gaskin]

Peter M. Brigham wrote:

> On May 2, 2012, at 2:26 PM, Scott Rossi wrote:
>
>> Recently, Mike Kerner wrote:
>>
>>> Interesting article from VentureBeat on LinkedIn's mobile app.  It was
>>> built in........
>>> http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/02/linkedin-ipad-app-engineering/
>>
>> An interesting (and important, IMO) comment at the end:
>>
>> “You can’t take a mobile app and just scale it up to tablet or desktop,” he
>> said. “A lot of responsive design is building one site that works
>> everywhere, and that works for websites. But it’s bad for apps… You have to
>> come up with a completely different design because of the use case.”
>
> It begins to sound as if Edinburgh's whole approach to coping with multiple platforms
> might be trying pound in a screw with a wrench. I hope they're not heading in the wrong
> direction.

It's not the tool, but how it's used.

Right now, it's fashionable for web designers to impress their clients 
with oh-so-modern techniques like "responsive" designs.

For most of the many decades of software design, "responsiveness" 
referred to performance, how well a system responded to user 
interaction.  This was a user-centric definition which I still prefer, 
since I believe all design decision must be user-centric and 
nomenclature has a subtle way of influencing our thinking; the current 
trend to redefine "responsive design" places the designer at the focal 
point, as it describes an architectural change which makes no visible 
difference to the user over more traditional methods of arriving at the 
same layouts.

In a world where designers' careers may depend less on a portfolio 
demonstrating unquestionable ROI for their clients and relying instead 
on reinventing common words to mean something entirely different 
(remember when "user interface design" became "user experience design", 
even though the actual scope of what the designer did remained entirely 
the same? Ah, the joys of anything that can be inappropriately 
acronymized to incldue an "X" <g>), in web design right now "responsive 
design" means simply using CSS in clever ways to have one layout adapt 
itself to multiple device form factors.

Before "responsive design" web designers simply used two different 
templates, one for full-sized devices and another for hand-helds.  Most 
still do, checking the user-agent string and forwarding to a m.* 
subdomain using the smaller-sized template when needed.

But those who feel the need to more trend-conscious than ROI-conscious 
have jumped on the bandwagon of making one-size-fits-all layouts, with 
the downside being as described in the quote above.

Many important decisions must be made to accommodate different form 
factors, far beyond just the layout.  With smaller devices you need to 
prune content very carefully, making sure that the most important stuff 
is available and easy to get to without sifting through less important 
stuff, while on a full-sized screen you have the liberty of putting both 
side by side affording an opportunity for discovery of things which may 
be less important but no less delightful to the reader.

So whether you're using HTML/JavaScript/CSS or LiveCode or Objective C 
or anything else, the same design principles come into play.

While it's possible to do one-size-fits-all layouts in LiveCode, I don't 
believe RunRev encourages that.

Instead, what I'm seeing is them encouraging folks to factor code and 
content, and crafting different UIs for desktop and mobile.

In fact, they provide different sets of messages for mouse- and 
touch-driven UIs for that purpose.

That said, it is indeed possible to use LiveCode - or any tool - to make 
a single layout that merely scales lazily for the device it's viewed on.

But again, this isn't a function of the tool, but of the designer's 
willingness to put in the appropriate level of effort needed to deliver 
a great UI (or "UX" if you prefer to make acronyms that aren't based on 
a word's first letter <g>).

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World
  LiveCode training and consulting: http://www.fourthworld.com
  Webzine for LiveCode developers: http://www.LiveCodeJournal.com
  LiveCode Journal blog: http://LiveCodejournal.com/blog.irv