Design for the Senses
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Until recently, creating mobile web designs that look and feel like native apps
has pretty much been an impossible dream. There are plenty of
creative workarounds to try
and bring that native ‘feel’ to mobile web browsing, but so far we’ve struggled
to bridge the gap between native and the web.
However, a slew of new, high-powered smartphones is allowing designers to
finally unleash complex, performant, native-feeling smartphone UI patterns —
designed and built for the web. These patterns are blurring the lines between
native apps and the web.
Take Style.com — their new adaptive website is an
interesting example of how to provide a great user experience at different screen-sizes,
while also targeting different device capabilities. This has led to some truly
advanced mobile designs that work extremely well on recent devices.
In this post, you’ll find five awesome design patterns from Style.com that
you’ve likely never seen before while browsing the web on a smartphone.
Web-based calendars on mobile devices have always been a pretty terrible
experience. This is why most designers avoid calendars like the plague, opting
instead for a different design pattern like a simple list of dates.
However, by getting a little creative with carousels and some JavaScript magic,
you can create very usable calendars for users on mobile.
On Style.com, the fashion show calendar was created by binding two carousels
together to help users easily browse through dates and events. That’s right:
double carousels.
Off-canvas flyouts are areas of the page that live out of the viewport until a
user taps or swipes the appropriate area. They have become a primary navigation
pattern for mobile in both native and web apps, and you can even find them on a
handful of desktop websites too.
Most web pages use off-canvas flyouts to simply hide menus and other static
content, but it’s possible to use them to display a whole host of other dynamic
content too.
On Style.com, both static and dynamic content are placed off-canvas. Primary
navigation is hidden within an off-canvas menu on the right-hand side, while on
the left-hand side of the header a secondary off-canvas flyout reveals a user’s
recent history on the site.
The recent history includes pages, as well as individual slides from fashion
shows. Seeing as Style.com is a fairly
content-heavy website,
it’s a great feature for users who want to review their favourite content after
browsing through the site.
This technique uses the WebKit
localStorage paired
with the off-canvas system Mobify developed in-house, called
Pikabu. There are a bunch of off-canvas libraries
available, you can also check out David Bushell‘s
Responsive Off-Canvas Menu,
and Christopher Yee‘s Pushy.
Pinching to zoom text is generally regarded as the sign of poorly formatted
content — but images are a different case entirely.
Just like with native maps and images in apps, users frequently want to zoom
into pictures on the web to see more detail.
Style.com has progressively enhanced their many image galleries so that users
can zoom into any slide and view the image in finer detail. However, they’ve
done so in a way that does not zoom into the viewport — just the
container that the image is in.
Since this feature requires a fair amount of processing power, it has only been
enabled for users with Retina iOS smartphones. Remember, it’s important to
treat performance as a design feature, so make sure that complex features are
only turned on for devices that can support them in a performant way!
At Mobify, we use a device’s pixel density (among other factors) to estimate how
powerful the device is. This allows us to ensure that we provide an experience
that works wonderfully on devices that can handle it — without worrying
about breaking the experience on older devices.
To replicate this viewport-constrained, pinch to zoom image functionality, check
out the popular hammer.js library.
There are two main reasons why large image carousels are a pain to implement on
mobile: performance and navigation.
But if you overcome both of these challenges, you can create a very native-feeling
image browsing experience to really take advantage of all those wonderful high
DPI screens out there.
The first challenge is a performance one: devices are not usually powerful enough
to render many objects in a row.
Imagine an image that is as big as a device’s screen (or twice as big if it’s a
Retina device). Now, since it’s an image carousel, imagine a few dozen or even
hundreds of those kind of images next to each other in a row. How wide will
it be?
On Style.com, one particular image carousel came in at more than 80,000px
wide. Yikes.
Most mobile browsers crash just trying to render that many elements on page —
even if they are just empty placeholders with no media content.
To get around this, Style.com has optimized image carousels so that inactive
slides take no space on the page. Using the DOM rewriting properties of
Mobify.js, images are requested on-demand only, and thus the
amount of CPU resources required for their rendering is significantly lower.
In some cases this made the mobile gallery up to 10x smaller (from 6.2MB down
to 650kB on one page).
The second challenge was around navigation. If you have all of these beautiful
images in a long row, how can you quickly move between them?
The answer lay in creating a grid view from the carousel HTML. This can be done
relatively easily by changing the image sources and CSS.
An alphabetical index is a great way to help users scroll through long lists of
items. Apple provides one to help users select contacts and music in iOS, but
it’s proven to be pretty difficult to bring this functionality to the web in a
way that works as well as its native counterparts.
On Style.com, this design technique been achieved using a double carousel (just
like the calendar!) and iscroll.js. And, with a
new spin on it, the alphabetical list only exists within the list’s container,
so other content on the page isn’t affected!
Until recently, the difference between browsing the web and using a native app
has been clear to anyone who uses a smartphone.
But as devices become more powerful, and responsive and adaptive techniques
become more sophisticated, it’s increasingly possible to blur the boundaries
between native and web. Style.com is one such example of how you can use
adaptive techniques to create some really interesting features that otherwise
wouldn’t have been possible to bring to users on mobile.
So with more and more people progressively enhancing the web to take advantage
of the capabilities of modern devices in this manner, it’s likely that we’re
about to see an explosion of truly advanced and noteworthy mobile web
designs. Exciting!
The techniques in this post were developed by the Style.com team and Anton
Bielousov, one of Mobify’s engineers. If you have any questions about them,
feel free leave a comment or reach out to Anton
directly @bielousov.
And if you’ve recently used a mobile or responsive website featuring some cool
design patterns that felt completely native, let me know in the comments!
The following is a guest post by Zach Saucier. Zach cooks up some pretty inspiring animations over on CodePen. I couldn’t be happier that he wanted to share some of the tricks he uses to create them, especially because they are things we all strive for: efficiency, reusability, practicality, and speed.
I’ve fallen into the habit of creating CSS animations in my free time, inspired by things I come across during the day. To create the animations as …
CSS Animation Tricks: State Jumping, Negative Delays, Animating Origin, and More is a post from CSS-Tricks
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