Author
Stephanie Rieger
Stephanie Rieger is a designer and closet anthropologist with a passion for the many ways people interact with technology. With a diverse background, her expertise lies in marrying design, technology and business goals to craft simple, elegant experiences. Stephanie's current focus includes mobile strategy, front-end design, and optimisation of web sites for multiple screens and capabilities. A frequent speaker at mobile industry events, she is also a member of the W3C Mobile Web for Social Development Working Group. Stephanie is Principal at Yiibu—a wee design consultancy based in Edinburgh, and works with clients such as Phillips, Nokia, Opera, and Microsoft.
Also from this author
Each week, new devices appear with varying screen sizes, pixel densities, input types, and more. As developers and designers, we agree to use standards to mark up, style, and program what we create. Browser makers in turn agree to support those standards and set defaults appropriately, so we can hold up our end of the deal. This agreement has never been more important. That’s why it hurts when a device or browser maker does something that goes against our agreement—especially when they’re a very visible and trusted friend of the web like Apple. Peter-Paul Koch, Lyza Danger Gardner, Luke Wroblewski, and Stephanie Rieger explain why Apple’s newest tablet, the iPad Mini, creates a vexing situation for people who are trying to do the right thing and build flexible, multi-device experiences.
The web as we know and build it has primarily been accessed from the desktop. That is about to change. The ITU predicts that in the next 18–24 months, mobile devices will overtake PCs as the most popular way to access the web. If these predictions come true, very soon the web—and its users—will be mostly mobile. Even designers who embrace this change can find it confusing. One problem is that we still consider the mobile web a separate thing. Stephanie Rieger of futurefriend.ly and the W3C presents principles to understand and design for a new normal, in which users are channel agnostic, devices are plentiful, standards are fleeting, mobile use doesn’t necessarily mean “hide the desktop version,” and every byte counts.
