Thursday, May 31, 2012

Rules for Mobile Usability in RIAs

We've been working with making our web apps mobile friendly and have come across a few rule-of-thumb type rules that can be applied to an application user interface at design time to help that process:

  1. All hover interactions need to be on elements with only that action.  The design cannot have a button with both click and hover events as mobile devices wont trigger the hover event.  On mobile devices the hover event needs to be a click thus conflicting with the other click event.
  2. All external, modal iframes need to be new browser windows/tabs.  iframes wont scroll on certain mobile devise, which you could get around by sizing the container unless it's a modal or you don't have control over the code on the iframe.
  3. All PDFs need to be a new browser window/tab.  Some devices do not support document download and if the document is in a confined container the user will not be able to scroll.
I'm sure there will be more rules like this as I get into more complex mobile web development but for the time being this covers the majority of any mobile friendly conversion.

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