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“If you’re designing a website and not thinking about the user experience on mobile and tablets, you’re going to disappoint a lot of users,” he warns. Designer Tom Muller thinks big brands getting on board will lead to agencies “increasingly using responsive design as a major selling point, persuading clients to future-proof digital marketing communications”. When doing so, Clearleft founder Andy Budd believes we’ll see an end to retrofitting RWD into existing products: “Instead, RWD will be a key element for a company’s mobile strategy, baked in from the start.” Because of this, Budd predicts standalone mobile-optimised sites and native apps will go into decline: “This will reduce the number of mobile apps that are website clones, and force companies to design unique mobile experiences targeted towards specific customers and behaviours.”

During 2012, the average site size crept over a megabyte, which designer/developer Mat Marquis describes as “pretty gross”, but he reckons there’s a trend towards “leaner, faster, more efficient websites” – and hopes it sticks. He adds: “Loosing a gigantic website onto the web isn’t much different from building a site that requires browser ‘X’: it’s putting the onus on users, for our own sakes.”

Designer and writer Stephanie Rieger reckons that although people now know “web design isn’t print,” they’ve “forgotten it’s actually software, and performance is therefore a critical UX factor”.

in 2010, Google did something very different. Google announced website speed would begin having an impact on search ranking. Now, the speed at which someone could view the content from a search result would be a factor.

Google's Matt Cutts announced that slow-performing mobile sites would soon be penalized in search rankings as well.

While Google has been intentionally unclear in which particular aspect of page speed impacts search ranking, they have been quite clear in stating that content relevancy remains king.

Among tablet owners, at least, reading on the mobile Web is preferable to using native apps, according to a recent survey from the Online Publishers Association. 

Forty-one percent of tablet-bound readers prefer reading on the Web, compared to the 30% who would rather launch a standalone app from a specific publisher. Aggregated news-reading apps like Flipboard and Zite rated surprisingly low on the list. 

Last month, Jason Pontin, editor of MIT Technology Review, wrote a widely read takedown of native apps, citing Apple's steep revenue share and the technical and design challenges associated with producing such apps.  "But the real problem with apps was more profound," Pontin wrote. "When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web, but stories in apps didn’t really link."

In 2014, the mobile Web will die. That’s right, that bastardized version of the normal Web will crawl into a shallow grave and leave us all in peace. No more websites crippled with horrible “mobile.yourawfulwebsite.com” URLs. No more reading janky websites that display way too much fine print or omit crucial features when viewed on your smartphone or tablet. 

The mobile Web will die because the companies that make the engines it ran upon are killing their mobile browsers and replacing them with fully functional versions that run on any device. In 2014, these browsers will be updated to put the final nail in its coffin. In turn, developers will continue to build websites that can work across any screen size. Responsive design (what we do at ReadWrite to make the site look pretty everywhere) will continue to grow in 2014 as people realize that their old websites are losing them a lot of traffic from mobile devices.

Location-based consumer apps didn't let me down; as predicted, they remained stagnant this year. Foursquare and its kindred just are not hot anymore, even if Foursquare did just raise a funding round this week.

The parallax style has excited web developers and inspired any number of hype lists. It's also triggered a backlash among critics who feel its bells-and-whistles approach detracts from actual content. Pitchfork creative director Michael Renaud recently told the Atlantic Wire he expects people to "tire" of the trend within a year or two.

the parallax site was only superior in one sense--fun. None of the other survey measures indicated a significant difference in user experience between the two sites. Parallax didn't even edge the standard site in questions about visual appeal (although participants did think it looked slightly more "professional"). Frederick also discovered one critical disadvantage of parallax: test participants who suffered from motion sickness found the style disorienting.

Sobering as this first careful study of parallax might be to web designers, Frederick still believes it's a fad with a future. He cautions developers to think more carefully about the context in which parallax is applied. Text-heavy sites that employ parallax scrolling seem more likely to disorient users, he says. Sites that emphasize visual elements--images, infographics, or data visualizations, in particular--are probably a better fit for the style.

The average top 1,000 web page is 1575 KB.

Page growth is a major reason why we keep finding, quarter after quarter, that pages are getting slower. And faster networks are not a cure-all for the challenges of page bloat.

According to Akamai’s most recent quarterly State of the Internet report, the global average connection speed among the top 50 internet-using countries is 3.3 Mbps — a 5.2% increase over the previous quarter. But when we’re seeing year-over-year page growth ranging from 45-50%, it’s easy to see that the gap is widening.

Adobe analyzed more than 1 billion visits for more than 1,000 websites and found that 8% of traffic came from tablets. That ranks ahead of the 7% of visits that came from smartphones. Of course, that leaves 85% or so percent of Web traffic still coming from desktop PCs and laptops. 

no matter how much we harp on the notion that the mobile Web is not just the future, but also the present, the vast majority of Web traffic still comes from the legacy that is the PC. 

The new laptop, which Apple unveiled last week, already has Web designers and developers trying to figure out how they're going to create sites and Web apps that look good on the new machine without leaving the rest of the Web's population behind.

One of the key advantages of these high-resolution displays is their crisp, highly readable rendering of text. That particular buck stops with the Web browsers, which are much more varied on the desktop than on mobile devices. Naturally, Safari supports retina-friendly text, but Chrome is still working on it, and other browsers will presumably follow.

For image-heavy sites, swapping out higher-resolution images can have a substantial impact on page load, which in turn affects user experience and even search engine rankings. 

Upgrading your connection from 1Mbps to 2Mbps halves the PLT, but quickly thereafter we are into diminishing returns. In fact, upgrading from 5Mbps to 10Mbps results in a mere 5% improvement in page loading times!

For every 20ms improvement in latency, we have a linear improvement in page loading times.

Latency on the other hand affords no such "easy" wins. Yes, the equipment can be improved to shave off a few milliseconds, but if you want significant improvements, then the answer is simple: you need new, shorter cables to reduce the propagation delay.

The principles behind Web We Want, which is coordinated by the World Wide Web Foundation, are as follows: Affordable access to a universally available communications platform The protection of personal user information and the right to communicate in private Freedom of expression online and offline Diverse, decentralized and open infrastructure Neutral networks that don’t discriminate against content or users

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds.

Many mouseover interactions are completely dysfunctional on a touch device

Instead of buying a state of the art monitor, buying a cheap monitor and several low-end devices to test your work on might be a better investment.

Hiding content and showing it on mouseover was considered to be a decent design pattern

Firefox OS is of the Web, for the Web. There is no such thing as a “native” app to Firefox OS. If an object exists as a web page, it can easily be turned into an app for Firefox OS by essentially turning it into a shortcut for the browser-based operating system to access. Instead of having to develop specifically for mobile platforms like iOS, Android or Windows Phone, the Web is the platform for Firefox OS. 

If you are a developer, you can build an app for Firefox OS by making some small changes to your website. You can then test the app by downloading the Aurora Marketplace onto your Android or using the browser-based Firefox OS Simulator. 

According to IDC, mobile web browsing will soon eclipse desktop browsing in the U.S. and worldwide. This consumption of mobile content isn’t just happening on the go; 93% of people are now using their mobile devices to browse the Web from their homes, according to a study from Google.

The main development methodology behind responsive design is the use of media query functionality in CSS3. Media queries target not only certain device types (e.g., Android vs. iPhone), but actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device that renders the page. For example, the code below “asks” the device if its max horizontal resolution is equal to 480px: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css", media="screen and (max-device-width: 480px)", href="http://uxmag.com/iphone.css" /> If it is 480px, the device will load iphone.css. If not, the link is ignored. You can also include media queries in CSS as part of an @media rule:

a responsive design approach does not involve putting all of your content in front of the reader. Responsive design is about putting the right content in users’ hands according to the context of their interaction.

For Google to eliminate underlines as well is simply the final nail in the coffin for this old web standard. But that step is necessary in an era when we navigate the web by other means than a mouse.

the pesky underlines still pop up if you mouse over them.)

Unwelcome news for marketers in France who aim to appeal to people on social networks: A majority of those consumers find such ads unpleasant, useless and poorly targeted.

Sixty-eight percent of web users polled said they found advertising on social sites “intolerable, “ and 59% said it was pointless because it did not reflect their interests or buying habits.

Moreover, ads on these sites seemed to be less effective than most other kinds of online advertising. Only 19% of web users polled by IFOP and Generix said they had ever bought a product or service as a result of seeing an ad on social media, compared to 60% who had made a purchase prompted by an email.

Gaze patterns users commonly exhibit and accommodating these behaviors F-pattern Layer Cake Pattern Bypassing Pattern Spotted Pattern Commitment Pattern Scanning vs. reading, why people do it, and how to drive user behavior with your design

Kick effect: People look at the last result on a SERP before leaving the page. (The tenth organic result, on a page of 10 results, is the lowest result looked at in 12% of cases versus 7% combined for the seventh, eighth, and ninth results. In 59% of cases people looked no farther than the third organic result.)

Other patterns such as skipping, backtracking, love at first sight, zigzag, re-acclimating, and bypassing

79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.)

Web pages have to employ scannable text, using highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others) meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones) bulleted lists one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph) the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

social media use on mobile devices rose 63% between native apps and the mobile Web in the United States in 2012.

Between PCs and mobile devices, Americans spent 121 billion minutes on social media in July 2012, an increase of 37% (88 billion minutes). 

In the United States, 152 million people accessed Facebook from their PCs against 152.7 million through either native apps or the mobile Web.

h. People with a household income of $250,000 and up are more likely to use the Web to stay in touch with friends and family (96 percent) than traditional ways (81 percent), according to the Shullman Luxury and Affluence Monthly Pulse. Email is the most popular Web-based method (favored by 78 percent), followed by texting (65 percent) and Facebook (55 percent), although it’s notable that among those under 35, Facebook is preferred by 69 percent. Business communication is also moving online; 89 percent prefer Web-based options versus 75 percent who use traditional ways, although among the under-35 age group, that figure falls to below 50 perce