zurb foundation 4 mobile vs desktop content

Question

I'm a big fan of Zurb Foundation. They just released Zurb Foundation 4 which was redesigned to be mobile first. I'm fairly new to responsive design taking into account both mobile, tablet, and traditional desktop experiences. I'm trying to wrap my head around how best to manage my site's content for these different devices. With Zurb Foundation 4, you can hide or show content based on small, medium, or large device sizes. So, it seems with Zurb's approach you drop all of the content down to the device and let the CSS decide what content to show depending on device (this is responsive design).

My question is why do we have to drop all of the content to the device? That seems like a waste of processing on the server, a waste of bandwidth, a slower experience as the browser handles the content some of which may never be shown to the user because of the device they are using. Am I missing something? Wouldn't it be better to go back to the server and let it send content to the client that's appropriate for the device type? Shouldn't we be concerned about mobile user's data plans and not send down content that's not appropriate for their device type? All the examples that I've seen on responsive design has content for desktop and mobile/tablet downloaded to the client which seems to be a waste.

I'm developing a time entry application that has a different user experience based on the device type. Desktops (when in full screen) have a more detailed data entry experience whereas mobile/tablets have a different experience because of device real estate is smaller. I'm developing the app so when the desktop browser is resized to something smaller that 768px wide that jQuery makes a call to the server to swap out the UI for the "smaller" mobile/tablet version. Is this appropriate? I certainly do not want to download 2 versions of the app and hide one or the other depending on the device width.

Am I on the right track with my jQuery approach? Am I missing something regarding responsive design and needing to tailor the content to the device? Any ideas, suggestions, and guidance is appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Mobile First with Zurb Foundation is basically a philosophy change by the Zurb team and if you want do develop a responsive site and not take a Mobile First approach then I suggest using Foundation 3 which is still available and fantastic. There is a book that I am reading that gives a great pitch for Mobile First, called Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski who is also listed as an adviser to Zurb.

here is an article by the same author that might be interesting:

http://www.netmagazine.com/interviews/luke-wroblewski-mobile-first

Basically: the premise is that you start your development and design for a mobile, meaning basically an iOS or Android style browser and then add features.

So instead of starting with a desktop / tablet experience and removing things as was commonly done with .hide classes in foundation 3 and could still be implemented in this way with foundation 4, they suggest using .show classes to add additional content.

This can be taken way further by using Compass and Sass Mixins. There isn't a lot of great documentation on how to do this, but you can basically keep your markup semantic, apply an id rather than a class and use the mixins to apply it to that id. There are advantages here in speed traversing the dom for an id vs. a class so it can be a good way to go.

Note: foundation 4 is using the drop in replacement (there are some limitations) for jQuery called Zepto. You can replace Zepto with jQuery if you really need it in foundation 4 or use foundation 3 instead. Zepto is much more lightweight and thus suited well for mobile.

As for it being faster by using jQuery to async load the data (I am assuming) based on the size of the browser, that is one way to do it. I am not sure if you are going to have a huge speed increase here. There are many strategies, pagination, async loading more data on the fly, and it depends on how you arrange the UX / UI around that data.

There are also many other issues such as caching resources, CDN, etc. that are typical in front end engineering that might give a faster load time. One resource you can check out related to this is ySlow.

There are also many design patterns such as off canvas slides, the 3 line (hamburger menu), loading more data on scroll, stateless apps, that can allow you to have the same functionality in a mobile app. If you go stateless, after the initial page load other pages should appear to be almost instantaneous.

I think the question here is more philosophical, in do you need all of the features, which is one thing that I believe taking a Mobile First approach is trying to approach.

Another thing to think about is the perceived loading time. I think I read about this is Seductive UX (another great read) but the faster you can get the page up with a loader or spinner, the faster it is perceived to be loading, even when in actuality it can be loading slower.

As a final note, if you plan on using foundation, you might look into using jQuery/Zepto with Modernizr to pull from the same media queries foundation is using. That way you don't duplicate or create something that is inconsistent with the rest of the responsiveness.

Answer 2

I'm developing the app so when the desktop browser is resized to something smaller that 768px wide that jQuery makes a call to the server to swap out the UI for the "smaller" mobile/tablet version. Is this appropriate?

It doesn't sound like a good approach do you take orientationChange in to account?

I certainly do not want to download 2 versions of the app and hide one or the other depending on the device width.

If you are on most tablets visiting the website in portrait and change to landscape you'll have to download the >768px UI after already downloading the <768px UI.

The mobile first approach in zb4 (with media queries) allow you to prevent stuff that belongs to big devices to be downloaded in to small devices. Basically you start with mobile styles and if the device meets the conditions you set on your mediaqueries (you can have much more breakpoints than the zf4 framework gives you by default) then the next rule jumps in.

I have worked in several 'responsive' projects even back in the pre-mediaqueries days were I use javascript to measure windowsize

Regarding javascript and like @powjames3 said zepto is much lighter / faster than jquery and if you could write your own javacript functions will be much better than using a over-bloated library.

Nowadays I do mobileFirst responsive webapps and websites use a mix of user agent sniffing ( sometimes to decide what image src or script / style src to deliver), despite the decision of the user agent tests i always serve mobile first mediaqueries, and conditionally loaded content.

"As Ethan Marcote (and John Allsopp before him), were right to point out, the inherent flexibility of the web is a feature, not a bug."

Here are some resources that might put you in the right track:

User agent parse and detection:http://mobiledetect.net/

Tutorial http://www.html5rocks.com/en/mobile/responsivedesign/ that covers:

• Why we need to create mobile-first, responsive, adaptive experiences
• How to structure HTML for an adaptive site in order to optimize performance and - prioritize flexibility
• How to write CSS that defines shared styles first, builds up styles for larger screens with media queries, and uses relative units
• How to write unobtrusive Javascript to conditionally load in content fragments, take advantage of touch events and geolocation
• What we could do to further enhance our adaptive experience

Hope it helps