Pull up m.dailykos.com on your smartphone and you’ll see we’ve brought some big changes to our mobile interface. The tech team has been working hard to bring you the ability to create comments and to recommend both comments and stories from the Daily Kos mobile interface.
Markos has talked about our increasing mobile traffic in the past. Our traffic (make sure you adjust the time range) is growing overall, and the percentage of our traffic that is mobile is on the rise as well. We’re long over due for a mobile interface to Daily Kos that allows for user contribution. I’m excited to see how the features will be used. Already there is a strong indication that smart phone use is categorically different from traditional desktop browser usage of the site. We see an increase in the percentage of mobile traffic for stories that go viral, and a similar pattern during big news events where we all want to stay appraised of the news, even when we aren’t in front of a computer. I have sincere hopes that the mobile site will be used by people at protests and other events as they happen.
And there are other great uses for these features. If you have a bad internet connection, I think you will find the mobile site is lighter- smaller images, less auxiliary content, less complex client side scripts- and runs faster. For those following the tech teams progress in porting Daily Kos from Perl to Ruby on Rails, a lot of the work that went into the mobile site will be reused when we port the front page, story page, and comments to Rails, and this should be a good, early scaling exercise of some of the Rails codebase. And, we are launching the ability to login and signup on mobile to accompany mobile recommends and comments, so perhaps we will see the community grow as well.
So, give it a spin, and let us know what you think.
7:33 PM PT: I should have addressed the reasoning behind the limited feature set for mobile, so here's a quick update about some of the decisions that went into the mobile site design. The mobile version of the site is intended to be limited in the number of features it offers, so that interface remains simple and easy to use. Only the essential functions are there- no hide rating, no formatting of text, no image library. We've focused on the core functions of text only commenting and recommending. We think this will provide the greatest all around utility to the greatest number of users doing the sorts of things that make sense while on a smart phone. Of course, we'll adjust our understanding of what makes up common use cases after these features have been live for a bit and we see how things go. There is also the consideration that we are pushing our data across cell phone connections, so we have gotten rid of features like auto refresh of comments, too.
As for getting rid of subjects, this changes has a few motivations. The first is that this is becoming a standard across the web. When comments on blogs had more in common with forum posts, titles made sense. Now, a comment on the web is closer to what we think of as a comment in real life- a single contribution to a larger conversation- and doesn't need the ceremony of a title. We have a large number of different types of text contributions on the web now- tweets, status updates, blog posts, comments on all of the above, etc- and interface design is trying to catch up with bringing this nuance to the web. The second, we did a rough audit of user comments and found that what looked like a very large percentage of comment titles were just the first part of the comment. It seemed like the comment title was just slowing people down as they tried to just write a comment. I think removing subjects makes comments simpler, and I hope it will make our comment trees easier and more natural to read.