We’ve started rolling out a series of changes in our visual design and layout which are intended to make our word game solvers easier to use from a mobile phone. This will occur in waves through the summer, as permitted by my work and family schedule…
For the aspiring web developers in the audience, the original version of this site was designed to render best on a desktop browser. I would still recommend this approach to a new developer. It minimizes the complexity involved in delivering your first project. Let’s face it, optimizing a web page for four browsers (IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox) with similar screen resolutions is a lot easier than solving for three levels of display and multiple device sizes. Furthermore, I’ve found most full-sized tablets tend to be fairly forgiving when rendering pages optimized for a desktop display; the issue comes with smaller devices (small tablets and mobile phones).
The urge to improve the quality of our mobile display comes from two sources. First, we’ve seen a consistently higher bounce rate from our mobile users; while many of them do return to the site regularly, we would like to give you a better experience! Second, one of the small joys of running a site like this is being able to “show it off” to friends and family, which is slightly less impressive when you have do cellphone gymnastics to deliver a half-way decent display…
The new design will be based on JQuery Mobile: we’ve already got our first couple of prototype solvers in production. The first of these is our general-purpose word solver; we’ve got this set up to render a horizontal three panel display on desktop (data entry, words, instructions) which turns into a neatly stacked vertical view on a mobile phone. Once we got this working, we quickly moved the template to our scrabble solver and words with friends solver. At this point, our boggle solver is probably next. We want to finish piloting this on the smaller solvers before we modify our heavy hitters…
On a related note, we’re redesigning several of the features in our scrabble solver; please let us know if there is anything you would like us to consider incorporating.