The Modern Web

Context: What We Don’t Know

The most important thing to bear in mind is how much we don’t know about the people using our sites. We don’t know where they are—I don’t mean geographically, as we can use GPS to locate them. I mean whether they’re at home, at work, on the bus, and so on. In essence, we have no idea of the context in which someone is using our site.

The common presumption is that people using mobile are on the move and in a hurry, often using low-bandwidth 3G connections, but that’s not always the case: Mobile is often used at home with a good fast Wi-Fi connection. But even the connection doesn’t tell the whole story; the signal may be poor or the bandwidth reduced because of congestion in the neighborhood. In fact, the 3G (or 4G ...