Inclusive

I thought this was an excellent talk on the hard questions we should be asking ourselves as developers. Why do most people use closed, proprietary systems and devices, if the open web is so wonderful? Even as developers, we still use them ourselves, and depend on them. How can we be more empathetic to what the average user needs and wants? How can we lock open the web, so the future isn’t entirely dependent on huge corporations and services, which is where we seem to be heading?

Whatever you may think, it currently isn’t possible to reliably detect whether or not the current device has a touchscreen, from within the browser.

And it may be a long time before you can.

Let me explain why…

Boxed in

The browser environment is a sandbox. Your app’s code can only get at things the browser wants you to, in order to limit the damage a malicious website can cause.

This means that the only information about the system you can get is what the browser exposes to you, in the form of HTML, CSS and JavaScript APIs. To determine if a system supports a certain feature, we can a) see if a certain API is present, or b) see if it actually does the right thing.

Historically, two browser features have been used for “touchscreen detection”: media queries and touch APIs. But these are far from foolproof.

Walk with me.

Device width media queries

Mobiles have small screens and mobiles have touchscreens, so small screen equals touchscreen, right?

[…]

So, so very wrong. Large tablets and touchscreen laptops/desktops have clearly proven this wrong. Plus thousands of older mobile handset models had small non-touch screens. Unfortunately, sites applying the mantra “If it’s a small screen, it’s touch; if it’s a big screen, it’s mouse-driven” are now everywhere, leaving tablet and hybrid users with a rubbish experience.

Touch APIs

[…]

If the browser supports events like touchstart (or other events in the Touch Events API spec) it must be a touchscreen device, right?

[…]

Well, maybe. The problem is, no one ever said that a non-touch device can’t implement touch APIs, or at least have the event handlers in the DOM.

Chrome 24.0 shipped with these APIs always-on, so that they could start supporting touchscreens without having separate “touch” and “non-touch” builds. But loads of developers had already used detects like the example above, so it broke a lot of sites. The Chrome team “fixed” this with an update, which only enables touch APIs if a touch-capable input device is detected on start-up.

So we’re all good, right?

Not quite.

An API for an API

The browser is still quite a long way from the device itself. It only has access to the devices via the operating system, which has it’s own APIs for letting the browser know what devices are connected.

While these APIs appear to be fairly reliable for the most part, we recently came across cases whereby they’d give incorrect results in Chrome on Windows 8… they were reporting presence of a touchscreen (“digitizer”), when no touchscreen was connected.

Firefox also does some kind of similar switching and it appears to fail in the same cases as Chrome, so it looks like it might use the same cues – although I can’t profess to know for sure.

It appears certain settings and services can mess with the results these APIs give. I’ve only seen this in Windows 8 so far, but theoretically it could happen on any operating system.

Some versions of BlackBerry OS have also been known to leave the touch APIs permanently enabled on non-touch devices too.

So it looks like the browser doesn’t know with 100% confidence either. If the browser doesn’t know, how can our app know?

Drawing a blank

Assuming the presence of one of these touch APIs did mean the device had a touchscreen… does that mean that if such a touch API isn’t present then there definitely isn’t a touchscreen?

Of course not. The original iPhone (released in 2007) was the first device to support Touch Events, but touchscreens have been around in one form or another since the 1970s. Even recently, Nokia’s Symbian browser didn’t support touch events until version 8.2 was released last year.

IE 10 offers the (arguably superior) Pointer Events API on touch devices instead of the Touch Events spec, so would return false for the ontouchstart test.

[…]

Neither Safari nor Opera has implemented either touch API in their desktop browsers yet, so they’ll draw a blank on touch devices too.

Without dedicated touch APIs, browsers just emulate mouse events… so there are loads of devices kicking about with touchscreens which you simply can’t detect using this kind of detection.

[…]

You’re doing it wrong

In my opinion, if you’re trying to “detect a touchscreen” in the first place, you’re probably making some dangerous assumptions.

[…]

So what should I do?

For layouts, assume everyone has a touchscreen. Mouse users can use large UI controls much more easily than touch users can use small ones. The same goes for hover states.

For events and interactions, assume anyone may have a touchscreen. Implement keyboard, mouse and touch interactions alongside each other, ensuring none block each other.

This is an incredibly exhaustive list of performance tweaks, improvements, and best practices. Some may be outside the scope of smaller websites, but there are plenty of things for everyone.

Back in the day, performance was often a mere afterthought. Often deferred till the very end of the project, it would boil down to minification, concatenation, asset optimization and potentially a few fine adjustments on the server’s config file. Looking back now, things seem to have changed quite significantly.

Performance isn’t just a technical concern: It matters, and when baking it into the workflow, design decisions have to be informed by their performance implications. Performance has to be measured, monitored and refined continually, and the growing complexity of the web poses new challenges that make it hard to keep track of metrics, because metrics will vary significantly depending on the device, browser, protocol, network type and latency (CDNs, ISPs, caches, proxies, firewalls, load balancers and servers all play a role in performance).

So, if we created an overview of all the things we have to keep in mind when improving performance — from the very start of the process until the final release of the website — what would that list look like? Below you’ll find a (hopefully unbiased and objective) front-end performance checklist for 2017 — an overview of the issues you might need to consider to ensure that your response times are fast and your website smooth.

A common idiom in our industry is, “You never can predict how the user will use your product once they get it in their hands.” If you’ve ever watched a stakeholder use a website or web application for the first time, you may know this firsthand. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen a user seemingly forget how to use websites on a mobile device, or try to use it in a way that makes you think, “But no one would actually do that in real life!”

The thing is, you never really do know what a user may do in the moment. They might be in a frantic state of mind, trying to accomplish something too quickly, and don’t tap or type the way a calm, focused user might. This fits right into the all-too-common scenario of designing and developing for the best case scenario, and not thinking about edge cases or “what happens if things don’t happen perfectly in this order?” As developers, we tend to build things thinking that everything will be understood, that the user is rational and should just know that tapping around too quickly might cause something weird to happen. It can even affect those who might make accidental taps or clicks when not giving an app full attention - how many times have you accidentally tapped on a mobile device when you were walking and talking while also trying to reply to a tweet or email.

Building out tools to help us test the unpredictable aren’t entirely new. In 2012, Netflix had open-sourced their internal service Chaos Monkey, which “terminates virtual machine instances and containers that run inside of your production environment.” In plain language, it’s a service that tears down servers at random to ensure an entire system doesn’t violently collapse during a failure. Our development communities also remind us to not just design for “the happy path”, but how can we actually detect for unpredicted points of failure in our interfaces the way we can with our server architectures?

If a hundred monkeys at typewriters can write the works of Shakespeare, then one monkey should surely be able to find bugs and problems in our interfaces.

Bring in the monkeys

Monkey testing is a method of testing that generates random user input - clicks, swipes, entering input - with the sole purpose of finding issues with, or entirely breaking, your application. Unlike unit and acceptance testing, where you are writing test cases that occur in a specific order or set of conditions, which ultimately creates bias in how your interface is tested. Developers have less control over how a monkey test will execute, and since they are random every time they are run, you’ll never be testing for just one scenario, but rather an infinite combination of interactions.

Although this type of testing is available for most technology stacks, things built for the web haven’t necessarily got there yet. For example, the Android SDK has a UI Exerciser Monkey that handles most interface-level and system-level events. As web developers have begun to think more critically about performance and stress testing, some of these ideas have finally made it over to the world of the web in the form of Gremlins.js, a JavaScript-based monkey testing library written by the team at Marmelab.