Vu Nguyen’s
playground of ideas

Click on image to see the live site

This is a test launch of the new for­mat that we build on our new plat­form. It is also our first stab at mak­ing the site feels like a native appli­ca­tion. By using respon­sive design tech­niques, we make the site work on dif­fer­ent screen sizes and plat­forms. So far it has been a suc­cess­ful attempt.

To make this man­age­able, we decided to sep­a­rate the desk­top site from the mobile site, so that we didn’t have to worry about older browsers and busi­ness require­ments that didn’t apply to our mobile busi­ness. It was a good choice because we man­aged to release this project in a very short amount of time. That gave us addi­tional time to refine and add fea­tures post-launch.

There were a few chal­leng­ing prob­lems that we tack­led. We decided to use a front-end solu­tion to serve images of dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tions to dif­fer­ent screen sizes. There is no user agent detec­tion involved. Another inter­est­ing prob­lem was the dif­fer­ent ad sys­tems between phone and tablet, which we also solved using a smart front-end solution.

What make this feels like a native appli­ca­tion is the fact that posts open in place. You can also search, fil­ter or get more con­tent in real time. Everything loads much faster than before due to some heavy opti­miza­tion to the code base and structure.

A while ago, I posted about our last mobile redesign. Since then we have learned a few new tricks that help grow our mobile busi­ness by includ­ing a whole new cat­e­gory of users, the tablet users.