GameDev.net has been around for quite a while, and during that time it has evolved and grown in many ways. We have a large and varied community core around which many of our services are built (forums for instance), we have a name that is well recognized, an article base that is quite large and fairly expansive… covering many areas of development and even some of the content creation and design domains that also are part of game development.

The problem, as I see it, is that this content is not always accessible. Let me explain: I have an iPhone. It is a decent device for what it offers, although too much of it feels weakly designed. For instance, when zooming in on a page while it is loading there is a very noticeable pause, around a second or more sometimes, before it will refocus. During that time period the page cannot be moved nor interacted with.  For me this is annoying because often enough I know exactly which link I want within the subset of links on the page. On GameDev.net this lag is even worse. Part of it is GameDev.net’s fault; other parts are simply the foibles of the iPhone. However, let us discuss the GameDev.net components for now.

There are several areas of GameDev.net that are mobile device unfriendly, so let’s enumerate a few of them:

• Too many images, and many of images are quite large (dimensionally, not necessarily bandwidth wise), including the background image.
• Each page has a great deal of content on it, far more than is comfortable to view on a mobile device. With much of that content being non-essential.
• The menu interface of GameDev.net does not interact well with browsers that only support a subset of HTML/JS/CSS. In fact, on the iPhone it doesn’t work at all.
• The interface is poorly laid out for a mobile device; it requires a lot of scrolling around and zooming in order to navigate the site in any meaningful manner.

So, what can we do about these? Well, ideally we would segregate the site such that mobile devices get treated differently from standard browsers. That can be done through things such as the user agent header and other HTTP headers, which can be used to identify mobile devices vs. normal browsers.

The image issue is a simple one to solve, just eliminate most of them. Some images (such as the IOTD) should be left behind, as it is neither large, nor is its content non-essential. Other things, like the GameDev.net logo should be scaled down, but should remain. Banner ads, with the exception of smaller ones, would have to be removed as they don’t scale well and also tend to not be very visible on mobile devices.

Page content is another area where GameDev.net suffers from noise. Some pages have a lot of miscellaneous content that doesn’t actually contribute towards the main content of those pages. Others, like the main page, are extremely cluttered and very noisy. They would need to be redesigned to drill down into the core components of that page, or be split into multiple pages that are easily accessible. For instance, the news and recent articles sections could be broken apart into two separate pages.

javascript support on mobile devices is… iffy at best. A lot of things like “mouse over” events cannot even be trapped simply because there IS no mouse interface on most mobile devices. Interface driven events are probably still doable, and if you’re really lucky, the device will support some form of AJAX (iPhone does, for instance). Nevertheless, most javascript and CSS information should be eliminated, both to reduce the overall size of the data required to be downloaded, and just because support for a great deal of it is just not there. Thankfully GameDev.net doesn’t use a lot of the more fancy CSS stuff, so that shouldn’t be a huge issue to take care of.

So, let’s examine a few rough drafts of how one could potentially organize the various types of pages found on GameDev.net. Up first is the news and articles page, which probably ought to be the first page. The important thing to note though is that the functionality has been reduced to the bare minimum required. Ads could be integrated through things like Google adwords or other text based ad marketing systems. Although many of those rely on javascript to auto-link items…

Also of note: News items should be fully summarized. Currently we don’t actually use the summarization fields of the news posting system enough. Thus, things like the daily’s end up being posted full body to the front page. On a mobile device though that full set of text will force you to scroll a significant distance to get to the next news item. Thus summarization with jumps to the full text of news items is a must. At the moment the system used to generate the page above does the summarization automatically.

Thankfully, there isn’t that much of an issue for the Latest Articles, as each article already has a summary with it. Other things to note are that we’re missing the date and author, both of which are absent due to the manner in which the page is generated currently.

Again though, the point is to reduce the amount of information clutter per page.

To the left I have a sample of what the Active Topics page might look like. Again it’s quite minimal, eliminating most of the information. Although post author and last update date is still in. Additionally perhaps the last poster should be included.

The interface could obviously be improved a bit, perhaps with a “move next” button or some such to allow for quick traversal to the next topic or news item. This would eliminate the need for scrolling (and thus summarization), but probably wouldn’t work on some devices like the blackberry.

The final point of interest, for me at least, is “what should a topic look like?” Clearly we want it to be minimal, but other than that, what else? Should we order the replies from newest to oldest, or leave it at the current format, which is from oldest to newest? There’s more, clearly, that we could consider as well such as: What is relevant and important information that should still be there? What about the edit and quote buttons? Obviously post reply should be available, and new topic too… From my own personal usage, I usually visit threads on my mobile device to check the status of/replies to my own comments. Thus for me: having it go from newest to oldest, with the topic at the top of the page, would be the best design overall.