 I am Sovik. I don't need to go through my introduction. I run a tiny design studio out of Delhi. We are a two-seater studio. We are happy to become an autorextile if anyone is interested. So just come and talk to me after the talk. And before I start, I just want to show you my T-shirt. My T-shirt says data goddess. So if you believe in data or if you believe in God, you should believe in whatever I say. All right. Okay, so I love traveling a lot. And last year I was fortunate enough to travel some parts of India. And I was traveling on a train back from Calcutta to Delhi. And this is a scene from West Bengal. There was a town where I got 3G signal. I managed to download my tweets. I was going through the tweets and the train was going away from that town. I switched over to an edge network. I clicked on a link that I really wanted to read. It started loading the website, right? And the signal strength was reducing. After a while, I got something like this. And it just dug there. Because by this time, there was no more data that is coming to my phone. This is a state where the entire website is loaded on my phone. The page is there on my phone, but the fonts haven't managed to load. And I just can't read it anymore because now I don't have data. In spite of the fact that I have the entire web page on my phone. Has anyone experienced this before? Few people have, right? And this is not great. And I have experienced lots of things like browser crashes. I have gone to an event where the website has so much jazzy JavaScript animation that it will crash on my phone. It will just not let me view a conference website. Position fixed is another problem. We have sticky navigation and the moment I try to zoom in on my phone, it will just fill up the entire screen. I am not able to read the content inside this. And I have come to believe that most... I mean, how many of you enjoy the web browsing experience on your phones? Okay, how many of you don't enjoy it, really? Okay, good. You are the right audience. And you know the problem is really there when you have cartoons being made on this? Has anyone seen Comet Strip? I mean, if you haven't, just go and check them out because it's a series of cartoons relating to the daily life of web agencies and developers, okay? So they made one on mobile browsing in 2015. So here's how it goes. First, you open a website. It says Ten Islands ruled by cats. You click on that. There's a long waiting time in a blank screen that you're staring at. And after a while, there's an ad that comes up that says, buy a car with your phone. And you wait for five seconds until a cross appears, right? Close this layer on top. And it's such a tiny cross that when you try to tap it, you manage to tap the ad instead of the cross. So you landed them on that website which says, okay, now you can install a mobile car shop, which you didn't want. You go back and you again have that same problem. This same dialogue opens up again, and they have not stored this in a cookie or something. And this time, you manage to press the cross and it says, do you want to download our app and read this article? Right? And you say, no. It will go ahead and say, do you authorize this website to check your location? And these days, this also comes up. Do you want a notification from us? Before you can even go ahead and read what's there, and by that time, you have lost interest. And this is something that typically keeps happening. This is a cartoon, I think, is a great indicator of the fact that an experience like this is widely experienced by plenty of people. And I want to recap a little bit of last year, because last year was really a landmark here. Here are two quick facts. The page views on desktops and laptops have gone down by 13% globally. Okay? Fewer people or fewer web pages are now being accessed through desktop and laptop. And as for mobiles, it's gone up by 39% just over the last year. Now, this is a small tweet by Nikhil three years back and he says that when conferences go beyond pitches, stating the obvious, like mobile browsing is increasing, it's not insightful at all. Even if you have data, it's not insightful. So the fact that you have these two metrics that say that mobile usage is increasing and desktop usage on the web is decreasing, it's not very insightful. Everyone knows about it. This is a known fact that the mobile web usage is on the rise. And what I also find from people around me, plenty of people around me, even product companies, they just keep complaining about this, that mobile is a hard problem. Anyone over here believes it, that mobile is very difficult to design for? Few people. Thankfully, most of you don't believe it. Well, I think it is a problem. I don't like to call it a hard problem. I rephrase this as mobile is an odd problem. It's unlike many other problems because what has happened is we are used to laptops and desktops for all this while and then suddenly a new thing gets invented that's less featured, less powerful, doesn't work as well as the laptops and desktops. It's almost like just imagine yourself if there was no, if you were using TV all the time and suddenly today a radio gets invented and then you had to design programs for radio and you think visually, you know how to give an art direction or visual direction but you can't design for radio because the constraints are there, there's no screen. You can't design a visual experience. It might be portable, there might be, it's also running on battery probably. So you feel chained, right? You feel haunted by these limitations and it's strangely like, I really like this expression, it's exactly like back to the future thing because the invention of mobile is like going back in computing in some way less power devices now, less capable devices but you also know it's the future. It's sort of that situation and why is it even important to take up this challenge, to design well for on a mobile screen, why is it important, why can you not slack or compromise on this? And for this, I'm just going back, taking a step back and trying to answer this question for myself. Probably you'll relate to it that why in the first place do I even work on the web? I could have picked any platform be it iOS, be it Android, be it not even these platforms, maybe making some software on your car deck, those platforms as well. Why the web at all in the first place? And for me, the answer is, if I have to answer it in one word, there might be plenty of reasons, but if I have to pick one, it will be this. The fact that it can reach so many people and I think the only communications, only the only way of communication that reaches more number of people than the web is probably the mobile network so if I was today copywriting SMSs, probably I'd be able to reach more number of people but the next best thing is probably the web today. If I'm designing a web page, it can reach many more people. And no single proprietary platform can possibly achieve the reach that the web has achieved today and that is partly because the way W3C, the mission and the vision works, they say we want to give web to all, we want to make it open for everything on every platform, we want to build trust and if there are these loaded words, but for me, they want to give it to everyone as possible and that's why they have made the technology such that it can be embedded on almost any new device that might come in the future. You can connect it to the web. If we look into how successful has web been in reaching out to people, so I just pulled in some data. So if you look at internet penetration today, 87% of people in the US have access to the internet. If you look at the global average, it's less than half, 42% people have it. So much people still in the dark. Only this much set is other set of people who have access to the internet in the world. Anyone knows what is internet penetration in India? Any idea anyone? Why I guess? Okay, so these are figures from January, I don't think it could have gone up to 27%, it's just 19%. It's less than half of global average. So just imagine 81% of India doesn't even have the internet access right now. If I also further try to look at what is the number of web pages that are loaded on mobile, that are served to mobile devices. In the US, that's 25%. This is all of last year. This is the report that has come out in 2015, January. 25% of the web pages were served on mobiles. The global average is more, 33%. Any guesses about India? 72%. We are more than double of global average in terms of web pages being served to mobiles. And what could be the possible factor for this? We don't have internet penetration, but so many people are, so many web pages are being accessed on the mobile. Let's take a look at some other factor here. I want to divert away from tech and web over here. Let's look at the wealth distribution in India. How many people have how much money? And this is from a report in December last year that has come in the Hindu. The poorest 10% have about 0.2% of India's wealth. The top 10% of India's population have 74% of India's wealth, right? And if you take a look at something like this, you can almost say, okay, 19% people have internet penetration. Most likely, we are keeping this site covered. So it's always saying that the left has been left out, right? Almost fair to say that this part has been left out. And we also know probably that the phones that we carry in our pockets, I am carrying an iPhone, right? Would possibly be outside the reach of all these people. Your top Android phones will also be. So someone has to think, like, okay, if I have to bring everyone to the web because we want maximum number of people connected to the web, what can we do about it? Let's try to build phones which are less expensive, inexpensive, low margin, but we have 80% of India's population to K-2, right? I can sell a lot more in number. And that's what some of the manufacturers are doing already. Most of them come from China, right? And smartphones are getting affordable, and they are being purchased in plenty and bringing first-time users onto the web. So we are still adding new people onto the web through inexpensive smartphones today. And if you are, if you like facts, so here's what happened in 2013. The global smartphone sales crossed the feature phone sales. And Asia Pacific grew the highest at 74.1%. And India is a part of Asia Pacific. And Latin America is the second-largest growth of smartphone sales. And if you walk out, if you like me and you like walking the streets, if you're around, if you take the bus, if you take the public transport, you would have suddenly noticed over the last one-and-a-half years or one year that so many people are carrying smartphones. And people you never expected to have phones in the first place, maybe feature phones. And there are people like this right now, cab drivers, auto drivers, people on the buses, delivery boys, street vendors, farmers are using smartphones now. They are connected to the web. Some part of this is pushed through businesses. I mean, so many cab companies have come in and handed over a smartphone to the cab driver and said, go, we want you to make money for our company, right? And while they have given the smartphones, they have talked to lots of cab drivers and they have given the smartphone to their kids who are in the 10th standard, who has taken the smartphone, it's connected to the 3G, they have installed the YouTube app and they are watching a movie every single night on that smartphone that they got, right? So that's how smartphone is reaching me, becoming popular to people who are not at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid right now. This has been a promise in the Delhi elections in December. You know that this has become popular. Everyone wants Wi-Fi now, yeah? Everyone wants Wi-Fi last year. And if something goes as a promise in the election manifestos, you know it's a populist demand, right? I mean, it's almost like this is something I had shown last year, you remember? At the bottom of the Mosleau's hierarchy of needs, we have Wi-Fi. We can live without food, water and shelter, but we cannot live without Wi-Fi. This is something I had shown last year. It's almost turning true. Just that by the end of 2014 probably, someone did an update to this. They added this. They say, okay, I need battery more than Wi-Fi because my batteries are draining out. And if I have to see how well the internet connections work in India or in the world, let's look at the average internet connection speeds in the world today. USA has an average of 11.5 Mbps. The global average is less than half at 4.5. India is less than half of the global average 2 Mbps. And if you're talking about mobiles, it's even less than that. 1.7 Mbps is the average internet connection. But you know the reality, I've been in Bangalore and I've been cribbing about the 3G speeds here. It just doesn't work. I can't believe it is even 1. It has to be one-fifth the average, probably the actual speeds that I'm getting over here. And how is the community changing its web design over the years? How are our page weights changing? That means how big are our each web page? Over the last two years, between January 2013 and January 2015, an average web page weight has increased by 50%. That means we are making heavier web pages. Our internet speeds are so low. Just between January and 2015, April, there has been a further 17 KB increase. And each KB counts. And does anyone know which is the most popular web browser in India? Someone screamed out the answer right. I wonder how many people actually, even people like us, how many of us use it or even develop on this browser? In 2013, this became the most popular browser, combine any Chrome desktop browser, mobile browsers combined. And today its market share is about 32%. Built by a Chinese company, it does some amount of cloud acceleration and data compression and therefore the page is load faster. And this is screamed ahead of all other competitors today in India. That's probably not true. I've marked the sources everywhere. And I hope I have enough money for my defense lawyers. All right, so there might be differences. But no doubt that this web browser is getting popular. There is also one more thing that is changing because our web page weights are changing. It's getting heavier. The consequence is not just performance and speed. Can anyone think of what is the other consequence of our pages being heavier? Anyone wants to take a guess at that? Sorry, what is the consequence of web pages being heavier? Other than the speeds being low and therefore it's loading slow. Irritation is because the speed is low. Eating user's data, someone related, how much does it cost your users to actually access your website? Has anyone figured that? At least I am talking about 80%, right? I think this is important. There's a site called whatdoesmysitecost.com. If you haven't accessed it, put in your URL over there. These guys will do the math. They'll work out the best case scenario. They have the data for the different mobile networks around the world. They allow you to see how much it would cost in US dollars based on purchasing power parity and as a percentage of gross national income per capita and so on and so forth. I put the MetaRefresh website. This year's conference website on this. This claims about 8.35 MB was downloaded when they tried to access the MetaRefresh website. And how much does it cost to the different countries here? There's a country called Wanwatu in the Pacific. If they access the MetaRefresh website once, about 34% of their day's income is gone. Can you believe it? And we are a little lucky. India is not even in this page. If you go a little further down, this is where India is, if you can see. This is where India is. But we are still way behind China, which is right at the bottom. But it costs money to access web pages. I wonder if you ever think on these scenarios. And this is the best case scenario, as I just told. There's one more trend that's really disturbing to me. It's called the view desktop version trend. It just doesn't want to go away. And last year, I was a part of a project in which I was doing a bit of user research on the domain of banking. And I think banking is a very basic requirement for people. And if you go through the mobile banking experiences and if you see their mobile websites, they don't even allow you to do essential tasks through the mobiles. For example, most banks that I researched last year would not even allow you to add a beneficiary to make a fund transfer through the mobile. They say go to the desktop, add a beneficiary, and you can come back to the mobile and do a transfer. And this is the reality for banking, which I believe is extremely essential, and proudly a bank states that on their mobile website, we have ensured that key services are available to you on the mobile website. For other services, please continue to the desktop login. What they have effectively done is, with this, something like this, fundamentally they have disregarded a class of users who only have access to the web through mobiles. And if you want to see some facts here and do really other people around who really see websites only through mobile and don't have access to desktop, this was mid-last year. Many developing nations, the majority of mobile web users, are mobile only. The highest include Egypt at 70% and India at 59%. We are the second highest in that. People who have access to the internet only via mobile. Further, it goes on to say that many mobile-only web users do not have a bank account in India. This is 57% of the mobile only. A chicken and egg problem, I guess. Banks here, I don't have customers on the mobile. Users will see, oh, I don't have banks on the mobile. And we are in sort of a mess and we shouldn't be in a situation like this. And I think view desktop site is a way of a door slam. Even while we are talking about the other forms of door slams that is happening, saying that go to the desktop website is, in my opinion, a way to shut out users who are trying to access through mobiles. And the W3C has actually put out, has tried to emphasis on this point that's called OneWeb. I don't know if you have actually gone and read through this ever. If you have, that's great. I hope you even believe in that. But what they say is, the OneWeb means that making as far as is reasonable the same information and services available to users irrespective of the device they are using. That's how they're defining OneWeb. But they do recognize that there's a difference between desktop and mobiles. And they further go on to say a little later that while services may be most appropriately experienced in one context or another, it is considered best practice to provide as reasonable experience as is possible given device limitations and not to exclude access from any particular class of device, except where this is necessary because of a device limitation. And I refuse to believe that I cannot add a beneficiary through a mobile phone if I'm accessing a bank through a mobile phone. And this is where we are flouting something that makes the basis of web. Because what do mobile users want to do? And there's a website called WhatDoMobileUsersWantToDo.com The answer is coming straight from God. God requires just one word to answer this, and it's everything. Mobile users want to do everything. It's just we who exclude them from doing things by making wrong design choices while we are making our products. So let me just sum this up a little bit. I'm saying that mobiles have made it economically feasible for a large section of India to access the web and further that an even larger population from the weaker socioeconomic sections are waiting to get on board. And that is the reality that we are in right now. And if we take a step further back from this, we're talking about India. India is just one of the 117 developing nations and India is classified as one of the 10 newly industrialized countries, which basically means that in many ways India is better off than about 100 other developing nations. So the state that you see right now possibly is a better situation than about 100 other countries that are lagging behind us. So you can probably do the math and see how many people are we affecting by taking bad design choices, by making bad design decisions. There's a talk by Ethan Markout. He gave this in 2013. It's called the map is not the territory. I would like you to go and watch that, but essence of that talk is right in the title itself. It basically means what we believe the map of the internet is, is not the actual territory of the internet. It will extend far beyond that and our idea of the internet or our idea of web is extremely limited and we are just looking through the map that we know of, as such. The title, of course, has been borrowed from Alphette called his whiskey. His Polish names are hard to pronounce. Anyways, and what I'm soon, very soon, and if it hasn't already happened, people using the web will be very different from us. What we imagine a person using a web, using the web will not hold true much longer because our idea of our peers, people around us, probably is at the extreme right of the chart what I pointed out. There will be new geographies, new languages, new cultures that will get exposed to the web. The place where I got this T-shirt about a week back, less than a week back, I learned that in the state of, just in the state of Assam, question papers, that school question papers are printed in 57 different languages, just in the state of Assam. And I suppose many of these people are going to get on the web sooner or later. Within the few years, I hope they do very fast because I want the web to be as impactful as possible. So a compromised web, mobile browsing experience will affect far more number of people than a compromised laptop and desktop experience going ahead. And it would go against the vision, the mission, the values, and the guiding principles that make the web. That's something that makes what makes web so reachable, so open and interoperable and the things that make it reach out to thousands and not real thousands, actually millions and billions of people is the fact that the principles that make the web. And the web essentially is an agreement. It's an agreement between the browsers have agreed to actually follow a standard specification. The device manufacturers have a promise to keep. The people who are building and developing the web, they have a promise to keep. The mobile operators, the networks, they have a promise to keep. And the community who builds websites also have a promise to keep, which is what would actually make it as reachable as possible going ahead. So key things, I think accessibility is the base take away, is the base experience for people. If you slam people out, or if you provide experiences that will not let people actually go ahead and access the website itself, that's basically missing the point. The base experience is lost. Other is performance is an uncompromisable feature today. It's uncompromisable because not only it affects experience, there is an economic impact to that as well, which I just pointed out. And there is this excellent line on an article called The Promise of the Web, which was written a few days back by Daniel on the medium. And it has this line that says if the web didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent it today. You can go ahead and read it and you can even think about this, that in case we didn't have the web and we only had the app world, it would be extremely crucial for us to go ahead and create the web today. Go ahead and read this and read the argument. I really love this. So small appeal. I think technology, people who are working in the technology are the people who can best understand the problem, they can best understand the technology, they can best understand the promise that web has and they are the ones who have to defend it in a certain way if they are asked to break away out of it. So things like educating our clients, people who are taking managerial decisions, who are business heads, it's I think that people who are working with technology, who have to go ahead and explain it, explain the thing and keep the stand. Most of my clients when I'm working in my design studio, the websites that we make, they evaluate the website on a 27 inch iMac and it's so hard but I have to try as much as possible. Please don't use that screen to evaluate the design. Please don't use that screen to push your design feedback. Just a few days back I was with a client who was asking, can you just put it beside this, make this a two column thing on their laptop? I think most of the world will not access it in a two column way. Most of the world will access it in a single column. So you have to prioritize these two things. All right. So one last point to spare. I thought about people who might be excluding. And do ask this question as what's our web going to be going ahead? That's the end of my talk. But before I end it, this is something that's happening right now in India. This is also something people who are working on the technology have to stand up and take a stance on. The Tri has asked us to reply, they have open public consultation on how neutral should the web be, should the internet be, I'd rather. And please go and answer if you don't know how to answer these questions, go ahead and read on savetheinternet.in there are answers available and do customize the answer because you might not believe exactly what's written there. Change the answer and just push in your recommendations to try. Because again, as the things I pointed out, I think the issue of a neutral internet is as much essential for the larger audience that is yet to see the web. Right? Thanks a lot. We have a few minutes for questions. One thing I want to say before this closes, how many of you have already done this? For the rest of you, what are you waiting for? It works on your phone, open your phone, do it right now. The other thing I want to ask is, how many of you know who built this website? I think people should come up here. People who built the website should come up here. The two people who built this website are right here in this room. One is here and the other guy is here. The third person is in Calcutta, but he was here at the last edition of MetaEfish. These are the people to thank because as of today, we effectively have brought down Facebook. Yeah, it's back to Q&A. Banking websites or apps should focus on more features and stuff like that. But most of the banking apps do not build apps themselves. They are being outsourced. As far as I know, few of the apps when you try to log in, they go to a third party software and then go to the banking website. Almost all of your passwords and stuff like that is insecure. I'm thankful that they don't give these features out there right now, but the way they do things should change. Not what they are presenting right now. The methodologically or the way they've been building stuff should change in any of the companies. That's what I believe. I think what I wanted to say out of that point wasn't exactly translated there. I don't want them to build more features. They are providing the same set of features today that is accessible on a desktop web on a browser that is running on the laptop. The same set of features are not available on the browser that's running on the phone. That is not a great decision. Yeah.