Numbers are in, and having a mobile view for phones apparently really matters

It's still early days, but doing all that mobile view work (and turning it back on once it was usable) seems to have had a pretty decent impact. Here are some stats from Google Analytics:


Before


After

The bit in red is mobile; above that is desktop; below that is tablet. The tablet audience is surprisingly small; it's swamped by both desktop and phone. The "bounce" rate is the percentage of people who hit the site and only look at one page. The pages per visit is a mean, and includes the bouncers. The time-on-site thing I consider kind of unreliable, to be honest. (It's regularly internally contradictory within a single day, is why.)

Anyway, as you can see, phone users used to bounce off the site at a dramatically higher rate than other kinds of users; now they've moved into line with everyone else. Pages per visit on phone is up, time on site (unreliable tho' it may be) is also meaningfully up. Mobile users had been dragging the whole site average down; now it's back in line with other formats.

So I guess that mobile view is kind of important! In retrospect I guess that seems kind of obvious, but I tend to hate them personally, so I guess that kind of affected my impression of their value. I wish I'd done the work earlier, now. Ah, well, live and learn.

Echoed from Crime and the Blog of Evil

"just to impress a boy"

I've been reading a lot of Shit People Say to Women Directors, a tumblr blog on the deep and endemic sexism in the US film and television industry. It consists of things said to women trying to work in the industry, as is implied by the label on the tin, and it's pretty often pretty brutal.

And we all know how bad the sexism is in gaming, and more specifically, the computer gaming industry, which makes me think there ought to be another blog called Shit People Say To Women In Gaming. This anonymous post at The Trenches could be the first entry.

In mid-2011 I applied for a localization testing position in Birmingham, UK. I have 2 years of translation experience and plenty of good references, so I knew my chances were good (I want to be part of the industry and I don’t care which end I get in). I sent in my CV and received an email back on the same day with a date and time for a phone interview. I was through the roof, you have no idea how long I had been trying to get into the industry. ...

Interviewer: Look, madam, I will be frank with you, I don’t actually believe you want this job.
Me: (very stunned) No?
Interviewer: No, I don’t believe your interest in the gaming industry is genuine as a woman.

Go read the whole thing, it actually manages to get worse. And keep in mind: this is a testing position, one of the relative refuges for women in software, in recent years. Imagine the odds of getting a callback for a woman in dev.

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