Having spent a large part of this evening preparing the foundations for a large UX review that we're conducting, it struck me how mobile frameworks, such as Cocoa for iOS and the Android SDK, are setting an exciting precedent for user experience.

Over the past few months, I've had the pleasure to work with native iOS and Android projects. On returning to web based app development, it has struck me how none of the common frameworks seem to put an emphasis on encouraging even the most basic of UI hints that the mobile frameworks insist upon.

The most strikingly obvious omission from the majority of everyday applications is what Apple refers to as the 'first responder' and you've probably never considered it up until now. If you have an iPhone or Android device, then you'll notice that when you open an app that requires an action, maybe a log in, the first input field is selected and the keyboard is on screen ready to go. Simple, right? So now open up one of your favourite websites, or maybe one that you've built...does it readily select the field that you're most likely to want. With a few exceptions, probably not.

Why not? Well, the mobile frameworks encourage the developer to provide a first responder out of the box but, to my knowledge, no web frameworks do so. It's a very simple UI tweak to achieve with a little bit of JavaScript, the focus() function is perfect if you have jQuery at your disposal.

It's really quite surprising how such a seemingly trivial afterthought can make your web app seem much smoother and easy to use so think about adding it to your apps in the future. There are a number of other simple tricks that mobile apps bring to the table that could help to improve usability of your web app too but maybe I'll talk about them in a later post.