nestoria new design

Nestoria New DesignSavio Dimatteo

Perl Developer,

Lokku Ltd.

Commercial Computing Lecture Series

Birmingham University

5 December 2013

Who am I?

● Savio Dimatteo

● Perl Developer at Nestoria property search engine

● working on a LAMP stack since 2 years [ “P” = “Perl” ]

● maintenance/frontend/backend projects

● currently working on: “Nestoria New Design”

Lokku

● dev team: 6 people● product team: 2 people● commercial team: 8 people

Nestoria

● property search engine

● 8 countries, 6 languages

● 1.3 million search requests per day

● 10 million properties indexed every day

Nestoria

Nestoria Internally

Nestoria Externally

Nestoria Stack

● HTML::Mason

● jQuery/jQueryUI

● XHTML Strict

● Apache, mod_perl

● MySQL

Nestoria Over Time

Legible Listings Layout

Legible Listings Layout

● ~200KB more CSS

● + ~6% daily clicks than in previous design

● exception: India

○ older devices

■ lower resolutions

■ slower connections

Nestoria New Design

Setting and Resources

● ~4 months time

Nestoria New Design

Challenges

Challenge #1Getting the Design Right

What you get:

○ spacing

○ fonts

○ colors

○ sizes

● Looks good!

New Design Specs

What you get:

○ spacing

○ fonts

○ colors

○ sizes

● Looks good! BUT

New Design Specs

Improvement via user tests

Smaller Graphical Tweaks

Logic not yet implemented

Exact dimensions

“Australian” Prices?

● Offers Above $545,000

● $439,950-$469,950

● POA

● Supurb Value offers above $1.49M

“Australian” Prices?

Implementing “impossible” specs

1. stick to the spec as much as possible

2. follow the principles the spec is based on

3. be inventive

4. talk to people

Implementing “impossible” specs

1. stick to the spec as much as possible

2. follow the principles the spec is based on

3. be inventive

4. talk to people

Australian prices!

Australian Prices!

● no collision

● leave as is

Australian Prices!

● collision

● detect collision (Javascript)

if ($titleLink.position().left + $titleLink.width() >= $titleAside.position().left) {

}

Australian Prices!

● detect collision (Javascript)

if ($titleLink.position().left + $titleLink.width() >= $titleAside.position().left) {

… $listingContainer.addClass(‘nst-collision-detected’); …

}

● Add ‘nst-collision-detected’ CSS rule to fix the issue

Challenge #2Building UI components

New Sliders

New Sliders

● disabled (any price allowed)

New Sliders

● left-bounded range

New Sliders

● bounded range

New Sliders

● single value

New Sliders - click

New Sliders - click and drag

New Sliders - touch

New Sliders - touch and drag

How would you do create a slider like that?

jQueryUI

“ jQuery UI is a curated set of user interface interactions,

effects, widgets, and themes built on top of the jQuery

JavaScript Library. ”

jQueryUI - sliders

jQueryUI - sliders

Can’t click!

jQueryUI - sliders

Can’t click!

Can’t touch!

jQueryUI - touch support

● jQuery UI Touch Punch

“ jQuery UI Touch Punch is a small hack that enables the

use of touch events on sites using the jQuery UI user

interface library. ”

● Can’t touch sliders on Silk Browser (Kindle Fire HD).

Why building our own sliders?

● complex yet specific user interactions

● it’s tempting to hack into jQuery UI sliders to add touch

support (forbidden!)

● would need to include jQuery UI (23KB, minified)

● we already plan to increase complexity of slider UI!

jquery.nstSlider.js - usage

<div class="nst-slider-outer" data-step="20" data-min="20” data-max="220">

<div class="nst-slider-inner">

<div class="nst-slider-grip-left"></div>

<div class="nst-slider-grip-right"></div>

</div>

</div>

jquery.nstSlider.js - usage

$('.nst-slider-outer').nstSlider({

'valueChangedCallback' : function(min, max) {

$('.nst-slider-min').text(min);

$('.nst-slider-max').text(max);

}

});

jquery.nstSlider.js - Idea

outer bar(gray bar)

leftgrip

rightgrip

position:absolute;left: 0px;

position:absolute;right: 0px;

inner barposition:relative;


outer bar(gray bar)

leftgrip inner bar

leftgrip

rightgripinner bar


outer bar(gray bar)

leftgrip

rightgripinner bar

left: <sth>px;

<sth>


outer bar(gray bar)

leftgrip

rightgripinner bar

left: <sth>px;width: <sthElse>px;

<sth> <sthElse>

jquery.nstSlider.js - Moving left handle

leftgrip

rightgripinner bar


leftgrip

rightgripinner bar

deltaPx

● track deltaPx


leftgrip

rightgripinner bar

● track deltaPx

● add deltaPx to left CSS property of inner bar

deltaPx


leftgrip

rightgripinner bar

● track deltaPx


● remove deltaPx from width CSS property of inner bar

- deltaPx


leftgrip

rightgrip

● track deltaPx



● map left , left + width into [rangeMin, rangeMax]

inner bar

left left + width


leftgrip

rightgrip

● track deltaPx



● map left , left + width into [rangeMin, rangeMax]

→ notify values have changed

inner bar

jquery.nstSlider.js

● easy to use as others jQuery plugins

● highly cross-browser (IE7+, iPhones, not Windows Phones

though)

● ~6KB minified (Closure compiler)

● easily customisable

● more code to maintain

● fixed size for now

Challenge #3Javascript Mistakes

Javascript

● more interactive compontents → more Javascript code

● Javascript:

○ Interacting with the DOM

○ Asynchronous event-handling

○ Single threaded

○ Multiple browsers and devices

○ many libraries out there

Scopingvar result = 1;

function oneOrMore(n) {

result = n;

if (n <= 0) {

var result = Math.abs(n);

result = 1 + result;

}

return result;

}

Scopingvar result = 1;


result = n;

if (n <= 0) {

var result = Math.abs(n);


}

return result;

}

var result = 1;


var result;

result = n;

if (n <= 0) {

result = Math.abs(n);


}

return result;

}

How to not iterate through Javascript arrays

Array.prototype.extraFunc = function () { … };

var myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4];

for (var x in myArray) {

console.log(x);

}

How to not iterate through Javascript arrays


var myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4];

for (var x in myArray) {

console.log(x);

}

1

2

3

4

extraFunc

How to iterate through Javascript arrays


var myArray = [1, 2, 3, 4];

for (var i=0; i<myArray.length; i++) {

console.log(myArray[i]);

}

How to not iterate through Javascript objects

var myObj = {

‘key1’ : 1, ‘key2’ : 2, ‘key3’ : 3

};

var k;

for (k in myObj) {

console.log(k, myObj[k]);

}

How to iterate through Javascript objects

var myObj = {‘key1’ : 1, ‘key2’ : 2, ‘key3’ : 3

};

var k;for (k in myObj) {

if (myObj.hasOwnProperty(k)) {

console.log(k, myObj[k]);

}

}

Javascript Code Validation - JSHint● Java-based tool

● parser-based validation

● easy to configure

● very flexible configuration

○ trailing whitespaces

○ naming conventions

○ undeclared variables

JSHint configuration{

"curly" : true,

"camelcase": false,

"eqeqeq" : true,

"forin" : true,

"unused" : true,

"es3" : true,

"trailing" : false,

"devel" : false,

"undef" : true,

"jquery" : true,

"browser" : true,

"globals" : {

"Modernizr" : true,

"$j" : true,

"google" : true,

"LokkuMap" : true,

"GoogleLokkuMap" : true,

"LeafletLokkuMap" : true,

"L": true

}

}

Conclusions

● talk to members of your team during your project

● changing a component completely? just build your own!

● Javascript → mistakes!

○ use code quality tools to avoid mistakes

Conclusions: Nestoria New Design● New design is now live

○ ~3% more daily clicks (all countries)

○ users feel it’s fast (i.e., more clicks per users)

○ we can improve its speed further

○ works in India too!

● the amount Javascript in our codebase is going to grow

○ old motto: “avoid Javascript as much as possible”

○ new motto: “write better Javascript”

Thank you!http://www.nestoria.com - find a property

http://www.github.com/lokku - open source code

http://www.lokku.com/jobs - work with us!

http://www.nestoria.com

http://www.nestoria.com

http://www.github.com/lokku

http://www.github.com/lokku

http://www.lokku.com/jobs

http://www.lokku.com/jobs

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