We live in the land of mobile. So, how do you optimize your site for a mobile experience? The leading operating systems are Android and iOS. The catch is that Androids run on different devices, which in turn, have different specs. Let's talk about how to quickly get to the lowest common denominator.

Specs for the Apple iOS are easy enough. The screen size is 320x480. Just remember that iPhone4 has retina display, so the ppi (pixels per inch) is much higher than previous devices, 326 ppi vs. 163 ppi for iPhone 3GS. There is support for scaling here, but remember your user. Do you really want them to zoom into every text block to read? Or would you rather have them easily scan through text and scroll at their leisure?

How about Android? Yes, it's layered on lots of different devices, but the operating system has common support for sizes and densities.

• A set of four generalized sizes: small, normal, large, and xlarge
• A set of four generalized densities: ldpi (low), mdpi (medium), hdpi (high), and xhdpi (extra high)

Refer to the developer site for full info.

How do these specs match up? I'd recommend designing to 320x480, which matches both iOS and the "medium" Android screen size. No more than 160 dpi. I hope this quickstart is helpful for someone else. There's a lot of information that's rapidly changing. I'd encourage you to target a few devices and operating systems that you think your target uses.

There’s no replacement for good research and preparation, but hunches are just as important in guiding us to the right answer. Microsoft and Flickr's co-founder, Caterina Fake, hope we find a lot of value in hunches in our decision making. I’m left to wonder …Is a hunch enough?

We’ve seen and heard the Bing ads, the ones with people regurgitating search results in everyday conversation. Their hunch is that people are tired of the irrelevant garbage we get back from Google that we’ll turn to a new tool. Is the decision engine a Google killer? My first test was to use my own name as a search term. While the results were ordered differently on Google and Bing, I didn’t feel like one outperformed the other. I filed it away in my head. Since Bing’s launch in May, I mostly forgot about it until I read about Bing’s upward trajectory. Microsoft must be on to something here. My second test came when I was researching a client’s social media outlets. My search term was something like “client name” + “facebook” and Google’s first result was a link to a political event that had nothing to do with what I wanted to find. I tried Bing, and the very first result was exactly what I needed.

What’s the take away? I'd say Bing is a good second choice to Google, but with the Yahoo/Microsoft merger, better things may soon be on the horizon. Meanwhile, give Hunch a shot.