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What have welearnt aboutResponsiveWeb Design?

Our two year journey of discovery into responsive web design suggests it’s not as simple as making a website fit into a mobile device; in this presentation we’lltake you a little further into the future...

We don’t want an app,We want a responsive web

site!

Clients have realised they don’t need an app to be visible in the mobile space - but they are now being bombarded by new phrases, buzzwords and terminology

Responsive / Adaptive / Mobile first /Mobile optimised

With so many new terms, it’s no wonder people are confused

After much research, we were convinced that a responsive site required all aspects of the design to fit into a browser, whatever its size or shape

Therefore we would adjust the browser width to set new CSS rules every time the design broke

We were startingto understand this

So: make the website fit various sizes, make the images and videos scale proportionally, adjust the behaviour of some plug-ins - and away we go!

Our initial aim was to make a responsive site for IE6 with the help of a few additional plug-ins

Developer test tools,client test tools

We even built a breakpoint analyser to help our developers set media query values

We rolled it out to clients so they could use it in lieu of having a range of test devices

It even works in IE6

This culminated in us building the most complex responsive site we’ve ever built

It has a responsive mega menu, responsive layout, images, video, accordions, EVERYTHING is responsive

Surely THIS was responsive?

It even works in IE6

As we discovered, there is more to this than meets the eye...

Massive overheadsfor testing

We discovered that maintenance and development took a lot of testing time

It took too long,and cost too much

A five minute amend was taking over an hour, which we estimated was a 30% impact to costs and timelines...

This wasn’t what we saw for the future of mobile web

We decided to rethink our position and fundamentally re-evaluate what responsive web design was

Responsive analysed

We analysed what responsive meant and narrowed it down to two factors that defined the core user experience:

- mobile hardware, software and its supporting infrastructure- user needs for content delivery within a contextual environment

We realised that a true responsive user experience is almost impossible to deliver with the current network infrastructure and

mobile device software, both in terms of OS and browsers

Standard v Retina

We chose images to illustrate why we think true responsive is not currently possible Images are usually the largest page asset

Developers detect device capability and show images based on that

Can’t detect 2/3/4G Wifi of LAN

Can’t assess quality of bandwidth

Standard v Retina

Do we show retina and punish data caps / ignore retina displays? Apple cache limit is 100k, used to be 25k,this makes a bad situation worse Alternative solution: deliver basic then enhanced site depending on data rate

Internet history tells us that poorexperience leads to loss of conversion

Does your website know i’m late?

Contextual awareness illustrates the ability of the website to interact with the device and its surroundings

Does the website interact with the calendar, GPS and time to show a customised view of the webpage? Will you get to your interview on time?

To accomplish this requires several apps to be open at the same time.A responsive page would auto configure to your time and situation and display a call button for the person you are to meet overlaid on a map showing directions

and approximate time of arrival

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities

are wrong”

- Voltaire

Understanding what responsive should be, we realised that we and the industry had been doing adaptive all along

However, most developers, competitors and online tutorials show a website in the obligatory desktop, tablet and phone mock-up

and call this responsive...

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities

are wrong”

- Voltaire

...we believe this is an industry mistake

So what did we do about it?

Knowing that delivering responsive images was fraught with difficulty we decided to stick with standard def images; it’s easier on people’s data caps.

A website that changes its appearance based on screen size isn’t responding to anything other than size, which is a faulty way to deliver

a mobile experience as the screen resolution and pixel density of nearly every modern mobile device is equal if not better than most desktop systems

Desktop = Tablet

Overwhelming industry research states that tablets are primarilyused at home and have comparable screen resolutions to desktops

We decided that a tablet specific design held no additional value and decided that a tablet should show the exact same website as

the desktop, regardless of orientation

Desktop = Phone

Our own user research indicates that the primary mobile orientation for website usage is portrait

Taking into account screen sizes and pixel sizes it became clear that the only consideration we needed to make after the primary

design was that of mobile in portrait

What we stopped doing

Stretching a browser width backwards and forwards and gaping in awe as the layout changes is not something a user does,

it's what developers do

This is not a mobile experience, mobile browsers are full screen, you can't stretch them

What we stopped doing

If clients wanted to see things stretch and fit into a variable sized window on our desktop we would have been using fluid layouts for the last decade

The fact that we have almost exclusively used fixed layouts tells us that if a window is too small for the website, the user will adjust the window

Test on real devices

Allowing the client to adjust the width of the desktop browser to see the mobile site is a false belief in the mobile solution...

...they are still sat down, using a low density very large monitor with a mouse and keyboard, everything you don't do or use with a mobile

Test on real devices

We stopped showing mobile solutions on a desktop and persuaded our clients to test the mobile solution on a mobile device

This allowed them to answer questions such as:

• is the menu button too small?• does it take too long to scroll the page with a thumb/finger?• is the text the right size?• is the mobile menu correct? None of these can be answered correctly on a desktop

So what have we learnt aboutResponsiveWeb Design?

• True responsive is currently impossible under current infrastructure and software constraints

• A picture of a website in 3 device formats is not a mobile solution

• Fluid layouts activated at certain screen widths does not accurately give a true representation of the mobile solution

So what have we learnt aboutResponsiveWeb Design?

• Retina images can be costly to user experience and the financial limits on users data allowance

• Adaptive solutions ARE more complex, requiring additional development & testing, however the impact can be minimised with an approach based on user research and experienced processes

So what have we learnt aboutResponsiveWeb Design?

• Performing mobile testing on mobile devices will accurately judge if the solution is fit for purpose

• Tablet design is the same as desktop design

• Mobile is primarily held in portrait orientation and mobile solutions should accommodate this

And finally...

Mobile solutions are still evolving, and as a result of our thorough due diligence and project processes, we have discounted many of them. We continue to analyse research the latest innovations to ensure the best solutions for our clients.