If you are anything like me, or 68% of respondents to this Google survey, your day goes something like this:
First, you wake up. Now, you immediately look around for your phone. You find your phone either in its appropriate overnight charging spot, OR utter a few choice expletives while you look for the surely dead thing somewhere in your mass of pillows and blankets. Once that whole situation is resolved you go about the business of life, which in today’s world means checking email, the weather, headlines on NYTimes and NPR, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. This all happens before you even get vertical.
We knew this was coming. Mobile Internet access has been increasing exponentially since we graduated from the Razr, and it finally eclipsed desktop access in the past few years. The stats on when this actual happened vary depending on which report you read, but the trend was clear years ago. When this became apparent, marketers and content providers realized that their material absolutely had to be mobile and tablet-friendly, and designers were forced to get familiar with the concept of responsive design.
The idea behind responsive design has existed for decades, but the actual term wasn’t coined until Ethan Marcotte wrote an essay about it in 2010. Basically, it’s a coding method that allows content to visually adapt to the device on which a user is viewing it. But even under this new framework, the design process wasn’t fundamentally changed. Not at first. We still designed for the desktop experience, only now we had the additional task of thinking through the downsized versions as well. In effect, it became an awkward afterthought. After laying out our amazing desktop creations we were now forced to pare things down for viewers with smaller screens, a shorter attention span and less tolerance for waiting for all our amazingly complicated graphics to load. For those of us who were still hung up on the I-can-finally-design-a-website-like-a-print-piece mentality of the Flash heyday, it was a bit like asking Betsey Johnson to make a cocktail dress that doubled as a nun’s habit. There were no cartwheels.
But everyone came around to the idea eventually, and with good reason. Google now says about 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they once had trouble accessing. And about 57% of people won’t recommend a business with a sub-par website. With stats like this, it’s no wonder the next evolution in web design was the mobile-first strategy. With this, designers began with the mobile experience when creating their layouts, knowing they are often more frequently seen than their desktop counterparts. And this is great, so long as designers understand that mobile users do not always have the same intentions as desktop users. Mobile-first design should not, in fact, just be a reverse way of approaching responsive design. App designers understand this all too well, and regular ole web designers who want to create great mobile experiences would be wise to take a page out of their design playbook. After all, it doesn’t make sense for everyone to have an app. Maybe your organization doesn’t require as robust a solution as say, Amazon or Uber. But the more these principles improve the overall usability of the Internet across devices, the less tolerant users will become with an antiquated experience. So, these principles really affect every marketer, no matter how local or small.
Who knows what the next stage of this evolution will be. We all have increasingly more options available to view our favorite online content and services. We’ve seen things like Google glass and VR equipment come and go, each threatening to redefine how we access our information. One thing is for sure though, one day one of these new technologies will stick, and designers will need to stay flexible in order to stay relevant.
What are your thoughts on the future of responsive design?