Responsive Web design -- it sounds like something no IT professional would be without, right?
Sort of. In reality, responsive Web design, the technique of building Web interfaces to fit a range of differently sized device screens, has become both a necessity and a challenge for many IT shops. If you're dealing in Web content, you'll need to understand the fine points.
The "trick," some experts say, is to understand exactly what you're trying to do. "Web design has always been about figuring out what's next and what technology's going to change and adapting to new devices and things like that," Jeff White, a principal at the marketing firm Kula Partners, said during last month's Atlantic Internet Marketing conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "Now we're trying to figure out how to make content work on as many different devices as possible using the least amount of budget as possible."
Jeff White, principal at Kula Partners.
One solution, he said, is responsive Web design, in which HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) technology are used to adapt the same content to fit screens on mobile phones, laptops, and even wide-screen TVs.
The problem, White said, is whether the content really lends itself to being spread across so many devices. "We really have to consider how people are using things, where they are when they're using them, what they're trying to accomplish, how it's different when you're using your phone or you're at your desk or in your living room." The issue is one of "context."
White isn't alone in giving this advice. The idea of developing once to fit a range of devices sounds efficient, but it many not be. According to Stacey Mulcahy of the digital design firm Big Spaceship, interactive elements and advertisements don't necessarily translate well from one device to another. "Responsive design takes care of the layout, but not the experience," she said during a conference in Toronto in April.
Mulcahy suggested giving mobile devices priority in the design process and considering the need for interactivity, instead of the perfect reproduction of a specific page.
Both White and Mulcahy gave good and bad examples of multi-device implementation of content in their talks. For White, the New York Times "doesn't take into account what device you have," so its main page is simply reproduced on a smartphone screen without being "contextually aware." In contrast, Mulcahy cited the Boston Globe as a publication "primarily focused on content," not just miniaturizing a given page.
Another issue with responsive Web design is that it is more than just a way to develop apps for different devices. It's also an approach that is distinct from traditional "waterfall" programming.
Like agile project management, responsive Web design is a departure from more traditional techniques that rely on sequential steps to complete a project. There have been plenty of comparisons of agile and responsive Web design. (BTW, check out what Allied Beverage Group CIO Brian Margolies has to say about agile methods in his Internet Evolution blog this week.)
There also are issues surrounding the standardization of responsive Web design. Presently, there is some contention between developers in different camps. Browser vendors, for instance, have a distinct view as opposed to application developers.
In the end, the news here is that Web design continues to evolve to support the realities of the Internet. Though IT must be aware of the trends and the choices involved, every shop will have to come to terms with what works best.
It seems like every content provider is either trying to develop their own unique way of displaying their media across PC/tablet/phone/smartTV/etc platforms -- or has given up and outsourced the job to a design firm with a cookie cutter process for creating responsive web design.
Seems like the concept behind RSS is pretty much dead -- IDEALLY, the content was supposed to be easily syndicated and then the end-user interface would decide how to display the information best. But nowadays, no RSS feeds contain full information b/c RSS feeds are seen as teasers to get readers to click thru to the full site for pageviews and advertiser eyeballs.
It's a shame, though, that the user experience has to be so fragmented just so advertising business models can survive.
Sadly, I don't really, and in some sense the widespread (and erroneous in my opinion) adoption of WYSIWYG for web design probably has stagnated this type of programmed design of visual environments.
Case in point, I have connected my gaming PC in my apartment living room to use my 32" LCD TV. And I sit on the couch and can web surf using a diNovo keypad (Bluetooth). To make it work I use the NoSquint addon for Firefox, which allows me to globally zoom text and web pages.
Now in a perfect world, zooming either of these should create useable visuals. And while that is sometimes true, often it is not. The reason is again, that web designers are often graphic artists and they design for an unalterable printed page which is optimized for a fixed size.
The other thing that iritates me is a designer who hard codes page breaks! HTML was designed to eliminate by having words "flow" into the browser space as it sized...putting in page breaks ruins this. So then to have big text, I have to use the horizontal slider and move back and forth to read the article.
Another issue is readability of text. Decades of newspaper publishing have confirmed that the narrow columnar format is best for reading. But how are 90 percent of web pages structured -- they use the entire wide rectangle of the screen...making them extremely difficult to read!
But then, our technology has advanced so much, maybe a completely different paradigm can be used. For example, we could have built into the PC, a program that scans the page and using design heuristics, automatically rearranges the whole thing based on the device being used and the desire of the people. Heck, I've played around with JQuery, and built addons for Firefox that can iterate through the hyperlinks of a web page and make them addressible by text commands and things like that.
So ultimately the best design might be no design at all. The publisher would just simply send a stream or streams of objects -- text, pictures, movies -- and some rules or guidelines (must show one advertisement per page) and then leave it entirely up to the user's software to display or lay it out.
lin crampton - The issue of when to use a native app and when to use HTML5 is complicated, and fascinating (well, fascinating to me at least).
With HTML5 you get easy cross-platform compatibility. However, you don't get access to some hardware features, like the iOS camera. And, at least on iOS, HTML5 apps run significantly slower than native apps, something Facebook has learned the hard way.
Good points, KMT568. The shortcut method of one size fits all may streamline the process for IT since they don't have to involve the business side in the process. However, a more effective way in the long run would be for IT and the business folks to look at what would work really well for each device category individually. More costly? Yes. More time needed? Yes. However, this approach ultimately will result in greater customer satisfaction, increased revenues, etc. because it gives the customer what they want, how they want it. Besides, it may lead to innovation that can then be applied to freshen up other mediums in the process.
in Idaho, I have DSL. Here in Maine, I have a Verizon mifi that generally just gets 2g here, if not slower. I could drive into town and park in the library parking lot if I *had* to. :-)
Are you using a satellite link, slfisher? I live in a remote area most of the time, and now I have DSL. But in the past I struggled with a satellite service.
This might look easy (finding the target audience) to figure out but most of the times its all the users using different devices at different times for the same purpose. For e.g. I can use my laptop, smartphone and tablet for logging onto my email account.
Nevertheless, I cant deny that there wont any specific cases where the specialize web design strategy may work.
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