Mobile Apps: the trouble with using 'Responsive Design'
"Amid an overwhelming amount of mobile options and solutions, it's easy to see why responsive design's singular code seems like an alluring universal panacea for mobile optimization. However, while responsive design aims to scale web content fluidly across multiple devices with different screen sizes, it may not represent the best option for organizations aiming to deliver unique and innovative experiences to customers. ...
The future of digital business depends primarily on mastering the mobile channel. Mobile's mushrooming numbers are due to the convenience of remote access and a new reliance upon the delivery of information when and where little to none was previously available. When developing your approach to engaging customers via mobile, it is key to ensure your strategy accounts for the rising expectations your customers have for this important channel.
Once you understand the kind of mobile experience you want to create, you can decide whether adopting a responsive design philosophy can deliver upon these expectations and goals. While responsive design can help you achieve a certain measure of consistency across channels, the real prize lies with the ability to create unique experiences. A broader multi-screen approach designed dynamically by channel will enable the sort of customer experiences that yield higher engagement and contribute to overall success."
(Carin van Vuuren, 18 November 2012, Forbes)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Luke Wroblewski on: Multi-device Layout Patterns
"Through fluid grids and media query adjustments, responsive design enables Web page layouts to adapt to a variety of screen sizes. As more designers embrace this technique, we're not only seeing a lot of innovation but the emergence of clear patterns as well. I cataloged what seem to be the most popular of these patterns for adaptable multi-device layouts."
(Luke Wroblewski, 14 March 2012, via Christopher Allwood)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Responsive Web Design
"Recently, an emergent discipline called 'responsive architecture' has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds approach them. Motion sensors can be paired with climate control systems to adjust a room's temperature and ambient lighting as it fills with people. Companies have already produced 'smart glass technology' that can automatically become opaque when a room's occupants reach a certain density threshold, giving them an additional layer of privacy.
In their book Interactive Architecture, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp described this more adaptive approach as 'a multiple-loop system in which one enters into a conversation; a continual and constructive information exchange.' Emphasis mine, as I think that's a subtle yet powerful distinction: rather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant and structure can-and should-mutually influence each other.
This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design. But how?"
(Ethan Marcotte, 25 May 2010)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
