Supposedly, when freed from backbreaking work, people have more opportunity to think creatively. That’s why, now the conversation has moved from making websites work across various archaic browsers to responsive design, we should be talking about the possibilities this presents, rather than design that works across various screens.
The better we understand the reason for use of one device over another, how it’s physically being held, and what this infers, the better the experiences we can deliver – no matter what we’re developing. And that, for me, is the beginning of truly responsive thinking. Not just responsive design.
When someone tilts their tablet or mobile phone from portrait to landscape view, they don’t do this because they want to see a different design. Something has prompted it. Maybe they’re walking and want to see the content at a size that’s easier to read or simply shifting into a more comfortable position.
We should consider this cause and do more than reformat the content to suit. We should deliver the features demanded in that moment. For example, moving from a portrait to a landscape orientation when reading an eBook could suggest the reader is growing tired. And we may want to prioritise the ability to alter the screen brightness and type size.
Going further, perhaps we shouldn’t limit our thinking to the device and its orientation if we want to deliver a better experience of our website or application. The geographical location of the device and the time of day can give us more confidence in our assumptions. If the user tilts their device to a landscape orientation when reading an eBook on a tropical beach in the afternoon, it’s safe to say they’re having a very different experience than the user reading an eBook late at night in the centre of a city. Because that’s the thing about user experiences, they aren’t restricted to the screen. They take in the whole world around it. It’s up to us to consider how different the features need to be to deliver the best possible experience in a particular moment of time.
If you know someone is in the immediate vicinity of your business when they access your website, you could assume they’re trying to find you. So it would make sense to increase the prominence of your location and contact details, along with an “in the moment” offer such as a morning coffee or early evening cocktail, depending on the nature of your business – of course!
A better experience of your website or application comes from fewer pain points – even those that are only conspicuous in their absence. The more of these you can remove, the better chance you stand of providing an experience that’s perceived as immediately valuable. The result is a customer who will instinctively check your website or app every time they entered your store or office. And the potential of that is almost dizzying.
As Arthur C Clarke said “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Genuinely responsive design puts us one step closer to that Holy Grail. Offers or content triggered by the time of day and an customer’s profile as they step into your store will soon stop feeling like science fiction.
However, some fundamental pain points are standing in the way of this reality – regardless of your brand.
Firstly, apps can be a hassle. Locating, downloading and installing an app tablet is more time consuming than we would like it to be. Even if you’re a die-hard app fan, it’s a safe bet that the number of apps you’ve download recently hardly compares to when they first arrived on the scene. It would seem we’re prepared to tolerate a degree of rigmarole when we’ve no awareness of another way and there’s a degree of novelty to chivvy us along.
Having lots of apps on your device is a hassle too. The individual icons clutter up your screen and need rearranging and organising into folders, if you feel the need to impose some order. This means that you may have to scroll through screens or dive into folders to find the app you need. Not the seamless and immediate experience we would like to create.
Also, there continues to be sense of fear surrounding mobile data usage. The networks fuelling distrust and suspicion thanks to the ambiguity of what unlimited really means in reference to a data plan. This makes mobile data usage a pain point in itself.
The good news is that with improving speed and increasing amounts of data that can be transferred, along with greater availability of free mobile internet connections, we will one day be less reliable on apps to deliver our mobile experiences. Our mobile web browser may become the only app we ever need to connect to the content or tools we need.
So there may be some time to wait until we can experience the magic of truly responsive design. But that doesn’t mean we can’t start having the right conversations now.
