Responsive Thinking
It’s a couple of days I saw this website spinning back and forth in the internet
Basically it features beautifully vector logos of famous brands which are totally responsive, you can resize the viewport and the logos resize themselves into smaller version, leaving intact their recognizability.
I really love it.
But the more I look at these logos, the more I am convinced it’s not about recognizability: they actually convey different messages and have different purpose in each of their respective responsive state. Recognizability is ensured by the logotype and brand color pattern, however in their normal state, the logos aim to be just evocative, the middle size ensures they are unmistakable and the smaller size provides “contextual orientation”.
If you ever start exploring the concept from the smallest sizes, probably things are not so obvious.
BTW,
They are beautiful because they express the meaning of responsiveness I always used to intend: it’s not useful to convey the same message across all media, it is far better to convey the best message for each media (when you can).
Even Google is not rich enough to support all the different mobile platforms.
Vic Gundotra — VP of Engineering at Google
What’s next?
Since Responsive Web Design (RWD) has reached is fifth birthday, this website allow me to take some time to think about what RWD means today for me, as a UX professional, and for my clients.
As Rick Monroe once said, “(RWD) remains the single most important shift in design and development for the web since the advent of CSS”, I always had been a strong advocate of crafting the right experience for each channel and media, in respect of their strengths and limitations. I always believed that responsive design is actually more a strategy than a mere process.
I tried (with fairly good success ) to educate my clients into thinking RWD as a strategy instead of just a mandatory check list item: RWD is wonderful opportunity that can be leveraged to encourage the utterly sense of love and loyalty of users who understand that you “care” about them, by providing amazing services and overcome their expectations.
In order to do that…
I always switch the word “responsive” with “adapting” because it is much easier for me to open up a discussion about what “responsiveness” should truly consist of:
- Responsiveness in Design: how you present your content should match the channel capabilities in terms of information hierarchy, font size, layout whitespaces, resolution and ergonomics
- Responsiveness in Interaction: how your interaction should respond to different device / media / technologies in terms of animation, patterns, orientation, context of use
- Responsiveness in Content: how much content and what type of contents are useful in different contexts? Too much or too less? What is really important for our user to reach his objective?
- Responsive in Technology: We all want beautiful images and photos, but serving a whopping 3mb of webpage shrank in a mobile frame is not responsive at all…
Unfortunately, the majority of the people in charge don’t think beyond the first bullet point, “making the web experience accessible to mobile devices”, which is the lowest level of mobile compliancy that you should think of.
Adapting your message to the current delivering media is the key factor for success and implementing only a “change of presentation” should not be enough for anyone.
Beautiful article on Smashing Magazine
You may find a striking resemblance with the using of the terms “Translation” and “Localization”: technical folks use them interchangeably but there is a mild difference between them. You should always localized your content, using proper language expressions, shibboleths, collocations and cultural references. In the worst case scenario, where you can’t provide a localization, translation is the fallback plan.
With “Responsiveness” we don’t go that far, the worst level of compliancy is now, today, the standard and the optimum is not even considered.
I honestly believe my clients ignorance about the whole concept of RWD is totally due to a woeful communication of the so called web experts (Us)…
If you check the wikipedia entry for RWD
Responsive web design – Wikipedia
As you can read along the whole entry, the technical point of view of the article is so strong and biased that anything else falls behind. No mention about functionalities, contents or purpose.
This kind of approach really upset me in the past and I do believe that this kind of culture is, in part, our fault.
Something is in the air
I believed once in dogmatic approaches and moving my process methodically in the direction of responsive design seems a convenient way of achieving better results: It was all a matter of agree with the stakeholders on the user objectives and the company objectives categorized by channel and building together a multi channel strategy.
It worked so far for pretty long time, but with my last project (a very big web portal) I started questioning those concepts.
In 2014, more people are using mobile devices to access the internet than desktop PCs. Accessibility for mobile devices has become a huge priority for web developers, maybe it is time for us to to redefine some of our misconceptions. 🙂
The internet is moved to a mobile primary consumption of contents, but for what the idea of “mobile” itself really stands for?
Is the “Mobile” the “in motion” experience we used to believe? 850 mln of people are today mobile only users, by will, and they won’t access the internet by web, desktop, laptop or by any other means.
If we still believe mobile is the “internet on the go” with tight focused experience, we are awfully wrong, since we have to deal with a brand new breed of users for whom the mobile experience is the ONLY experience.
As a matter of fact, I start changing my mind…
providing a subset of functionalities with the assumption that they ought to be more than enough may not match user expectations and failing user expectations in the UX design field is an unforgivable sin.
Today, responsive design is an unnecessary necessity and I start thinking that the mobile distinction is just an artificial barrier we built because we are not ready to deal with complex projects.
If we are able to design full fledge experiences regardless of the delivery channel, do you think the “mobile first” approach still holds or we can safely return to a more traditional content first?
I often lose myself into infinite activities where I can live, work, teach, learn on how people interact with the future.
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