Artefact 2 Results

Tom LLoyd from Bluegg

In your opinion, how important is Responsive Web Design (RWD)? Do you think it is essential to have a responsive site?

I think responsive web design or RWD is a bit of a buzz word at the moment. I think all websites will eventually be usable on 'all the devices', without interfering with the users experience. Devices will cover everything from phones and tablets to TV's and desktops. Over time we'll stop referring to these sites as 'responsive' as that will be just part of the process. In the same way we stopped talking about a website that meets 'web standards'. It's just 'web design'.

Which method do you think is the most effective: RWD or Mobile-Specific? Why?

It think there is room for both and it depends on the site. In general I would say there's no need for a separate m. site for the vast majority of websites. For some, like Autotrader or Facebook it makes sense, as the experience on a mobile device is quite different from desktop. This might change over time as browsers increase the number of media queries they support. The BBC news site is a great example of one that seemingly fits the mobile specific site approach but is a successful responsive site.

How is designing for mobile devices affecting businesses/ digital marketing/online advertising today?

Yes big time. And it's all to do with specific targeting. Businesses and marketeers can now be more targeted with their messaging than ever before as they have an idea of in what context the user is browsing. By detecting whether they're on a mobile device, they can promote products or services which match. 

The biggest question mark is over advertising. Currently dealing with set ad sizes which would normally be visible on the right hand size of a desktop site on a space restricted mobile devise is tricky. So much so that sites often drop ads on a mobile. The best example of this is Facebook. They are yet to find a way to monetise their mobile traffic which by 2015 will over take desktop. It's a big headache and no one has really come up with an answer. Yet.

Elliot Jay Stocks  

1. In your opinion, how important is Responsive Web Design (RWD)? Do you think it is essential to have a responsive site?

Responsive Web Design is the future of the web. It's not a fad or a trend or a hot new topic — it's what the web was always meant to be. As we move further and further away from the concept of the 'desktop' and the definition of 'mobile' becomes blurred (Is a car dashboard a mobile screen? Is a Wii a mobile screen? Is a fridge display a mobile screen? etc.), RWD acts as an enabler for us to push one site to multiple environments, without needing to know the specifics of any one environment. 

2. Which method do you think is the most effective: RWD or Mobile-Specific? Why? 

RWD without question, purely because designing something mobile-specific is like designing something car-specific, or console-specific, or fridge-specific — you have to know the exact requirements or each device (or category of devices) and you're designing for the now, not the future. RWD is the ultimate website future-proofing tool.

3. How is designing for mobile devices affecting businesses/ digital marketing/online advertising today?

The old paradigms are shifting. Traditional models are on the out. Business and designers and marketers are having to adapt: not only to smaller screens, but — more importantly — to scenarios: Am I out and about in town? Am I somewhere with a poor mobile reception? Am I on a location-aware device? Am I in bright sunlight? There's a lot to consider, which is why broader strokes (i.e. RWD) will server us far better than device-specific design.

Richard Rutter from Clear Left

1. In your opinion, how important is Responsive Web Design (RWD)? Do you think it is essential to have a responsive site?

 
Responsive design is not a simple binary proposition of "is it responsive or not". It is more a case of "how responsive is it". In most cases a website should be useable on a small screen because lots of people use smartphones to access websites. Not all websites fall into that category - for example business webapps may see the vast majority of users on desktop-sized screens.
 
There are of course different ways to get a website to work well on a small screen, and responsive design is only one of those.
 
 2. Which method do you think is the most effective: RWD or Mobile-Specific? Why?
 
RWD restyles the exact same content of a page to better fit the kind of screen or device that content is being viewed on. Mobile-specific changes the content (often by removing content and changing navigational structures) to better.
 
Mobile specific sites are also often optimised to be extremely lightweight for slow connections.
 
The decision comes down to what's best for the content and the user.
 
 3. How is designing for mobile devices affecting businesses/ digital marketing/online advertising today?
 
The biggest effect is on online marketing. Mobile as a whole is a tricky market for advertisers (witness the plummet in Facebook's shareprice when investors realised that Facebook hadn't worked out their mobile advertising strategy). Ads are still so dependant on being specific sizes (stemming from the legacy of print ads).
 
More and more businesses are seeing the need to make their sites responsive because the shift in usage patterns towards phone use, and RWD seems to be the best way to do it. Afterall the web starts out responsive and accessible (HTML only) and ironically we then apply to CSS to make inaccessible and non-responsive. (Only to wrote yet more CSS to make it responsive again). 


James Box from Clear Left 


1. In your opinion, how important is Responsive Web Design (RWD)? Do you think it is essential to have a responsive site?

In a ideal world, everyone would have a responsive site. It makes a lot of commercial and technical sense. However, as you can guess, this isn't always practical in the real-world. Whereas smaller websites (blogs and brochure-ware) are fairly easy to convert or build responsively, most larger sites are dependent on various layers of technology which make this a more complex proposition. Factor in things like unit testing, ad-servers and content strategy and responsive design can quickly become overwhelming and even financially prohibitive to organisations. What was originally considered to be a  simple re-factoring of front end code actually becomes a far more demanding, strategic project which affects everyone in the organisation (I'm not exaggerating there).

So, as with all these things, the decision about whether to 'go responsive' comes down to what value it brings your organisation. And how that value compares to other work that could be carried out. Perhaps adding a new feature or spending the money on marketing will actually be more beneficial in the short term. These things need to be examined in the broadest context.

2. Which method do you think is the most effective: RWD or Mobile-Specific? Why?

For me, RWD is almost always more effective than a mobile-specific approach. In the long run it is far more practical, efficient and therefore cost-effective to maintain one codebase than several device or platform specific services.

In isolated cases, it may be more relevant for a mobile-specific approach. Say for example you want to take advantage of the device's form factors (it fits in your pocket!) or mobile-friendly features such as GPS. But this is an exception to the rule.

3. How is designing for mobile devices affecting businesses/ digital marketing/online advertising today?

This is a massive question. All I will say is that it's only just started to affect them. We're starting to see larger brands such as Currys and Channel 4 News realise that this makes long-term commercial sense but it hasn't really dawned on most as to how much work is involved. What's more is that there are few professionals out there who can do this well. Lots of people can create a simple, static site using some of the responsive frameworks out there (Twitter bootstrap, Zurb foundation) but this is only scratching the surface in terms of implementation. 

In short, I expect to see responsive design gaining more traction during 2013 but it won't be without its failures as people realise it's harder than initially thought.

Andy Budd from Clear Left

1. In your opinion, how important is Responsive Web Design (RWD)? Do you think it is essential to have a responsive site?
 
As the proliferation of connected devices continues to rise, more and more people are accessing the web thought alternate mechanisms such as mobile phones, games consoles and smart TVs. As such, it's becoming increasingly important for website owners to have some form of mobile and connected device strategy. Responsive design is a relatively simple and cost effective way of delivering the same core information to a variety of devices in a way that takes into account their differing screen dimensions. This makes responsive design a good baseline mobile strategy from which to build upon. However this doesn't discount the creation of separate device optimised sites or apps to account for specific platform differences, user behaviours or user expectations.
 
So to answer your question, responsive design isn't essential, but having a site that can support the increasing number of ways people choose to access the web is becoming essential, and responsive design just happens to be one of the easiest and cost effective ways of achieving this.
 
2. Which method do you think is the most effective: RWD or Mobile-Specific? Why?
 
I've touched on the answer to this question above. Ultimately there is no single perfect solution that covers all sittuations. Instead it depends on the specific problem that your trying to solve, the people you're trying to solve it for and the constraints you have. So if you were designing a solution for a well funded international e-commerce store for instance you may want to create a solution that involved responsive design as a baseline, but create specific sites for popular mobile platforms, games platforms and TV platforms. You may also want to create platform specific apps, If however you're working for a small national e-commerce brand with a limited budget, creating a responsive version of your site could be the best way to go,
 
3. How is designing for mobile devices affecting businesses/ digital marketing/online advertising today?
 
I think advertising platforms have been slow to adapt to a multi-device world. As such we're seeing advertising deals which specify banner widths in pixels, which makes some sense when you’re dealing with a homogenous group of devices with similar screen sizes accessing your site. However when you're dealing with screens that could be a few hundred pixels to many thousand of pixels wide, this fixed width thinking falls down. As such, the advertising platforms need to update their business models to take into account the reality of the world we're currently living in.