Friday, 3 May 2013

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.

 

Artefact 2

For my second Artefact, I thought it would be beneficial emailing experts in the industry to gain their view on Responsive Design...

The questions I asked were....


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

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


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


Artefact 1 - Results


Question: How is Responsive Design affecting the changing business patterns of digital marketing?

For Artefact 1, although I was unsure of where I was going with my Artefacts, I thought it would be beneficial to collect data from a survey, to act as a starting point. I believe creating a survey for my first Artefact is an advantage as it allows me to gather statistics & people's opinions and habits as regards to Responsive Design. 

As mentioned before, the main purpose of the survey is to see whether people view the same site across different platforms (i.e. desktop, tablet, mobile), and also to see whether people buy online using a  mobile device, or whether they’d use a native app. 

In total, I only received 31 results, which was fairly disappointing, since I asked my classmates and people on Facebook and online forums to fill it out. But I could only wait so long.

The Results:

My first question showed that 100% of the people asked believe that the Responsive Design technique is worth using, which can only show positivity for the future of Responsive Design.
This was then followed by the question "How many different devices do you access the internet from?" Interesting to see that nobody answered with 0. 41.94% consumed mobile media through 2 mobile devices. 48.29% answered with 3 and 9.68% accessed the internet via 3 or more devices.

Results show that 93.55% tend to but online, and only 35.48% would rather buy online usnig a mobile device - the remainder being via a desktop or laptop.

However, the results do show that 53.33% have bought online in the past using a mobile device. Comparing this to 5/10 years ago, when people hardly had the opportunity to browse the internet using their phone, this is an obvious increase.  It is expected that more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online.

This then led onto the question "Is there a typical site you'd use across all 3 platforms?"  67.74% answered with Yes, however the examples given were social media. One person mentioned Google, which then made me think about advertising on mobile devices (quite possible this will be another Artefact later on!) Do people react in the same way if they saw an advert on a desktop?....

One final important question I asked was "How would you react if you viewed a non-mobilised website on a mobile device?" 25.81% said it wouldn't bother them. 54.84% said they wouldn't be pleased, but would continue to use the site. 12.9% said they'd leave the site straight away, whilst the remaining 6.45% selected other, with the following responses:

"If the site forces me to use a different site just for mobile devices, I leave."

"Depends on whether I can do what I need to do or not."

The first answer was a surprising answer to see. Personally, I believe if the site can deliver what I need to find out, then it shouldn't be a problem. I find it strange to see that someone would leave a site because it looks different to the desktop version.

To Conclude

The majority of the time people view the same site across different platforms. However I do not believe the results are accurate enough to answer this question. When asked "Is there a typical site you'd use across all 3 platforms?" the majority of answers given were social media. It is more than likely the person was using an App as opposed to the website.

It's clear that Responsive Design and designing for mobile devices in general is affecting digital marketing, since many people have bought or currently buy online using their mobile device.