Categories
Design Development Mobile Strategy

Some think RWD isn’t the long-term solution for the mobile future???

Yesterday Brad Frost (@bradfrost) tweeted this:

The link lands you on an article from Mobile Marketer titled: Responsive Web design not a long-term solution to mobility: Forrester

Please take a minute to read this article so you can do this:

I can’t decide if this article is meant to stir the pot and get people like Brad, Luke, me, and any other RWD evangelist up in arms, or if they are serious. My fear is that the survey they took is legit and it is sadly eye opening OR as one person commented, “Guys, this is just a commercial for Moovweb who is trying to coin a term “Responsive Delivery”. Shameless.”

The article points out that RWD is too complex and that too much cost is associated with moving to RWD.

One of the main issues with responsive Web design is that it requires the code for a company’s existing Web assets to be completely rewritten, making the project more complex than some expected.

We didn’t really need proof that most sites have been put together like Lego’s over the years, plugging in things here, adding 3rd party software there, etc. The move to mobile is simply making these bad development decisions more visible. IT departments don’t want to admit they were wrong and I think it’s very short sighted of those involved to write RWD off:

“One of the biggest things that came out of this was that responsive Web design was viewed by the majority of the respondents as a tactical short-term solution,” said Mitch Bishop, chief marketing officer of Moovweb, San Francisco.

The comments on this post are great:

“This article is an example of what happens when non-developers write about development. Check your facts – RWD does not require companies to “rewrite their code base”. The whole point of RWD is to have one code base.

So many inaccuracies in this article, it boggles the mind.”

and this one is pretty much exactly what I thought the first time I read this garbage:

Have you lost your mind?

Responsive web design is all about the front-end. RWD itself DOES NOT require “back-end” changes unless the previous front-end and back-end code are poorly written and intertwined – and if so that is NOT the fault of RWD.

Who paid you to post this collage of gibberish, doubletalk, half-truths and outright lies?

Sigh.

Categories
Agencies Design

Great article about the differences in Traditional and Interactive Creative

An ongoing theme/struggle that I find in my day to day work life is the notion that traditional creatives can do interactive creative with the flip of a switch or by watching a few presentations. Obviously from some of my previous posts I do not agree with this “idea” and from my experience none of my colleagues in this field do either.

I found an article this morning that, yet again, argues this point. I will admit from time to time I need to read what others are going through because it makes me feel like this issue is everywhere and not just in my little world. It seems that every day the gap between the two disciplines widens. Case in point, this article we can start to think about yet another complexity about interactive creative that traditional creatives just don’t seem to be able to get there heads around. Adaptivity and responsiveness.

Here is an excerpt from the post:

With traditional designers, the focus is generally about the visual qualities of a design. All too often, traditional designers forget the underlying objective of the website: to convert sales and generate leads. A responsive website consists of clean design that directs users to do something. Websites are merely a company’s marketing “real estate.” They account for a substantial component of lead generation, sales and the cultivation of new business opportunities.

Success in designing sites for adaptability comes from understanding how the user behaves. In my opinion, a design that can be adapted or changed due to user behaviors is the best approach. It is how I approach every site design. User behavior involves meaningful activity; it necessarily involves interpretation and awareness. In most cases when people land on a site, they’re arriving with a specific task in mind. This means they already have tunnel vision on and they won’t look at all the other pretty things your site has to offer. The user will be clicking deeper into the site in no time. All the effort spent crafting your homepage is lost. People just want to get their task done. This is just natural behavior and we cannot change it no matter how much we try. Take this behavior into account when designing a website: you must ensure that the site’s purpose and content are clear on all pages. If the purpose is not immediately apparent, many people will either give up or look elsewhere (there are plenty more sites in the sea). The same goes for highly clever brand experience sites that have no direction but high quality videos playing in the background.

This all goes back to my mantra: “Traditional creative is consumed, absorbed and looked at.  Interactive creative is more like a product, that is actually used and interacted with and is fluid. The differences between the two are simply complex.”

Later in the article the author does say something though that I also believe:

“There is room for both traditional and interactive designers. Each can learn from the other if both can keep an open mind. But, and I say this with a big but, I have found that most interactive designers just want to do interactive and not cross over into traditional. With that said, I have a hard time with the idea of a traditional designer doing the job of an interactive designer. I myself find it hard to embrace this trend, but the traditionalists are children in the interactive space.”

I’ll keep beating this drum till I’m blue in the face, or on the street 🙂

Categories
Development

Adobe Labs releases “Shadow” to help with RWD

Though it’s still a beta release, Shadow may well be the most useful thing Adobe has ever built for web developers, particularly those that have embraced responsive design. It’s no secret that, while responsive design allows developers to easily target a wide range of screen sizes, it adds a considerable amount of work to the development process. But with Shadow mirroring your website across dozens of devices at the same time, testing becomes simple and easy. It’s a bit like synchronized swimming for web browsers. 

Read the rest here:
Adobe Shadow Simplifies Mobile Web Testing | Webmonkey | Wired.com.