To most people, including developers, mobile is compartmentalized into two parts: Phones and Tablets. Mobile developers make sure that their apps and websites work on the ever-growing number of tablet and phone sizes and operating systems.
However, the mobile scene is changing. Mobile is quickly becoming the main way to access the web. In India, mobile internet usage has risen to 60% surpassing desktop. Just five years after the release of the first iPhone in 2007, nearly half of Americans have become Smartphone users and about 25% own a tablet.
And it doesn't stop there either. Rumors are quickly circulating about the unveiling of Apple’s iWatch and Google Glass is set to be released to the public later this year.
What does all of this mean for developers? As mobile becomes increasingly important, developers and designers need to see mobile as more than just phones and tablets. They need to view mobile on larger (and smaller) scale.
As Luke Wroblewski said so eloquently in his book, Mobile First, “Fundamentally, there’s just one World Wide Web, but it can be experienced in different ways on different devices.” So how did the experience change as we moved from desktop to smartphones to tablets?
We started designing mobile sites on a 320x480 scale and went to a one-column layout. We dumbed down and condensed sites to only have the bare minimum of content and created touchable sites that required less typable input and more increment selector fields. The tablet transition teetered between the two, some sites just using a larger mobile version and others using a smaller desktop version.
While we have changed the way we work and code, we have not changed the way we think. We invented coping mechanisms instead of changing our thinking. We have switched from “Best viewed on 1024x768” to “Best viewed on desktop” or “Best viewed on mobile.”
Our constraining views of mobile are holding us back. Mobile hit us as a surprise and left us still catching up. The average smartphone user visits 24 pages per day on their phone and yet, according to MongooseMetrics, less than 10% of sites are truly “mobile ready.” Mobile will shape our future in ways that I’m sure we never dreamed it could, but that process will be greatly stunted if we continue to think inside the boxes of phones and tablets.
This is where responsive design has come in to save the day. Yet again, responsive design shouldn't just apply to phones and tablets. We can now explore the web from devices the size of a watch screen to the size of a big screen TV and beyond. Is your site ready for the iWatch or Spatial Operating Environments (the Minority Report style interface)?
Responsive design should get developers thinking on an infinite scale.
We don’t always know what our users need out of our sites. And responsive design acts as the rebuttal to the myth that you need to dumb down and condense to make a site mobile. Rather, you can include all of the necessary content, just in restructured ways that makes the most important content easiest to find no matter the size of the device.
Responsive design is not just a site with fluid CSS elements, it should be a way of thinking among developers. So if asked if responsive is the always the mobile answer, I say yes. Not because apps or mobile specific sites are unnecessary, but because even your apps and mobile specific sites should be usable on all devices.
If you design sites to support separate sizes and browsers, you could end up designing several sites and still fail to cover all devices. However, with responsive design, you can design one that can be used on all devices. Let’s change the way we think about mobile. Mobile doesn't mean phones and tablets, it means infinite accessibility.
