SXSW: Is Your Website Responsive Enough?

Editor’s note: Emily Reeves, director of digital innovation and insight planning for advertising powerhouse Stone Ward, will be providing contributions to Talk Business & Politics from the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive festival in Austin this week. She is providing additional content on her observations from SXSW at Stone Ward’s Waiting For The Elevator blog.

If your company has developed a website lately, you have probably heard the term “responsive” more than once.

“Responsive” is the term that those of us in the web development business have been using to talk about website readability across all types and sizes of devices. Essentially, it is the rearranging of elements on your website to be viewed optimally on mobile and desktop, and all screen sizes in between.

When 79% of smartphone users have their phones within arm’s reach for all but three hours of the day, responsive should no longer just be about screen size, but should be more general: it should be about responding to the needs of the user.

And one “size” does not fit all, when “size” can refer to the file size affecting load time of a website for the 3.5 billion people that have slow internet connections across the world. Take that fact and throw on that 25% of website visitors will abandon a site if it takes four seconds or longer to load.

Our traditional way of thinking about responsiveness is readability; our revised way of thinking about responsiveness should be performance.

The stakes are now super high to make the right decisions in the website planning stages. Thinking “mobile-first” should no longer be business jargon that we throw around before really making decisions using the desktop displays. Mobile-first is the future of web use and thereby development.

At South by Southwest this week, there are numerous sessions that talk about website usability, user experience and mobile optimization. These are things we have been talking about for years, but are just now really hitting the mainstream.

In a session on responsive design, the presenters put it succinctly: the overall idea is to reduce the customer effort to find information and use your website. It is that simple.

This may mean prioritizing content by device, which can be detected in the website code: on a desktop, a visitor might want to read all about your people while on a mobile device they want to find your location.

It may mean delivering a separate set of assets to mobile users, like the difference in using Facebook on a desktop compared to using it on a mobile device.

Or it could mean thinking truly only of mobile, like Instagram where there is a desktop version but it is basically “view only.”

Think of your website as the thing that delivers the first impression of you and your company: it is what people see before they ever talk to or meet you. How does it look and act when it is delivered on a mobile phone?