In this interview, responsive design expert, Aidan Foster, explains the current state of responsive design, its significance for marketers, and where the technology is heading. Aidan is a front-end coder, a public speaker, and the owner of Foster Interactive, a boutique web shop in Toronto, Ontario. Foster Interactive focuses on building responsive and adaptive design for mobile, tablets, and desktops and also provides consulting services for companies. In addition, Aidan is the project lead and writer for responsivedesign.ca which educates individuals about responsive design technology. Check out this interview to find out what Aidan has to say about responsive design for marketers!

1. Are the costs of responsive design attainable for any-sized company?

My rule of thumb is that Responsive sites cost about 50% more than creating an equivalent desktop-only site. Most of this cost comes from additional planning, design, and testing the site rather than coding. But given the dramatic growth in mobile, businesses must provide a mobile friendly solution. Responsive design is usually the most cost effective option.

2. What do you see as the future of responsive design?

In many ways smartphones have greater capabilities than desktop computers with their embedded hardware, such as location awareness or access to a camera. As time goes on we’ll stop thinking about mobile as a “lite” version of the desktop,  and start seeing a blurring between mobile websites and native apps.

3. What are the limitations of responsive design?

Responsive Design by definition is about compromise — it needs to work on any sized display. Usually the logic that controls how a site appears happens on the client side browser. So this means that the website itself doesn’t know whether it’s being viewed on a smartphone or a desktop. Because of this, it sends all possible layouts for a site, and the viewing device picks the best fit. This increases the size of files it needs to download.

Other challenges with responsive design relate to images. It’s currently quite challenging to get small images sent to a small screen and larger images to the desktop or retina. There are solutions, but they’re more complex than when we only worried about the desktop.

4. How does responsive design impact marketers?

In some ways it makes life easier as any outbound or social marketing efforts will drive traffic to a website that works anywhere. There’s nothing worse then a friend sending you a tweet to an event that you want to buy tickets for but the website doesn’t work on your phone – Responsive Design solves that problem.

5. Are device-specific features sacrificed when implementing responsive design technology?

Absolutely, Responsive sites run in the website’s native browser, so you have more limited access to its hardware. This is improving as time goes on and as hardware vendors realize that the line between websites and apps are narrowing. For example, currently we can access the accelerometer, but not the camera. On the iPhone, iOS 6 can now upload saved images from the camera, but can’t access the live camera app itself.

6. How easy is it to take an ordinary website and make it responsive?

That is a major challenge, because responsive design isn’t just a layer of paint to tack on to a website.

A good responsive website is created from the ground up with a mobile-first design focus. This means that the site’s information architecture is built to have a very focused and task based interface. Desktop websites are often a company’s dumping ground for content, and this lack of a content strategy really becomes a mess when you view it on a small screen.

Because of this it’s usually best to consider responsive design as a place to address both a content strategy and a design solution. Mobile visitors should be presented with a simple and focused interface in order to effectively navigate a website, but desktop users benefit from it as well.

7. When wouldn’t you recommend companies to go responsive?

Well if you’ve got lots of data to show that mobile users are doing different things then desktop users, then a dedicated mobile site or native app might make sense if you’ve got the budget.

Foursquare would be a good example of desktop and mobile apps that have very different use cases. Their desktop website allows you to search a map of places you want to check out, but the native app allows you to check in and review places you are at right now. I don’t think a responsive site would be a good solution for a company like Foursquare.

For more information on the importance of Responsive Design for marketers, check out our free whitepaper!

About the Author

After graduating from the HBA program at the Richard Ivey School of Business, Aaliyah launched her career as Marketing Coordinator at Uberflip! Prior to her HBA, Aaliyah also completed a Bachelor in English at Western University.

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