Cross-Device Design Responsibility

Mobile device use in the online market place has grown exponentially in the last few years, yet often web designers still don’t fully understand how to design for multiple screen sizes, device pixel ratios and device capabilities.
Device types and sizes will forever be changing (with smart jewelry being introduced we will no doubt have to start thinking of yet new ways to properly integrate content across even smaller screens (the device landscape keeps expanding and will continue to do so well into the foreseeable future). Designers and developers have to catch up and start thinking about future proofing websites to smoothly adapt to any screen or device capability.

Responsive web design was originally defined by Ethan Marcotte on A List Apart back in 2010, “…allows you to build one fluid site that can shrink or stretch to fit any screen size on any device. With fluid grids, flexible images and media queries, we don’t have to whip up a separate, mobile-dedicated website.”
However to expand upon that, we also need to think about device capability degradation, as desktop and laptop machines and browser capabilities get more and more powerful we can start creating extremely advanced animations and interactions, while we are also getting smaller and more restricted screens such as smart watches, so now we have to decide when and how these new capabilities are to be degraded.

Unfortunately there are still a large subset of designers who don’t understand devices, how content can be degraded appropriately, how and when to make the decision to use a responsive grid layout vs. dedicated device specific sites.
Often we will see designs that require monumental development labor to transition from desktop to mobile, are requiring pages of javascript to create a kind of hybrid mobile only and responsive design which should have been a simple responsive CSS grid based layout that works across more devices and is a much more solid and robust application with significantly less time-to-production.

To wrap up, multi-browser and device capability is not only “here to stay” but will no doubt get more and more complex as new technologies are introduced, so we all better get familiar with designing, strategizing, developing and degrading our sites to suit these new ways of content consumption.