Truly Responsive Design Means Aligning to Business and User Goals

Editor's Notes

• #3: The team I work with ISITE design – lets me work with awesome clients – who whom we co-create apps, websites, and campaign work with digital experience at the core.Forrester in covering this field uniquely – and we were honored to be among 40 or so firms who’s work they highlight in their latest report.
• #5: And we gather brands and experts in digital experience that we admire both virually in our blog – Delight.US – and in person at two in-person conferences we host in our headquarters cities of Portland, Oregon and Boston, Mass.If these stories resonate with you – we’d love to talk with you, to feature your work, and to have you as our guest at Delight.
• #7: Way back in 2000, John Allsopp identified a fundamental issue of control and flexibility
• #8: 10 years later, Ethan Marcotte names Responsive Web Design. In between? 10 years of fixed-width, table-based layouts replaced by DIV-based but still fixed layouts. (That’s not entirely true, but it was broadly the case)
• #9: The official theme of DrupalCon Denver 2012 was “collaborative publishing for every device” – but Robert Douglass and Jeffrey McGuire's opening session shortened the official tagline to this version for the tl;dr; crowd
• #10: Origin – responsive architectureLet’s not forget the user is who we should be responding to, not just the device
• #11: What’s positive about RWD is that it forced the end of the collective hallucination that digital experiences should be the same across all devices – the myth of the 1024 x768 screen and the fixed width design. The challenge is that in all our focus on devices – on different form factors and capabilities we’ve lost touch with the notion that devices don’t use the web, people do. We want to respond to the users, not the devices. Truly responsive web design requires a focus on the brains (and hearts) behind the devices.
• #12: I’m going to focus today on how you ensure that what you’re doing keeps “what users want” in mind. I’ll cover three stages:Whole company / brand levelSpecific project / site / application Ongoing
• #13: We respect what we can measure – improve and report.Research from Bain, Forrester, and Temkin Group
• #17: Personas / Journey Maps / Strategic Brief
• #18: Theme / Opportunities / Prototypes
• #20: We lead a two day workshop with oer 30 stakeholders from all across the organization.Confirmend existing journey map and brainstormed “future-perfect” state.
• #21: This is the hard work of bringing the great thinking down to earth and making decisions about what can be done today, tomorrow and in the future.
• #23: User research (quantitative & qualitative; in-context observation, surveys, focus groups)Social ListeningAnalyticsPersonasContent Strategy
• #25: Personas mapped to tasks
• #26: This is a card sort – a Content Strategy exercise for tailoring messaging – divided into what we are, what we aspire to be, what we are not. Triggers lots of good discussion
• #27: 3. RWD moves us away from device centric and pixel specific design process. Part of our design methodology should include a detailed goal and experience map that can serve as a guide throughout the project. Consider your client as a team member.
• #28: Lorum Ipsum – “Neither is there anyone who loves pain itself since it is pain and thus wants to obtain it”
• #29: 3. RWD moves us away from device centric and pixel specific design process. Part of our design methodology should include a detailed goal and experience map that can serve as a guide throughout the project. Consider your client as a team member.
• #30: A couple of sketch examples that demonstrate high level thinking. When sketching start out at 50k foot view…Loose ideas, big boxes on post-its, napkins, etc…Begin validating the big ideas with more detailed sketching
• #31: Detailed sketching example that explores specific interactions. What happens when a certain action is taken…work through task flows. Great way to find interaction problems before too much commitment.
• #36: For example, in the Media & Publishing space, users want engaging content with high production value and high quality, at no cost, with no DRM, with no annoying ads or interruptions. In ecommerce, users want high quality goods as cheaply and conveniently as possible. But businesses also have goals – and those goals are critical to long term success.
• #37: You know more about what is not working than you admitSeparate “image problems” from “reality problems” and fix the reality problems first