Developing for Responsive Design
Frederic Welterlin
Senior Presentation Layer Architect
San Francisco

Agenda
• What is Responsive Design?
– How did we get here?
– Why should we care?
• Crafting a Responsive User Experience
– The Flexible Grid
– Flexible Media
– Media Queries
• When is Responsive Design Warranted?
– Yes! and… Not Really
– Ford Motor Company Example
– Airline Industry Example
• Conclusions
– Some Thoughts
– What is Responsive Design?
– Thanks

What is Responsive Design?
How did we get here?

“We should work toward a universal
linked information system, in which
generality and portability are more
important than fancy graphics
techniques and complex
extra facilities.”
Tim Berners-Lee original WWW proposal.
(http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html)

“…balancing the needs of designers
for a sophisticated set of presentation
and interactive features against the
desire to make the Web accessible to
the largest possible number of
browsers (and other client
devices) and environments.”
© 1998-2001 Web Standards Project
(http://archive.webstandards.org/mission.html)

So the question is…

San Francisco MUNI
Friday, June 8, 2012

The Players

RESPONSIVE DESIGN
“is a web development approach that
suggests that design and development
should respond to the user’s behavior
and environment based on screen size,
platform and orientation.”
- Kayla Knight
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-
web-design/

Why should we care?

Crafting a Responsive User Experience

The Birth of Responsive Design
The term “Responsive Design” was first introduced in Ethan’s
A List Apart article:
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/
Subsequently, he wrote:
Responsive Web Design
Ethan Marcotte

The Flexible Grid

The Flexible Grid

The Flexible Grid
Gridpack
http://gridpak.com/
FRAMELESS
http://framelessgrid.com/
960 Grid System
http://960.gs/
There are so many…..
http://www.awwwards.com/grid-based-web-design-resources.html

Other Tools, like CSS Preprocessors (LESS, SASS, Stylus)
SASS (syntactically awesome style sheets)
Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document
cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows.
http://sass-lang.com/
Extends CSS with dynamic behavior…
- Variables
- Nesting
- Mixins
- Operations
- Selector Inheritance
- Etc

Examples “borrowed” directly from SASS web site
Variables Nesting
$blue: #3bbfce; table.foo {
$margin: 16px; margin: 2em;
.content-navigation { td.bar {
border-color: $blue; text-align: right;
color: darken($blue, 9%); }
} }
.border {
margin: $margin / 2;
border-color: $blue;
}
.content-navigation { table.foo {
border-color: #3bbfce; margin: 2em;
color: #2b9eab; }
}
.border { table.foo td.bar {
margin: 8px; text-align: right;
border-color: #3bbfce; }
}

Flexible Media
img, embed, object, video {
max-width:100%;
}

Media Queries
CSS3 Media Queries expands on the role of the traditional CSS2
“media” attribute with specific parameters that control how your
styles are applied for various devices.
@media screen and (max-width: 480px) {
.foo {
float: left;
}
.bar {
margin: 0;
border: 4px solid #666;
}
}

Media Queries
@media screen and (min-width: 320px) { insert CSS for SmartPhone portrait… }
@media screen and (min-width: 480px) { insert CSS for SmartPhone landscape… }
@media screen and (min-width: 768px) { insert CSS for iPad portrait… }
@media screen and (min-width: 1024px) { insert CSS for iPad landscape… }
@media screen and (min-width: 1200px) { insert CSS for desktop… }
(disclaimer: these measurements are simplified for illustrative purposes :-)

Media Queries
So… who is this guy??

Media Queries
http://www.thismanslife.co.uk/
projects/lab/responsiveillustration/
James Mellers

When is Responsive Design Warranted?

When is Responsive Design Warranted?
• YES!
– Content focused sites: information travels in one
direction, from source to user…
»Newspapers
»Magazines
• Not Really…
–Transactional sites: complex applications that utilize
workflows and user input…
»Banking Applications
»Airline Ticketing

Yes!
The business advantages of using Responsive
Design…
• One code base (less maintenance, saves money)
• Device agnostic
• Improved SEO
• Possibility of using “mobile first” approach

Ford - Support Site (http://support.ford.com/)

Not really…
The business disadvantages of using
Responsive Design…
• Does not address differing user needs between
device usage
• Performance (un-needed markup is still being
sent)
• Pixel perfect expectations are shattered
• Need to support legacy (non HTML5/CSS3)
devices

www.united.com
Device: Desktop
Goal: Research Trip to NC
Task: Find/Review Flight
Dates, Options,
Connections

www.united.com
Device: Desktop
Goal: Research Trip to NC
Task: Get Mileage Balance
Review Status Upgrade

www.united.com
Device: Desktop
Goal: Research Trip to NC
Task: Sign-Up for Credit Card?

www.united.com
Device: Desktop
Goal: Research Trip to NC
Task: Review Deals and
Vacation Packages

mobile.united.com
Device: SmartPhone
Goal: Travel to New York City
Task: Go to Mobile Site

mobile.united.com
Device: SmartPhone
Goal: Travel to New York City
Task: Get Flight Status

mobile.united.com
Device: SmartPhone
Goal: Travel to New York City
Task: Check In, get Mobile Boarding
Pass

mobile.united.com
Device: SmartPhone
Goal: Travel to New York City
Task: Review Itinerary

Yeah… but Fred, isn’t what
you just showed an example
of being “responsive?”

Conclusions

Some Thoughts…
• “Responsive design” is a marketing term, and should be
used with caution.
• Razorfish tailors technology solutions around user
experience and business needs (and not the other way
around).
• Responsive design is still in its infancy. Future visionaries
and architects will continue to iterate on the “one code
base” concept. Responsive architecture?

RESPONSIVE DESIGN
is a web development approach that
suggests that design and development
should respond to the user’s business or
task oriented needs, in conjunction with
device usage.
- Fred Welterlin

Thank You
• Thanks and respect to the following individuals…
– James Walton and Michael Calfee (Razorfish, Austin, TX)
– Ralph Brandi (Razorfish, New York, NY)
– Ethan Marcotte (author, “Responsive Design”)
– Ray Velez/Chris Stetson (Razorfish executive sponsors of this presentation)