This is the story of what we learned during a redesign for our most demanding client — ourselves! In this article, I will explain, from our own experience of refreshing our agency website, why we abandoned a separate mobile website and w...
This is the story of what we learned during a redesign for our most demanding client — ourselves! In this article, I will explain, from our own experience of refreshing our agency website, why we abandoned a separate mobile website and will review our process of creating a new responsive design.
At Cyber-Duck, we have been designing both responsive websites and adaptive mobile websites for several years now. Both options, of course, have their pros and cons. With a separate mobile website, you have the opportunity to tailor content and even interactions to the context of your users, whereas a responsive website means better content parity for users and a single website to maintain.
Why Adapt To A Responsive Design?
Our redesign story starts in August 2012. Until then, our previous strategy of having separate mobile, tablet and desktop websites didn’t exactly perform badly; they drove conversions, and user engagement appeared to be good relative to our desktop website. I should mention that this strategy was borne purely out of the need to quickly tailor our ageing desktop website to the increasing number of tablet and mobile users at the time.
We used jQuery Mobile to create our previous mobile-optimized website as a quick fix for the increasing number of mobile users on our ageing desktop website.
We produced our tablet and mobile websites specifically with users of these devices in mind — performance was our top priority. We wanted to improve on the loading time of our “desktop” website dramatically; the desktop home page was 2.2 MB, with 84 HTTP requests, and the mobile home page was still quite large, at 700 KB, with 46 HTTP requests. We had also designed the interfaces specifically with touch in mind, using jQuery Mobile to enhance the user experience with touch gestures.
Changing Our Approach
Despite this, several factors led us to decide that this approach was no longer sustainable for our own website:
having to support multiple code bases,
content management,
the emergence of new mini-tablets and “phablets.”
The first two were not ideal, but at least manageable. The third, however, was a deal-breaker. OK, so we could have designed a website optimized for mini-tablets, but with so many more Web-enabled devices of all shapes and sizes entering the market every day, it would have been only a matter of time before we needed to think about optimizing for new form factors.
We wanted our new website to be easier to maintain and more future-friendly for the inevitable influx of new form factors.
It was at this point that we decided to completely overhaul all three websites and create a responsive design that would provide the best possible experience to all of our users, regardless of how they accessed our website.
Setting Goals for the Responsive Design
At the very start of this overhaul, we set ourselves some simple goals, or principles if you like, that we wanted to achieve with our responsive design:
Speed
Performance affects everyone.
Accessibility
It should work with no styles, backgrounds or JavaScript.
Content parity
The same content and functionality should be on all platforms.
Device-agnostic
Leave no platform behind.
Future-friendly
Cut down on maintenance.
Based on these goals, our starting point for the design was to review our existing mobile website and to use it as a base for our responsive design. We explored how we could enhance for wider screens, rather than attempt to squeeze our previous desktop website down to mobile.
We started by speaking to some of our trusted customers about what they liked about our website, what they didn’t really like, and what was important to them when searching for a digital agency.
We also used analytics data from our previous website, using a mixture of Google Analytics, Lead Forensics and CrazyEgg to help us better understand what existing users wanted and needed from our website. As a result, we were able to streamline and prioritize a content strategy based on how our u