Why a CEO should champion Responsive Web Design | Hacker News Reader

Why a CEO should champion Responsive Web Design

mike-hostetler.com

19 pointsmikehostetler33 comments

I disagree.

A CEO should be setting the direction, and letting his managers (and their staff) decide upon the best way to implement it. "Make our product work on mobile devices", not "Use Responsive Web Design because I've read it's the best for all cases".

A CEO needs to trust his managers to do the right thing for the company while following his direction. If they don't, then they're not doing their job, and should be dealt with as such.

This, of course, does not apply to those who wear the CEO, Manager and Employee hat all at the same time.

I agree that the CEO should set the direction and let their staff decide the details of implementation, but the reality is that a CEO must be aware of the benefits of choices like RWD in order to authorize and support the additional investment RWD takes during implementation.

Why? Because they CEO ultimately controls the money. That's usually what it's all about anyways, right?

RWD costs more short term but pays off long term, that's the point.

Again, those decisions should fall to the CEO's staff, not the CEO himself. Responsive Web Design is just one tool in the mobile playbook, and it's not going to always be the best tool. Sometimes the best tool is a native app, or a different version of the page, or responsive web design.

A good CEO will have too much on their plate as it is to worry about low level implementation details like RWD, and should be able to trust his staff to also be looking out for the company's bottom line as well.

I'm not entirely sure the article is calling for CEOs to roll up their sleeves and get directly involved in the development of their sites. Instead, it seems to me that the author is calling for CEOs to gain a better understanding of this emerging trend, so that their interactions with project managers and others will be better informed.

JS slideshows with JQuery usually support swiping when available but work with clicks as well.

I've seen this done on certain web sites for my iPad, and I really love it. Best experience I've had for simple reading.

We used flexslider [1], didn't even realize it had that feature until I saw it working:)

[1] http://www.woothemes.com/flexslider/

In that case, neither JOBS nor Tim Cook is a Champion, I guess, because Apple's homepage isn't responsive by any means. But, if Jobs and Cook aren't great examples of a good CEO, then I wonder who is.

So, fuck responsive design, I'm a designer with experience and I can tell you only this - People with retina displays and high resolutions are already used to visiting MANY websites that aren't responsive yet, and if your site isn't, it's only a good thing, because, responsive design is a tricky pond, if you slip, you're screwed. It's much, much easier to break stuff trying to be responsive than on a fixed-width website. And a perfectly working fixed-width website is much, much better than a broken responsive website.

This article is BS. There isn't enough data to support the claims made by the author.

Please point to examples of sites you've implemented to back up your claims?

RWD does set a higher bar for implementation, but isn't that the point? That we challenge ourselves to be better?

The goal of the article was to help the guy at the top, the CEO, to understand that the investment into better implementation is worth it.

You don't need any examples from me. Just take Apple's homepage. It isn't responsive yet, so, if it is still a usability nightmare, would you still be buying their products?

I agree with the challenging part. I will tell you a specific example:

There are monitors with SO MUCH variation in resolutions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_resolutions

And the ratio of the time invested in beautifying your website, to the quality of usability that improves is almost negligible.

When the majority of the internet has progressed to better resolutions, please write the article again and I will gladly agree with you.

> And the ratio of the time invested in beautifying your website, to the quality of usability improves is almost negligible.

Having had many companies hire me and my company to "beautify" their site for the sake of usability and performance, and subsequently measuring the improvement, my response would be that you just haven't run into the situation yet.

Additionally, history on the web tells us that hardware likely won't standardize on any resolutions in the near future, which is the problem that RWD is intended to solve. The problem exists now and the solution exists now. All that's standing in your way is learning how to implement RWD correctly and efficiently.

Here's a few links to get you started: http://www.jannahagan.com/2012/05/responsive-web-design-reso...

You lost me at:

>>You don't need any examples from me. Just take Apple's homepage. It isn't responsive yet, so, if it is still a usability nightmare, would you still be buying their products?

WORST ANALOGY EVER.

I just love it when people invoke the, "Well, if Apple doesn't do it, then no one else should." As if Apple has some divine knowledge on web design and user experience.

Given their market capitalization and their trophy cases full of design awards, I'd think otherwise. It may not be concrete logic working here, but I think using Apple is a rough rule of thumb is probably not the worst thing.

Um you're the CEO of Appendto.com right?

I'm assuming your site is working for you (or you'd change it?) because that site isn't responsive.

You're correct. The RWD version is launching soon ;)

With all due respect, perhaps you should re-consider. With fixed-width sites, you wind up having buttons cut-off, and whole portions of the page missing - you have to rely on the user being familiar enough with how the variable-resolution web works that they know to scroll laterally for additional content. Missing content means missing conversions.

Also, nobody is advocating a broken responsive web design. And to be honest, depending on the way it's broken, it may still be much better than a fixed-width design that hangs 80% off your screen. Missing content means missing conversions.

What broken mobile web browser are you using that can't scale and zoom a fixed-width page properly?

I was referring to desktop monitors, which don't scale pages down to fit within the viewport.

Often times mobile devices crush the page down into its device dimensions, resulting in a thumbnail-looking preview of the entire site. Again, not very helpful to many users on mobile devices.

You're asking that they either 1) have high-density displays 2) superb eye-sight, or 3) familiarity with the site to know what is where so they can immediately zoom into their areas of interest.

How wide is the fixed-width website that a desktop monitor cannot display it?

I'm far more likely to go find my laptop than I am to tolerate a different, and so far in 100% of cases inferior, experience on my phone or tablet.

Nothing about RWD necessitates the end-product to be inferior to the fixed-width alternative.

Out of curiosity, I just pulled up AListApart on my laptop, and Lumia 920. I browsed both, side-by-side, and found equality in the experience on both devices - can you tell me what is inferior about ALA's RWD?

It's probably time in this discussion to expression appreciation for your time, and that of others, and to assure everybody that I mean no disrespect to any of you.

ALA is not representative. That's a site run by people whose entire reputations and fortunes are built on evangelizing web technologies.

Here's a more neutral example - http://readwrite.com/ - the entire right column ends up removed.

Modern mobile and tablet browsers don't really need much if any special consideration beyond 'no flash'.

This is dumb. Responsive design doesn't necessarily increase usability, and could massively decrease it - if you create a one-size-fits all interface, a lot of platform-specific UX enhancements can be lost - e.g. touch events like swiping through a slideshow etc.

Responsive Design implemented incorrectly would decrease usability, but done correctly it almost certainly enhances it. The key premise of RWD is that the same functionality is available at all reasonable device widths (> 320px). This does not mean it needs to look the same, but you must be able to accomplish the same interactions on a smartphone browser as a desktop browser.

The goal of the Open Web is to provide a OS platform-agnostic foundation. The mistakes learned from building specifically towards IE6 and now building specifically towards WebKit in the mobile space have taught us that the platform-specific road is the road to narrowing your audience and higher maintenance costs down the road.

I certainly agree that, done correctly, RWD enhances usability on all platforms. But the cost of doing RWD "correctly" (device testing and experience optimisation across a wide range of devices) can be prohibitively expensive when developing anything more than a landing page.

Any site that requires extensive user interaction (i.e. contains custom form controls, overlays etc.) requires that usage patterns be tailored to the context in which they appear. So at a minimum, you're going to want to change your interface based on whether the user is using a finger or a cursor. Screen size, browser capabilities etc. are all additional factors that a careful implementation needs to be aware of and adapt to.

Sure, but you're sort of begging the question. It's very hard to do this perfectly correctly and in some cases I'm not sure you should try. A feature that's designed for a user with a mouse and a big monitor may be terrible to use on a phone even if you hack and squeeze and strip it to fit the screen.

Swiping gestures are supported on most modern phones today. And when they're not, you can gracefully fall back to touch events. And when those aren't supported, you could gracefully fall back to a list, rather than a slideshow. There are methods by which everybody gets to play along, and as long as those are implemented properly, nobody is left out.

You can do both.

Frankly, I don't buy the idea that a CEO should champion RWD or have any bias towards it. However, it is a good idea for the CEO to know what responsive web design is. Of a start-up or a small company, that is.

Agreed that it is nice to be aligned with the web as much as possible, but RWD can easily become an expensive undertaking for a company with fewer resources at hand. You don't want RWD to come in between when there is just too much to experiment with and throw away. Not recommended to start-ups, not at least to CEOs without hands-on on design.

In fact, if you look at how fragmented the support (actually miserable) for web standards is on the mobile, the best option would be to let the team take this decision, not CEO alone. And if a CEO with zero technical/web-design skills says 'Yay, RWD!' just because he/she read it somewhere then, I believe, it is more trouble for the company than any help.

Also RWD is not feasible in several scenarios. Many a times it is safer to premise the design for iPad and above for one part and iPad Mini and below for the other half. Or just stick to time tested fixed-column design.

I'm waiting for the Onion follow up "5 reasons the CEO shouldn't have given the CTO a wedgie before the board meeting again".

Um, a CEO should champion a direction and a vision much less than an implementation. The job of the CEO is to make sure everybody can do their job, the bills are paid, the company grows, etc. To run the company, not to build the tech stack.

Also, responsive design is fine, but it's not perfect by any means. It adds cost, it adds complexity, and it isn't always the best interface to reach the end users.

There is upside to responsive design, but it's not magic and it shouldn't be touted as some kind of panacea to all things.

I agree with this - it just seems like last years media friendly buzzword HTML5 has been replaced by RWD but at least the thought is there (until facebook announce they aren't making any money because of it)

I agree.

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