Beyond Responsive
Back in 2012, CSS3 media queries were more than three years old and elasti layouts were popping up across the web. My partner at Mayday and I went on a roadshow, meeting with fashion brands and photo agencies across New York to talk with them about upgrading their websites. We were amazed at how tech-backwards both generally were, and we made a pitch to help them upgrade. The pitch was simple and direct:
You have a problem
Your site is designed for web only
Your site’s visitors are increasingly coming from mobile devices (and that’s not going to slow down)
Your image content — lookbook photography and portfolios — does not display well on mobile because your visitors are viewing a big website on a mobile screen
Your visitors are frustrated by pinching and zooming to navigate through the site on their devices
There’s something called Responsive Web Design (RWD) that can fix all that and optimize display across major web, tablet and mobile screen sizes
Let’s stop frustrating your visitors and start delighting them by working together on a new responsive website design
During those meetings, we talked in depth about how a mobile site was no longer enough and the range of optimized experiences that could be rendered from 640 pixels up to full web width, and everywhere in between. Six months after proselytizing the virtues of RWD during our New York roadshow, Forbes wrote an article titled “Why You Need to Prioritize Responsive Design Right Now,” ending a time when responsive design was a nifty add-on and starting a new period where designing for several breakpoints was a given. With Mayday comfortably addressing interfaces from 640 pixel screens up to cinema displays and everywhere in between, we’re asking ourselves how can we expand our purview in 2015?
There are three directions we can move in, each with their own challenges: very small displays, very large displays, and odd-shaped displays. Limited sets of UX standards exist outside of the typical RWD breakpoints, which creates an opportunity to invent new types of interactions and establish best practices.
Very Small
As mobile screens get larger, wearables are filling the small end in the spectrum of screen sizes and we’re anxious to extend our design approach in that direction, both for iOS and Android devices. LG, Motorola, Samsung and Apple all released convincing smartwatches this year, each with a radically different take on what the ideal screen dimensions for a smart watch should be — Round? Square? 16:9 portrait? Landscape? Filleted edges? Designing applications that can operate effectively across most small screen formats presents a significant challenge, with the first step deciding what will app concepts utilize screen-appropriate content. We see an opportunity to design cross-platform applications this year that fall within a few broad categories:
Application that ask users to perform a single, repetitive action
Applications that focus on information display
Applications that mobilize individual users around a collective action
Very Large
We’re eyeing large digital billboards, activated building facades, and outdoor projection systems. Large displays present a chance to design for widespread campaigns, the presentation of useful urban data (traffic, weather, collective energy usage), and a means to bridge the gap between physical and digital experiences. We also see a connection between the pending ubiquity of device-based health tracking and an opportunity to display the aggregated personal data of individuals to show, say, the collective healthy activity of neighborhoods and cities.
Other Displays
Other displays? Most of the world’s digital interfaces and viewports are “Other Displays.” These are all of the neglected, overlooked, or difficult to categorize digital displays that will present the richest opportunity for invention in 2015 and onward. With both B2B and B2C applications, this includes next generation IoT devices, along with more mundane, unconnected machinery that still deliver woefully outdated user experiences to consumers: ovens, microwaves, tv remotes, wireless routers, budget car dashboards. What happens when consumer electronics are opened up to developers and reimagined en masse is still largely unknown, and very exciting. Look around your house and office — most of your digital product touchpoints are relatively dopey and need to be rethought.
Other displays also include screens designed for users that fall outside of the typical demographic for digital fluency: children, elderly people, people with learning disabilities and other neurological disorders. Most of the digital tools created for education, healthcare, industrial processes, supply chain, mass transport (the list goes on) are more or less reliable technologies, but their displays are resistant to invention, far from intuitive, and represent a really incredible chance to redesign the interfaces that drive infrastructural systems.
