Giving Up Control Of Your Web Site

Just the beginning, really

In work for my agency this year, the leading discussion in Web site development has been how designing for platform has become the new point of concern. It used to be that your job was over as soon as you had browser cross-compatibility nailed, but now, with people viewing work on all manners of platforms, that concern has expanded.

What most have chosen to do, up to now, is let the nature of the site determine the dominant design mode. E-commerce plays still generate most of their sales from desktop / laptop, and need to romance merchandise photography, so bigger displays ruled the roost. Content sites were the first to see big traffic gains from platform change, so you just design down on width, let the work scroll to eternity, and call it a day. Simple, right?

Well, not so much. E-commerce, especially on lower price, digital download or replenishment orders, is now moving to mobile as well, especially for anyone under the age of 25. As traffic from mobile moves well beyond the 50% mark, and SEO becomes more of a mobile-friendly play, a generational shift is at work. So if you want to be simple about it, everyone but the most lavish and older demographic e-commerce play should just say UI be damned, everything's mobile now, and thin is in.

However, this leaves one major issue out of the mix. Mobile screen sizes are far from static, and site design is enough of a cost and QA hassle that you really don't want to re-think this every year if you can help it.

Start with the aspect ratio discussion, which makes every UI issue a bit of an open question. While UX studies and surveys show a general preference for tablet users for landscape over portrait, the trend is far from total, and splits to a large enough percentage so that design decisions aren't likely. Tablet use as a whole may also have crested, with large "phablet" plays taking over. And while those phablets may seem set as a size from sheer incompatibility in a pocket or purse, they have been anything but to date.

Next, let's look at the history of what's been available for users. The status quo of a iPhone or large Droid display seems like it's the logical end of the process, but probably isn't. Imagine, for instance, how viral and useful it would be to use your handheld like a projector on any reflective surface, so that you could share content, and maybe even interact with it, with high resolution at the size of your choice. (While I'm wishing, I'd also like my phone to recharge from light, like my watch.) We could easily see displays in the next few years go back to old desktop browsers standards or larger, especially if it seems to be something that moves the needle in ROI.

So what happens next in site design? The only thing that can happen: responsive design work that reformats sites, at a machine level, to the best guess for the individual screen. A dramatic loss of control, at a brand marketing and design level, so you can have a fighting chance at cross-device functionality. A back to basics movement for sites that were using greater broadband bandwidth to creep up on code bloat and loading times. Tactical decisions, based on what's best for the individual site and user base. Maybe even a split by domain level, which would require a dramatic step up from the machine intelligence involved in SEO/SEM. And any number of rushed responsive coding jobs for e-commerce sites that have lived with the same basic site architecture for a decade or more.

Not the worst time to be in the agency business, in other words!

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