Code: Responsive Web Design

This is an excerpt from Scott Jehl’s book Responsible Responsive Design. 2014, A Book Apart.

Chapter 1: Responsible Design

“My love for responsive centers around the idea that my Web site will meet you wherever you are—from mobile to full-blown desktop and anywhere in between.”—Trent Walton, “Fit to Scale”

Responsive design’s core tenets—fluid grids, fluid images, and media queries—go a long way toward providing a holistic package for cross-device interface design. But responsive design itself relies on features that may not work as expected—or at all. Our sites need to react to unexpected user behaviors, network conditions, and unique support scenarios.

In this chapter, we’ll dig into two responsible tenets: usability and accessibility. We’ll cover higher-level considerations before getting into nitty-gritty code you can implement now and expect to last. To start, let’s talk design. Read More

We’ve probably all had the experience of opening an HTML email message on a smartphone only to find that it hasn’t been optimized for mobile. The text is too small to read easily, and it’s difficult to interact with calls to action because of their size and spacing. However, there are ways in which email creators can solve these problems, including using responsive design techniques and taking a mobile-first approach to designing HTML email messages.

The example shown in Figure 1 is a TechCrunch daily-update email message, which is not optimized for smartphone users. The first problem is that the headline text is too small to read easily without zooming in, so it requires horizontal scrolling. Some headlines have additional text beneath them, but that text is even smaller. And the read more call to action feels almost microscopic. To be fair, the headlines also link to the articles, but people may not know that at first, because there is a separate, more explicit call to action. Read More

This is a sample chapter from Karen McGrane’s book Going Responsive. 2015, A Book Apart.

Chapter 4: Clean Up Your Content

“The responsive design became a content solution and not just a technical solution to make the ongoing evolution of our digital products more robust.”—Alex Breuer, the Guardian

Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries: nothing in the definition of Responsive Web Design (RWD) says anything about your content. And yet, a lasting benefit for many organizations comes from the process of cleaning up and paring down content.

It probably comes as no surprise that creating a good user experience across all devices means presenting less content, better content, and more thoughtfully prioritized content. Gone are the days when we could assume that users want—and look at—everything we cram onto the page and shove into the right column. Truth is, users never wanted all that dreck. Now, with smaller screens, we’re forced to acknowledge that uncomfortable truth and make decisions about what really matters. Read More