Nomad

2 Jun 2011 by Brad

What is Mobile?

Recently I've seen my Twitter feed filling up more and more with developers talking about Responsive Design.

A responsively designed website is a website whose layout adjusts to the platform on which it is viewed. So you view it on your 1920 desktop monitor and you get the full desktop experience and if you view it on an iPad or other tablet device you get a tweaked layout for the smaller screen size, ditto for mobile phones.

Responsive design is being grabbed by the masses and hailed as the answer to "mobile" website building. A little media query or two and our sites work on mobile now, right?!

Well *sort of*

There is an important question to ask yourself.

What constitutes a mobile device?

I imagine your brain is now filled with shiny app-filled touch screen goodness, but there is a lot more to think about than just iPads, Xooms and iPhones.

If you are a web developer,  you will (hopefully) find the following slides most interesting. (I've linked this on twitter before so if you follow me chances are you've already seen them)

The most interesting part of the presentation to me is the section that mentions iPhone market share (slides 16 - 19).

6% of the USA phone market and just 4% of the EU5 (France, Germany, Spain, Italy and the UK) market.

This leaves a somewhat staggering amount of mobile devices that we don't necessarily consider when we build our mobiles sites.

What else should we then consider when we think about mobile?

What does mobile mean?

mo·bile
Adjective: Able to move or be moved freely or easily.

That certainly doesn't just mean a phone. Phones and tablets then? but what about netbooks? They have similar portability as a tablet, similar screen sizes and resolutions. What about laptops with the same resolution as a desktop? How big does a netbook have to get before you consider it a laptop?

Even if you just take the phone subset of mobile devices, sure there are your touch screen smart phones,but do you consider devices like the N97 mini. Someone I know has this phone and loves it, but complains that web browsing is a major pain a lot of the time on it.

The point I am trying to make is that you need to think about the audience of the website you are delivering, would they be better off with a mobile site that is independent of your main site and not just a media queried squished down version? We need to remember that just because *we* look at sites on iPhones, HTC desires and Tablets, we are more often than not the exception and not the rule.

As a caveat I want to say that I like responsive design, I think that a site should be able to be viewed where ever you are on whatever you browse it on. I just don't think it's a good idea to consider responsive design a one hit fix for any mobile problem.

I can't wait to get my teeth fully into a proper responsive build. My next post is going to cover where to start with responsive design and the things that you should consider if you are doing a responsive build.