Chimero Frank - Going Responsive

MANY FINE BOOKS out there will tell you how to design and build a responsive website. This isnt one of them.

Wait! Dont throw the book away yet!

Theres more to going responsive than fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. Indeed, most organizations that have implemented a responsive design report that the design and development decisions were the easy part. The hard part is getting the organization aligned on what it means to design for all devices equally.

Going responsive requires everyoneeveryone!to approach the design and development process with a new perspective. Long-simmering conflicts about whose thing gets priority on the homepage must be addressed, head-on. Site speed stops being the concern of a few heroic developers and becomes something that guides decisions throughout the process. Flabby old content cant be shoved into stretchy new responsive clothes, so your editorial process and workflow must evolve.

Your entire organization must work differently to pull off a successful responsive redesign. Teams take on the challenge of designing and reviewing multiple breakpoints instead of a single fixed-width design. Design decisions must now be grounded in a style guide or pattern library, which must be created, maintained, and enforced. Stakeholders accustomed to reviewing Photoshop comps are instead expected to provide feedback on interactive prototypes. Organizations discover they must move staff into new roles, hire new people, even create new reporting relationships to manage this process effectively.

These changes may come as a surprise to executives who are accustomed to dealing with the web design and development process at arms length. They gave their okay to go responsivesurely everything else is just an implementation detail? Unfortunately, no magic wand can take an existing website and automagically make it work across platforms and devices. Responsive design cant be implemented by hardworking designers and developers without support and buy-in from the rest of the organization. Pulling off a responsive design requires a new way of solving problems and making decisions.

This is a good thing. The promise of responsive design isnt just that organizations get a website that works across multiple devices. Responsive design forces companies to fix whats brokenin their content, design, workflow, and team structure. Pulling off a large-scale responsive redesign means learning to work more effectively and efficiently, which can set your team up for greater success in the future. You may never get a better chance to revamp how you worklets take advantage of this opportunity.

This book is based on research and interviews with dozens of companies that have successfully managed a responsive redesign. More and more companies are planning to go responsive in the next couple of years. Smart organizations will avoid the pitfalls and gain from the experience of people who have been there before. Whether youre managing the process, making decisions that affect the website, or a member of the design and development team that will bring it to life, this book will give you an overview of what youre in for.

• If youre a decision-makerperhaps a project or product manager, stakeholder, or executiveand youre looking for information about what responsive design means for you, youve come to the right place. This book gives guidance on how to make good decisions when leading a responsive redesign. Your goal is to deliver a better websiteone that works better for your business and your users.