I’ve been recommending to many of my customers a responsive design approach for a while now. I’ve always felt that it provides a consistent branded experience across multiple devices with less ongoing maintenance. The trade off is that it does take more effort to define, design and develop a responsive website.

There are lots of articles about responsive design but this one I read on the Real World UX website is the first one that takes a broad overview of the cross-functional perspectives that should be considered. In  “Deciding whether to go responsive requires strategic collaboration” the author details considerations from the business strategy, user experience and development area perspective. For each area there is a list with a need and a short explanation of that need.

The article stresses the need for cross-functional collaboration to broaden the understanding of the needs in each area involved in a responsive website design project. Without this understanding conversations between the areas may “devolve into arguments rather than constructive dialogue”.

The one thing I find missing from this article is a solution to facilitating these sometimes difficult cross-functional conversations. I believe you need to have an experienced Business Analyst involved in the project. Their role are to elicit requirements from all stakeholders in the project – that includes design and development needs. It is their job to be able to communicate those requirements clearly to all parties involved and make sure they understand each others perspectives. I also believe that a strong, independent Project Manager will keep those cross-functional teams on track and informed during the project.

I like the lists of cross-functional considerations in this article. My recommendation for a successful project would be to include a Business Analyst and Project Manager (or someone who can perform both roles) as a part of your responsive website project team.

I recently read an article called The New Rules of the Responsive Web by Matthew Carver on the Webdesigner Depot website. The article started by telling me what I already know – Responsive Design is now a near ubiquitous buzzword on the web. To me that means a lot of people think it’s great (including me) and a lot of people don’t know what it is – but know they need to have it.

The Responsive Design approach is been around for a long time. But it has now gathered enough momentum to be a part of most every web design project. This article lays out four ground rules for how to work on the design of a responsive web design project. The first rule is don’t stop at just a graceful rescaling of the design. Build a site optimized for anything from the desktop to a “tiny cellphone running IE7 on an EDGE network”. Second, there is no easy way out. Responsive design is complicated it calls for a new iterative approach to design and development. Evan Gerber VP of Mobile at Fidelity in a presentation I attended described it as a “Lean UX” approach. By prototyping your wireframes and presenting them to the client you can focus on the site’s layout before the design. Third is to embrace change. You have to change your tools and approach to design fro a responsive design project. You need to go beyond Photoshop and full page mock-ups. The last rule is my favorite – “Remember your roots”. It starts with a quote from Tim Berners-Lee. “[The web] should be accessible from any kind of hardware that can connect to the Internet: stationary or mobile, small screen or large.” This has always been the case. We need to think of how the target audience is consuming our information and make sure is easy for them to do so.

Read the full article for the full details of the rules. There are links to some nice resources and as always the comments on the article provide for some interesting perspectives.