INTRODUCTION

MANY FINE BOOKS out there will tell you how to design and build a responsive website. This isn’t one of them.

Wait! Don’t throw the book away yet!

There’s 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 everyone—everyone!—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 can’t 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 arm’s length. They gave their okay to go responsive—surely 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 can’t 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 isn’t just that organizations get a website that works across multiple devices. Responsive design forces companies to fix what’s broken—in 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 work—let’s take advantage of this opportunity.

WHAT YOU’LL GET FROM THIS BOOK

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 you’re 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 you’re in for.

If you’re a decision-maker—perhaps a project or product manager, stakeholder, or executive—and you’re looking for information about what responsive design means for you, you’ve 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 website—one that works better for your business and your users.
If you’re a designer or developer looking for ways to work more effectively with the rest of your team when executing a responsive design, you’ve also come to the right place. If you need help explaining to your managers or stakeholders how and why this process is different, this book should come in handy—buy them a copy!
If you’re a writer or editor who wants to know how a responsive redesign can help you clean up and prioritize content, you’ve arrived at—dare I say it—the right place. Many organizations report that editing and managing content are the primary challenges they face with going responsive, so you’re not alone.

WHAT YOU WON’T GET FROM THIS BOOK

Responsive design is a huge topic, and the explicit goal of this book is to look at how it affects people and processes outside of specific design and development techniques. Many of the issues typically considered to be at the heart of responsive design are not covered here. Fortunately, these topics have been discussed at length by other people, and you can find useful resources about them in the back of the book.

If you’re looking for help with how to actually design and build a responsive website, you’ll be sadly disappointed by this book. There isn’t a single line of code here. Many excellent writers—all more qualified than I am to address the specifics of how to build a responsive site—have covered this subject at length.
If you’re contrasting responsive design with other options, like a separate mobile website or native apps, you won’t get a completely unbiased perspective here. The title of this book is Going Responsive, not Evaluating Your Options for Mobile. I will present research and data to help teams make a persuasive case for responsive over the alternatives.
If you’re digging deep into mobile development, web performance, or device detection, consider this the CliffsNotes version of some of the in-depth discussions taking place today. The purpose of this book is to help make those debates relevant to everyone, so please forgive me while I try to stay out of the weeds.

WHY YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO ME

Since the spring of 2014, Ethan Marcotte—the guy who invented the whole responsive web design thing—and I have been talking to companies of all shapes and sizes about how they implement responsive design. We’ve hosted workshop sessions with major corporations, including Expedia, the Associated Press, and CIBC, to help work through their most pressing concerns. Ethan and I also host a podcast series, fittingly called A Responsive Web Design Podcast*,* in which we interview people who have pulled off large-scale responsive projects at companies like Google, Starbucks, Fidelity Investments, and Condé Nast (http://bkaprt.com/gr/00-01/). I’ve talked with dozens of organizations about their stumbling blocks and successes along the road to responsive, and this book is a synthesis of what I’ve learned from them.

Beyond that, I’ve spent my entire career helping organizations understand and adapt to working on the web. Much of the conversation to date about responsive design has focused on specific development challenges. I’m not a web developer, and I’ll admit that the nuts and bolts of implementation are not my forte. But I am an excellent translator between the people who push the web forward and the people whose jobs and businesses are affected by it. It’s a privilege to walk so many organizations through this latest wave of change.

Let’s start by looking at the arguments for going responsive—and the main arguments against it. Even if you’re convinced that responsive design is the way to go, understanding its benefits, risks, and tradeoffs will help you make the case to your team.