Just recently, I read an AdWeek article on the ANAR Foundation, a Spanish child-advocacy organization. With the help of their ad agency Grey Spain, they used lenticular printing for a powerful outdoor advertising campaign that offered help to abused children without alerting their abusers, even if they saw the ad simultaneously. Lenticular printing is a process where printed images are given the illusion of depth or motion and allows for different photos to be seen depending on the angle it’s viewed from.
For this particular poster, anyone over four-foot-five would read, “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”
Those under that height would see, “If somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you” along with the phone number for ANAR’s hotline.
Seeing this made me wonder: how are we as an industry adopting smarter, more responsive design given the incredible tools that we do have?
In an article in Smashing Magazine, Vasilis van Gemert wrote: Up until not so long ago, we used to base our designs on some rather general assumptions about screen size and input type. With the rise of devices with various screen sizes and alternative ways to interact, these assumptions have turned out to be unreliable. In the ‘90s, the web was 640 pixels wide. In the early 2000s, it grew to 800 pixels and later to 1024 pixels. Then, a device with a very small screen entered the market. Suddenly, our ideas about the size of the web did not work anymore.
Something similar happened with bandwidth and page load time. We went from 14.4 to 28.8 to 56k to broadband and got faster and faster. Then people started using those very same mobile devices to browse the web more and more but expected for load times to be comparable to what they saw on PCs only to find that they wouldn’t due to compatibility and integration issues.
According to an article on KISSmetrics: Surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com indicate that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within three seconds. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again, and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.
At the moment, you may not be seeing much in terms of web traffic from different devices, but I wouldn’t be quick to disregard this advice. As we’ve all seen, history is filled with examples of once-thriving businesses that were wiped off the map due to an inability to adapt (e.g., Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Kodak vs. Fujifilm, Borders vs. Barnes & Noble).
As a sidebar, each of these businesses failed to read emerging markets correctly and defeated themselves. Ironically, Kodak invented one of the first digital cameras in 1975 only to put it on the backburner for about two decades because it wouldn’t be very profitable at the time. By the time Kodak decided to switch gears, it was much too late.
But going back to the point, back in March, Adobe Digital Index posted a study after analyzing more than 100 billion visits to 1,000+ websites worldwide uncovering trends in the transition from PC to mobile device usage, which are impressive to say the least.
Global Traffic by Device Type:
The study goes on to say that while smartphones remain much more common, the tablet form factor makes it ideal for browsing. Whether it be leisurely surfing the web, engaging with video or shopping online, on average internet users view 70% more pages per visit when browsing with a tablet compared to a smartphone.
In an article on “Responsive Web Design,” Ethan Marcotte writes “an emergent discipline called ‘responsive architecture’ has begun asking how physical spaces can respond to the presence of people passing through them. Through a combination of embedded robotics and tensile materials, architects are experimenting with art installations and wall structures that bend, flex, and expand as crowds interact with them” much like ANAR’s outdoor ad buy.
Marcotte goes on to say, “This is our way forward. Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can treat them as facets of the same experience. We can design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed standards-based technologies into our designs to make them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the media that renders them. In short, we need to practice responsive web design.”
Since the end of 2012, we’ve incorporated responsive web design into all of our web design projects from sites that stream movies via CDN to those with online shopping carts. If you have questions on the either its benefits or how to achieve this, please contact us here.
Photo Credit: PetaPixel.com, Adobe Digital Index