By Chris Andrasick, Tacit Knowledge, a Newgistics Company
Responsive Web Design (RWD) is being heralded as a cure-all for online retailers to build a single site that addresses the myriad different devices their customers are using. As mobile continues its march to being the dominant method by which consumers interact with brands RWD is supposed to help improve the experience and conversion rates, but it falls far short.
Retailers already think RWD is “the answer” and as a result focus on issues with load times and ongoing expenses, which are important, but overlook the fundamental challenges of mobile commerce.
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In reality, RWD just solves the issue of fitting an existing experience into a smaller screen and does nothing to optimize performance — and that’s just part of the story. The biggest issue concerns the origin of the Internet and e-Commerce, and how we got to where we are today. The principal medium for e-Commerce experiences for the past 15 years has been the desktop computer which, when you think about it, is nothing more than a networked typewriter. Admittedly that’s a bit of a simplification, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s forced us to adopt drill-down browsing experiences designed to navigate product taxonomies grouped into categories and multistep, keyboard-intensive checkout flows.
More recently, rich, interactive product detail pages have become a source of investment as multi-variant testing has empirically proven that people buy more stuff when they can more deeply interact with it. Browsing large catalogs (product discovery) necessitates large screens. Checkout necessitates lots of typing. Rich packet data protocols (PDPs) necessitate bandwidth.
Put simply, common e-Commerce interfaces are poorly designed for product discovery and purchasing on mobile devices. The usage flow introduces a lot of friction when applied to mobile experiences and it introduces an ongoing quality assurance (QA) cost. Any significant user interface (UI) changes will need to be tested on countless form factors.
Instead, retailers should create use cases specific to mobile that do things like abandon the funnel commonplace for desktop sites — which brings shoppers from a homepage to browse/search to product detail to cart to checkout — and elevate other features and functions differently. They can do this with an adaptive solution to fit the four main device types: tablet (think iPad), small tablet (think Kindle Fire), smartphone and desktop. A fifth category may soon be required for smart TVs. Doing so provides the ability to optimize for use cases on those form factors and the gesture-based interfaces available.
Responsive should only be used to handle the variances within each of the device types. So the server needs to first determine which of the four homepage payloads to respond with and then deliver a payload that is responsive to fit the specific device (say an iPhone 5 versus an iPhone 3). This addresses the performance concern as the total page weight is tunable based on the type of device. That’s the best use case: adaptive delivery plus responsive design. It is also the use that best future-proofs an ongoing mobile strategy.
The ultimate goal should be to eliminate friction that will turn mobile browsers into mobile buyers through these and other tactics that will deliver the best possible experience for each device while reducing the need for thumb typing and extensive browsing. The companies who do this will be the ones who capitalize the most on growing mobile traffic.
Chris Andrasick is the CEO and founder of Tacit Knowledge, a Newgistics Company and the digital commerce consultancy that delivers Silicon Valley innovation to the retail world. Throughout his career, he has worked with and led digital initiatives for leading online retailers including Converse, Kodak, Barnes and Noble, Sony, Macys, Sephora, The Body Shop and Gap.
