Arris Blog

What is responsive design and why should we care?

The mobile user experience is not just a gimmick or an add-on. Increasingly our clients’ content appears on mobile phones, tablets, screens and contexts not even imagined a year ago. At Arris Marketing Communication we see the value in supporting mobile devices every day.

We always start the design process by listening to the client and asking questions that tease out the needs of the user. To be sure we are designing content that enhances the user experience and presents the most relevant information in the most efficient way.

When redesigning the Quality Wool website we reasoned that the audience our client was speaking with, their customers, were increasingly likely to view web content on mobile devices. We wanted to give the client a responsive website that would adapt their content to suit mobile phone screens and tablets as well as the desktop.

During the design phase we identified the unique challenges that navigation on a touch screen poses as distinct from the desktop experience. We also recognised that the mobile user experience would be unique; clients would want quick and easy access to specific and relevant  information in the field.

So the resulting design presents Market My Wool, Contact Me and Find My Rep as primary buttons on the mobile home page. Of these, Find My Rep, through clever coding, quickly ascertains the location of the user to present them with the contact details of their nearest representative.

This project was a great opportunity to leverage the possibility of mobile to enhance the user experience.

For ease of maintenance, the client is able to regularly update and keep their content fresh via an underlying Content Management System that controls the same content for desktop as for mobile.