Three Design and Development Methods for Mobile: Which is Right for You?

Like everything else in this age of rapid technological innovation, the multiplication of mobile devices makes it hard for businesses to keep pace with consumer expectations. For instance, a recent Dynatrace infographic revealed that 67 percent of consumers start engaging on one device and then continue on another – and an organization is expected to be able to provide a rewarding experience on each device.

Mobile means more than smartphones and tablets; wearables and mobile devices used in-store must also be considered when creating a mobile strategy. Merchants will also need to determine how these various devices impact all the sales channels currently offered. When you think of it, every consumer sales experience can be delivered through a mobile device such as POS, kiosk and, most importantly, ecommerce.

To meet this challenge, there’s a veritable alphabet soup of options nowadays in terms of design options: Adaptive Web Design (AWD), Responsive Web Design (RWD) and HTML5, as well as native app development. These have added to the confusion as enterprises struggle to provide an optimal mobile experience for their customers, while keeping website maintenance costs low.

Each of these options has its pros and cons, and it is imperative that you find the one that matches your customers’ shopping habits without breaking the bank. In this article, we will explore and define the three fastest-growing trends for addressing ecommerce through the mobile web and provide the pros and cons for RWD, AWD and a blended approach known as RESS.

Three Methods to Build a Mobile Strategy

To construct a site that operates well on a variety of devices, there are three different methods currently, some of which were mentioned above: Responsive Web Design (client-side scripting), Adaptive Web Design (with server-side scripting) or blended web design (responsive with server-side components, or RESS). What’s the difference? What should you use and why?

AWD

In Adaptive Web Design, users on different devices are served different content – the server-side approach. For example, a company sends users on mobile devices to a different domain that serves content from a different module. By sending different content, the user experience can differ significantly from the desktop site.  

AWD Pluses and Minuses

Pluses

• Site performance is optimized to each site separately, resulting in faster load times for mobile devices.
• While delivering a consistent experience on all platforms has real benefits, in some instances, you might want to offer different experiences to users on different devices. With AWD, this is easy to do.
• Building static sites one by one is more familiar to business, design and development teams.
• Outsourcing to a third party can be cost-effective if non-desktop segments are not expected to generate revenue or if a seamless user experience is not a priority.

Minuses

• Business, design and development teams’ attention is split on multiple sites and projects.
• Project work must be done in parallel with various teams (mobile site team, desktop site team, etc.), which can be hard to coordinate.
• All maintenance and release work is multiplied by the number of sites.
• Business reporting and web analytics are in multiple systems and require business resources to gather and combine data manually.
• It’s pretty difficult to keep everything in sync. You’re almost guaranteed to have different user experiences on different devices.
• When compared to a single static site, this method involves increased development and QA time.
• The SEO effects can be negative when content is split across multiple sites/URLs.
• New devices in the market may require new sites or re-designs.
• User accounts and data are not shared across sites without significant engineering effort, which means tougher back-end integration.
• Activity across devices requires engineering effort to handle complex interactions (mobile URL opened on desktop, or vice versa).

RWD

This design method enables the development of a single fluid website that will respond to the user’s device, allowing a well-designed experience to work on a wide range of screen sizes – from the smallest smart phone to the largest desktop, and every tablet or laptop in between.

Rather than the server-side approach of AWD, RWD is a client-side approach that uses CSS and Java Script to modify the presentation of pages to fit a user’s screen. The technology behind RWD is built into the front-end of the website and executed on the user’s device. Server-side changes are not needed and no redirects or third parties are required.

RWD Pluses and Minuses

Pros

• Having just one URL for each page can drive higher search rankings and avoid the SEO dilution that can happen when you’ve got multiple sites serving the same content.
• Business, design and development teams are focused on one project, optimizing your team’s efficiency and creating a simplified calendar of release cycles.
• Flexible design does not require re-work when new devices are released (larger phones, smaller tablets, etc.). This means you’ve got a future-proof design and better reach to non-desktop devices.
• User accounts and data do not require complicated synchronization across devices. A logged-in user sees the same account on every device.
• RWD can deliver a seamless user experience across devices. It’s all the same site – it is simply displayed in a way that’s responsive to different devices. A consistent experience can help you reinforce a positive brand impression and drive higher conversions.
• Reporting and analytics are easier to manage on a single RWD site. There’s no need to combine data from multiple sites.

Minuses

• Since RWD is a new technique, there’s a limited pool of developers who can do it well.
• Designing for RWD can be challenging. If your developers aren’t well versed in it, it can be tough to learn.
• Process changes require more collaboration between design and development teams.
• If responsive images are not used and the site is not built correctly for all screens, the site can be slow on mobile devices.
• As compared to a single static site, this method requires increased development and QA time.

RESS

The third method is a mashup of RWD and AWD, called Responsive with Server Side Components (RESS). For example, using an RESS approach, users on mobile devices can receive a header and footer that’s customized to their device, but there’s still just one website to serve multiple devices. This decreases the overall footprint of the download and can reduce the processing that has to happen on the client. Essentially, RESS combines the best of RWD and AWD.

Pluses

• With RESS, it’s just one site – just like RWD– so if you have the skills, it’s simpler to build and maintain and it delivers a consistent user experience across all devices.
• Having custom components delivered to different devices can reduce the client-side processing burden and improve performance.

Minuses

• If the talent pool for RWD is limited, the number of developers who’ve mastered RESS is even more so. This will change over time, but given the benefits of RESS development, it might be worth going the extra mile to find developers who have mastered this new approach.

The Right Mobile Strategy

As the pluses and minuses attest, each method must be carefully considered. For most businesses, though, RWD will offer the best bang for the buck. Since there are few companies with the capital to invest in constant maintenance of multiple code bases, RWD offers an efficient and economical way of optimizing your current website to meet the demands of ever-changing screen sizes and resolutions. Many of the drawbacks of the RWD approach can be greatly minimized or completely eliminated with the right team using the RWD framework.

In addition to the pluses listed above, RWD also offers reduced development costs, easier integration, simplified maintenance and a consistent user experience – without running into the performance issues that can plague client-side processing.

Your specific needs and resources will determine the best approach for your organization.

If you’ve got primarily tablet-based traffic and limited resources, an AWD approach might be a reasonable stopgap before making the move to RWD or RESS in the future. Although an RESS approach offers additional benefits it can be more costly and requires a special skill set to be executed correctly.

In an age where consumers get frustrated if a site takes half a second too long to load or is not optimized for a particular device, it is clear that a good mobile strategy is a must. Understanding your customers’ needs and preferences, in addition to your own resources and capabilities, will help you determine which mobile strategy will best serve them.

To download the entire white paper on this topic, click here. 

Author Bio:

Sam Ganga is President of Global Mobility Services at DMI and also serves as the company’s Mobile Innovations Officer. Sam is responsible for Global Mobility Services at DMI, overseeing managed services growth across government and commercial accounts. Specifically, he oversees the Cloud-Based Managed Services, Managed Mobility Services and Government Mobility Services divisions. Sam’s group focuses on providing managed services through DMI’s Data Center, using secure management of mobile devices, applications and data, while reducing risk and complexity for customers.