Features from Meantime IT

Responding to future needs now

At Meantime we make it our mission to know about new advances in technology. We read the trade magazines, specialist press and blogs and we go to conferences and exhibitions. Our water-cooler office chat isn't Breaking Bad or X-Factor, it's the hot gossip about the latest server security update. Sad but true.

We filter the endless waves of new developments released on a daily basis and dismiss 99% of them as irrelevant. The PR companies with their big-budget launches will have you believe that you simply HAVE to have the latest development, but most of it is mere marketing puff. So we watch, and we wait.

But every now and again something happens that makes us sit up and take notice. We predicted cloud computing would be big, now it's pretty much standard. Years ago, we discussed how mobile technology had the potential to become so much more than making and receiving calls, but you’ll just have to take our word for that because it was way before we had a website.

What's getting us going today is responsive design. We believe this advance in IT is going to become the most important change to the web since browsing stopped being something you did at your desk and became something you could do on a hand-held smart phone. And it's this move to mobile browsing that's caused the revolution. In 2013, for the first time ever in the UK, PC sales haven't grown and the reason for this stagnation is the growth of the tablet device.

Responsive design is the name it's been given by the powers that be, but we believe it’s a misnomer. It's so much more than design; this advance in IT encompasses code, design and every aspect of everything we do.

The emperor's new clothes?

The growth of the smart phone and tablet has been unprecedented and, suddenly, throwing together a mobile version of your website or e-shop isn't enough. For a long time, web-builders (us included) have created a mobile site by including it as an extra style sheet. Style sheets, or CSS, are like the web equivalent of a dress designer's collection; think of the website as the model and the stylesheet as the designer's new collection. The 'clothes' can be changed or removed at will. Take them off and you've got the bare bones of the site; the plain text without pictures or colours or fancy fonts.

But suddenly, the designers have realised that not everyone is five feet nine and a size zero and creating one set of clothes in two colourways isn't enough. They’ve realised they need to design for the short people, the fat people and the thin people. In short, they'll have to throw away their pattern books and start from scratch. The skinny models are your desktop PCs, and the people of all shapes and sizes demanding garments that fit are the tablets and the smart-phones and the netbooks and the tablets. When it comes to web design, it's no longer one size fits all.

Size matters

Screens not only come in varying shapes and sizes, they're used differently. Desktop screens are used with a mouse or by moving the cursor. The tablet is switched from landscape to portrait while you make yourself comfortable on the sofa and browsed by swiping a finger up and down. Responsive design is about making sure that your website and your business systems not only look amazing but remain functional, whatever device they’re being viewed upon.

Let’s imagine you operate a business that relies on people using your website in order to buy your service; a hotel, for example. Your customers visit your website, choose their dates, fill in their details and pay the required fee. Doing all this will be a very different experience on a 32 inch desktop monitor with separate peripherals than on a small phone screen with a fiddly touch-screen keyboard.

Responsive design enables each user, wherever they are and whatever their device, to have the same experience. The large-screen user will have no problem filling in a form that stretches across the screen, tabbing to the next box and adding in their all-important credit card details to seal the deal. Put the same form on a tablet and it becomes impossible to fill in because the user can’t scroll left to right. Responsive design recognises the device and tailors the display to it, so the wide address fields on the large-screen monitor become a narrow list on the tablets that can be completed easily from top to bottom with the swipe of a finger.

A change is gonna come

You may be reading this and wondering what all the fuss is about. We're perfectionists, we want the user experience to be as good as it can possibly be for everyone who uses or comes into contact with the websites and software that we build. You may not share our view and think it doesn’t matter, that it’s not that big a deal.

It is. It’s happening, and it’s not going to be long before web designers stop talking about testing on different browsers but instead talk about how it will look on different devices. It’s a progression that isn’t going to slow down or stop and if you want your business to be taken seriously it’s something you need to know about.

The way the world does business has changed. PAs don’t use a rolodex to find a hotel number to call and book a room for their boss, they whip out their iPads in the airport lounge and book it online. Council workers are sent out on their rounds with their smartphone and given real time updates on which bus stops have just been smashed up so they can get there within minutes to clean up the glass. Doctors wander the wards with tablets in their pockets so they can look up the blood results of the patient in front of them.

Future perfect

If you use Google analytics, or another analytics package, to track visitors to your website then you’ll already know what devices people are using to look at your site. A really good package will also tell you how many sales you’re losing from potential customers who get to a certain point in the process and then drop out. Is that because your site doesn’t work on their device? You really should be finding out.

People aren't tied to their desks anymore; they want and expect to be able to do everything on every device, whether they're in the office or at the beach. It's not the future, it's now.

Download this guide as a pdf