Recently, we have been touting the benefits of responsive web design to a prospective client. For those of you who are not completely familiar with responsive and adaptive design, think of them as methods to optimize your web content for mobile consumption – a challenge that businesses and organizations must face in order to adapt to today’s media consumption trends.
Our web team talked up all the wonderful things about optimizing websites for mobile, such as no more cumbersome navigation on small screens or the aggravating inadvertent clicks on links. We also explained how it made good business sense for their company – one-up their competition, longer relevancy for their new website, and increased conversions.
And of course we covered the metrics and data behind this approach to web design. The trend is pretty impressive – mobile internet use is projected to surpass that of desktop within the next year, a growing percentage of consumers expecting websites to be optimized for mobile browsing and abandoning sites that don’t function on mobile, and continued growth in mobile commerce.
At times, we get caught up in the support data to back up recommendations for clients and prospects. But I personally also love to throw in anecdotal references whenever possible. Remind me to tell you about a pro-rodeo contestant on his smartphone minutes before getting on a 1,800 lb. bull. But that’s for another blog entry.
For this post, I’d like to reference an observation I had about a week ago. All four members of my family, ranging in ages 44 to 9 years, sprawled throughout the kitchen and living room on a lazy Sunday morning – mom sitting on the couch reading the Sunday paper on her iPad, teenage daughter tweeting away on her Samsung Galaxy smartphone, occasionally running over to show me something cool on Instagram, and my youngest streaming Sponge Bob episodes from her Kindle Fire HD. All of this happening while I’m cracking up listening to a Jay Mohr podcast on my iPhone and cooking breakfast. How’s that for multi-tasking?
The compelling part of this observation is not that we aren’t communicating with each other the old-fashioned way. Trust me, we have plenty of good, old-fashioned, personal interaction. What brings me down a little is the fact that our desktop PC is now an outcast, shunned by the entire family and collecting dust in a closet upstairs. My teenage daughter even declined the hand-me-down because, as she put it, “no one uses those anymore, Dad.”
I also suspect that the laptop is not far behind. Its only value is the occasional need to type up school reports, but never to go online. That’s why we have our mobile devices.
The digital media revolution has arrived, folks. And this time, it will be streamed on your mobile device.