The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s responsive website.
in The Mobile Challenge | The User Experience, Aaron Schmidt has some excellent points to make about the difficulty in using responsive design for library websites. The biggest two being that first we don’t know what users are trying to do from their mobile devices and second, that we often have little control over the presentation of the services we license for our users.
Meanwhile, a report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that not only are more people using the Internet from mobile devices, there may be a significant part of the population that only accesses the Internet from a mobile device. Today’s smartphones are just as capable as most computers and significantly cheaper but their smaller physical screens and expensive data plans means they have particular needs that need to be addressed.
It’s a tough balancing act, particularly combined with the advent of high resolution screens on the same devices with data caps but one libraries can’t ignore.