Media-queried responsive & adaptive sites afford us the ability to re-architect content on a page to fit its container, but with this exciting new potential come equally exciting challenges. Web designers will have to look beyond the layout in front of them to envision how its elements will reflow & lockup at various widths while maintaining form & hierarchy. Media queries can be used to do more than patch broken layouts: with proper planning, we can begin to choreograph content proportional to screen size, serving the best possible experience at any width.

As I step into my 3rd responsive project with Paravel, I’ve made a habit out of picking apart media-queried sites I happen across, noting how things get rearranged at various widths. At times, it seems as though all of the site architecture & planning goes out the window as content reflows. I’ve also found that what might work very well for one type of content or site might not work so well for another.

Content Stacking

This is unavoidable. Take a 4 column site at full width: as the view narrows, 4 will become 3, then 2, and 1. The most common solution is to stack them on top of each other in chunks (fig. a). Simple enough, but what happens if the first column is really tall? Is the content in column 2 less important than all of the content in 1? It probably is for something like a full-length article, but I can’t help but think that in some cases, this method throws off the hierarchy.

Another approach could be to interdigitate content by folding elements into each other as the view narrows (fig. b). In real terms, what happens if a main column is a tall grid full of product thumbnails, and the sidebar features a coupon or promotion? When those columns are combined, it might be nice to slide the promo in between two product rows instead of shuffling that important piece to the bottom of the main column.

The Content Change-up

Another thing I’ve noticed is that media queries are being used to significantly redesign pages. I’ve seen background colors change and top-level elements move from left to right. If critical thought is applied here those choices may be spot on. But what happens if a user visits at full-width one afternoon and revisits your site in the evening on a tablet, and everything looks completely different? It’s annoying—like someone rearranging the groceries in your pantry every time you closed the door. The power of media queries can be intoxicating, but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

De-compartmentalize the Workflow

The production model of passing a site down the assembly line from design to development to launch seems to be an inefficient approach for responsive & adaptive site design. I think the Paravel method of gathering around a table & slugging every decision out until launch lends itself to the level of reiteration necessary for these projects. We’ve found that the best way forward is to pull all members of a team together to design, build, test and then evaluate in multiple quick rounds.

Of course, the alternative would be to create designs for every media query you plan to include, but that kind of thinking seems inefficient and fails to take advantage of the device-agnostic approach that responsive web design offers. In my mind, it’s best to build something that works on any possible width or device instead of something that works on all current widths and devices.

Balancing all of these new facets of the web designer’s role may seem overwhelming, but that’s the nature of the profession and one of the reasons why I love it. Honing the craft of content choreography will help us to orchestrate the best experience possible at any screen size or resolution. In time, I believe knowing what works best will become second-nature to us—just like designing progressively enhanced CSSed pages without tables or superfluous markup is now. The best thing for us to do? Practice!

A few days after Steve Jobs announced the release of the iPad, I read that in Apple’s Reference Library: Preparing Your Web Content for iPad, and started to realize the drastic implications the evolution of multi-touch would have on interaction design. Anything we design for the web that requires a hover state has an uncertain future and could be subject to serious usability issues.

The Touch-Screen Boom

If you think this is something that can be addressed later, when multi-touch “catches on”, consider this: as of June 22, 2010 Apple has sold 3 million iPads in 80 days, 1.03 million touch screen phones are sold per day, and companies like Dell and HP have been developing & releasing touch interfaces for tablets and laptops for quite a while now.

The Hover Crutch

Hover states are everywhere. I don’t think I’ve ever written a stylesheet or designed a site without putting a significant amount of thought into how they should behave. As users, we’ve been conditioned to rely on hovers states to trigger changes in link color, reveal action items, and navigate through multiple tiers of a drop-down menu. Sliding our mouse pointers across a page to reveal hidden clickable points of action has become an automatic addition to our web browsing skill-set. As designers, we’ve turned to hover states to accommodate extra content and allow visual aesthetics to trump usability. Like it or not, those days are over and the interactions we design are going to have to stand on their own two feet.

I believe that in most cases, the best solution isn’t pursuing alternatives such as multi-touch hovering technology, trying to adapt hover-dependent designs, or transforming your website into an iPad/iPhone application. Instead of adding scripts, kilobytes, and billable hours to treat symptoms, I think the focus should be on simplicity and bullet-proof user experience design. In line with Luke Wroblewski’s statement that we should start designing for the web mobile-first, I propose that we should be designing for Multi-Touch first, and moving forward, we can only afford to add hover states as enhancements only.

Try to Avoid

• Hyperlinks that aren’t 100% obvious
• Javascript tooltips that show important information or metadata
• Displaying action items on hover. Examples I’ve seen typically involve edit / delete items.
• Displaying graphics in a less-than-ideal state until hovered: all those semi-opaque or black & white screenshots and photos that only display full color when covered by a cursor
• Drop-down menus. While some of these can be revealed on click or tap, be sure the user has cues that show those options.
• Focusing too much on hover dependent CSS3. I know it’s a bit of a heartbreaker, but while these have always been seen as enhancements, we’re going to have to settle with the fact that multi-touch users won’t be seeing our fancy transitions.

How do we adapt?

More often than not, making adjustments won’t be a quick or a simple process. The more layers of interaction a site has, the more work is going to have to be done to address usability issues. I’ve noticed that a few of my favorite sites have already taken a variety of steps to provide some fixes.

Show everything.

Prioritize your content, and if you’ve been hiding things behind hover states, make room to display them. The WordPress admin posts screen is a great example of this. Normally, action items are only visible on hover, but if you login with a touch device the links are always displayed.

Utilize tap to reveal a hover state.

Depending upon the implementation, this can be risky; Amazon has done fairly well with this method for their category-based shopping navigation. The paneled list and orange arrows help to make those areas clearly tappable. Another example can be found in Basecamp’s edit and delete controls for to-do lists, milestones, and files. When you hover over one of these the action items appear. For touch-screens they’ve built a javascript popup that works fairly well once you’ve figured it out. The problem is that users get no cue that tapping the to-do text is even an option, and I can’t help but think a solution similar to WordPress would have worked better. That being said, I’d happily pay a few extra pennies per month to get a mobile version of Basecamp.

Build specifically for touch-screen devices

and take advantage of native device controls, gestures and popovers. Touch-screen apps for Twitter and Gowalla play a key role in their overall success and are probably used more than the websites themselves. I use the Netflix iPad app regularly, but in many cases it feels like a hover-dependent website dropped into an iPad viewport. Currently, if you’re browsing instant titles and want to add something to your queue by tapping, you’re looking at a 3 step series of taps instead of an instant hover reveal option with a point-and-click interface. If you’re going to build specifically for touch, you’ve got to follow through.

Wait for touch hover technology.

I’m not convinced this would do anyone any good. It may be exciting to see what Cypress has come up with, and to know that Apple has applied for a patent for a proximity sensing touch-screen, but this does worry me. I’d hate to see us revert to our old shortcuts and make user experience sacrifices just because the technology is in place. Plus, we’re going to look like a bunch of idiots who are afraid to touch our smart phones & iPads. On the bright side, Phil Dunphy would love it!

We’re going to be OK.

Ultimately, I think seeing hover states fade away will make the web a better place. There never has been any substitute for concise content, clear interaction, and simple design. If we focus on core elements that make browsing the web great, our sites will function properly no matter how people use them.

Click here to download the 1024px x 1024px wallpaper.

Shaun is now tumbling the innovation at blog.mimeoverse.com. Check it out and save your pennies for what I think will be an epic multi-touch game.

For years, web designers have been working within a firmly established jig. Books have been published, studies have been conducted and businesses have been built on a handful of fundamental interface design principles. Many of these rules have been written based on the understanding that a mouse will be serving as the primary tool in carrying out the user’s will. What happens if this lowest common denominator for user interface design is replaced with a finger tip? Multi-touch technology will soon change the web more CSS3 or even HTML5.

Mouse Clicks VS Finger Tips

If I squint, I can get my mouse pointer accurate down to a single pixel. The tip of my right index finger measures 30px X 40px. That makes my finger 1200 times less precise than my mouse pointer. Does that mean that multi-touch technology is a step backwards? No. After all, user interface design is all about making things easier and more natural. Multi-touch does this by removing the middle man, in this case a mouse & cursor. Any gripe people have with multi-touch as it grows won’t be because they miss carefully positioning a mouse pointer to click a link. It will be because web designers have crammed too much on a page, or made link buttons too small for fingers to easily tap.

Scrolling VS Zooming & Tapping

Until now, websites have moved vertically, like a filmstrip, through a browser window. This specific linear method of engaging content has made a web designer’s job relatively easy. Counting on the fact that users are limited to scrolling from top to bottom while viewing the entire width of the page, important items can be placed at the top of the page (above the fold) while additional content can be arrayed below, or in a sidebar. With multi-touch, DIVs are the new fold. Being able to tap on a section to zoom in will allow users to focus only on the content they want to see. This quadrant based page browsing will make skipping over uninteresting content & advertisements much easier.

Multi-touch VS Mobile VS Standard

These are two very different areas of interface design that have a lot in common. Many of my iPhone apps already cater to finger tips with their big buttons & super simple navigation. So this begs the question, do we need to design a mobile and a multi-touch version of a website? I don’t think so. I think the core structure of what the regular version of a website will need to adapt to fit fingertips, which means everything will have to be redone, re-imagined... re-figured out.

A Change in Posture

During the Apple Keynote, Steve Jobs wasn’t hunched over a desk pecking characters into a keyboard. He was sitting on a couch, casually flipping through content on his iPad. To an extent, web design has been all about what we want users to see and when. We’ve been orchestrating the user-experience from click in to click out. With multi-touch the tables have turned. With a brand new set of gestures, users will be calling the shots as they tap, swipe, pinch and zoom. It will now be up to the web design community to study up & do their best to follow along.