We use network (CDN) level wurfl and customer UA patterns to redirect devices to the maximum experience we can offer. It doesn’t use media queries but it is completely responsive.

As you’ve mentioned elsewhere, this lead us both to offer support for Blackberries (hard to do but worthwhile) and also feature phones. I have a 10 year old grey plastic fliphone that uses WAP – which will quite happily book on our mobile website.

That’s what responsive is about – the audience, their devices, their data rate, their context, their location and what *they* think of as being ‘responsive’ – not the precise definition of the term by UX practitioners and designers.

Side Example: When my HTC Evo came out, the company was boasting that the phone now had seven panels instead of three. You could fill seven whole screens with shortcuts and widgets. I thought at the time what a great idea this was. After using the phone for a month, I ended up leaving 4/7 of them blank. They just ate up battery life and taxed my mind. More isn’t always better.

I just wrote an article about that we shouldn’t worry that much and I am interested about your opinion if Apple could have done it better like explained there.

Greets,
Michael

Seeing stuff like this really puts into focus what we are comfortable with as humans. I’m reminded of when Facebook first introduced News Feed, and everyone cried foul over privacy intrusion, but now it’s absolutely the centerpiece of the product. If the same thing happens in physical spaces (we already have self-checkout lanes at the store), we’ll see this level of automation and faceless interaction as the norm. I’m curious to see how it will affect our ability to interact with each other (i.e. will the art of small talk be lost?).

Things are going to get really interesting as the digital world continues bleeding over into the real world.

You can see some of it here on these pics.

Growth to Nov 2011 (It has now gone over 20% worldwide so this graph is out of date):

http://twitpic.com/8xcgkr

This shows how our growth reaches over 25-30% of all unique visitors:

http://twitpic.com/8y309z

And this shows World OS share, showing inroads of Android:

http://twitpic.com/7qgfep

Feel free to ask me to mine for anything interesting you fancy Stephanie.

The one thing I forgot to mention is that the Blackberries get much higher conversion mainly due to the dropout rate for onscreen keyboards.

I looked closely, for example, at the conversion rate of Android devices. One thing I noticed was that the OS version was driving some diffierences between 1..5-> and up. What we saw was that this was driven by the different implementations of the Onscreen Keyboard. We checked into this and clearly for forms, there is a correlation between drop rate and the presence of a keyboard (or good onscreen version).

The older androids (and fragmentation remains a problem in some markets due to over the air upgrade problems) simply have a nastier keyboard so people struggle more. Conversely, with blackberries, data entry (especially for non lookahead or complex data) has much less friction.

Screen sizes also make differences to our conversion rates, as well as even simple things like the text layout, decoration, simplicity and clarity. We must have gone through 40 iterations of crushing the copy down again and again to the raw minimum to support the customer. There was no BS or corporate guff left – just the raw utility and emotion. Copy makes a huge difference on small viewports.

Hope that adds another bit of info – I love reaching maximum device audiences because its good for business but ends something I think of as basic discrimination. I speak about our mobile work a bit and always say – Would a retail store put a bouncer on the front door and randomly punch you, just because you had a Samsung in your hand? No. Start testing what thy user holds.

An area of mobile web design that is woefully underrepresented both in terms of real world examples and information is accessibility – making sites usable for people with disabilities. Added to your list I’d love to see:

- Case studies on accessible mobile web design and how it improves overall usability without negatively impacting or altering the intended design
- Case studies on ROI on supporting disabled users on mobile
- Case studies around responsive design and accessibility (I’m hoping I will be able to share something in the future)
- What devices to test accessible mobile sites on (I have some information on my blog http://bit.ly/GVet4t but this could be improved)
- Disabled user testing findings

There is a degree of information out there on how to make mobile websites technically accessible (i.e. readable by voice output such as Voiceover on iOS, Talkback on Android, Talks on Nokia etc) but not enough about the process, benefits and how disabled users browse the mobile web.

It would be great if we could make accessibility part of ‘definition of done’ when building sites rather than an occasional add on.

We do a heap of device analysis to see exactly who’s attempting to use our sites (continually) and then focus test plans on them. We do device sniffing at network level for redirection first of all and then on the mobile site (m.safelite.com, m.autoglass.co.uk) we use 2 x CSS stylesheets to handle 97% of the devices.

Yes, boringly enough, we sat down with a list and debugged using deviceanywhere (rent devices remotely – install apps, visit urls, use GPS, throttle speed) and crossbrowsertesting.com – this enabled us to crunch through about 120 devices, and it all works rather well. Page transitions are about 7-10Kb load and our google speed stats show the vast majority of people get <2 seconds for each load.

It's not a classic responsive design but it is brutally focused on maximum audience reach. In the UK, US, Canada, for example, Blackberry devices convert higher than iPhones – for two reasons – many sites provide a lousy experience for blackberries and secondly, because it's hard to get right sometimes. The payback is that these visitors convert at a higher rate than iPhone or Android handsets, so it was worth our time being inclusive.

I put all of our story of the UCD build, lab work, testing and outcomes into a slide deck here – hope you see why your writing resonates so much with my experience:

http://www.slideshare.net/sullivac/mobile-presentation-sydney-online-retailer-26-sep-2011

The sites may be small, fast and seemingly quite limited and simple – that's precisely what people wanted, and it works. That device focus enables the mobile website to take 5M a month – about 100x more than the app generates.