Grasping the mobile visitor: combining adaptive design with performance optimization to provide an exceptional user experience

In today’s hyper-connected world, the performance of mobile applications based on the web is playing an increasingly important role in driving customer adoption and loyalty of this. End users have high expectations: expect pages to load faster than ever and find some experiences and rich and engaging Web applications.

At the same time, the mobile is a global phenomenon that is growing rapidly and is changing the way we interact with the content, either for business purposes, informative or entertaining. Therefore, the ability to capture mobile users with fast, quality web experience has become a business requirement and a prerequisite for success. Ignore the needs of mobile users is to risk losing an important and growing business segment.

The adoption of adaptive web design is growing rapidly

However, providing a quick and quality experience in this new world full of challenges is not exactly easy, given the challenges of optimizing performance with different browsers, devices and screens of different sizes. Therefore, companies are looking for techniques that work equally well on all devices. This process is known as adaptive web design (Responsive Web Design, RWD).

The adaptive web design is web development approaches that considers web pages should react to the context in which they are being charged (mainly the size of the screen) and modify its user interface accordingly. The RWD pages contain the necessary to display all versions of a website HTML code, including both versions for mobile and desktop computer.

The tendency to use RWD is growing rapidly. One reason is that the RWD effectively eliminates the need to return to the design and development phase each time a new category of mobile device enters the market.

RWD adopt a strategy it seems the ideal solution. However, it should not be seen as a “magic wand” that will improve the mobile user experience.

The reality of successfully capture mobile users with websites RWD is not always an easy task. As mobile devices have been growing stronger and networks have become faster and more consistent, expectations of mobile end users have also grown.

Offer a fast, quality web experience is not easy

If the RWD is not a panacea, what are some of the challenges associated with providing this type of websites? According to a recent study on the composition of the RWD sites and their impact on Internet performance, RWD 347 sites were tested in different screen resolutions and the number of bytes required compared to download each page on each resolution. The result revealed that 70% of RWD sites examined were approximately the same size in different screen resolutions and that 22% of them were only slightly smaller.

The most important thing is that most pages not only transmit the same payload on different devices, but the same payload is consistent with the general trend that pages are increasingly heavy time, with an average size of page about 1.2 MB.

A problem associated with larger and more complex pages developed by RWD is that needs to be transmitted to end-user browsers, which then must process them and display them. For low-power mobile devices that have limited processing power and limited wireless and mobile networks, this can negatively affect the user experience.

So, what implications do transmit large, complex pages to mobile devices from the end user perspective? A study to evaluate the experience of an end user visiting the web RWD page of a retailer from different and better networks and devices industry revealed that the transmission of a relatively small site (700 KB) to a mobile device through wireless networks seriously deficient performance.

Basically, end users do not care about the underlying technology challenges and necessary for fast and limited quality over wireless networks or mobile devices experience. Interested only that pages load quickly and work according to their expectations. But these end-user expectations are increasingly high, and correspond to the wish that web applications are becoming faster, richer and more attractive.

Steps needed to offer adaptive web pages fast and quality design

The first step is to focus on the actual page and associated objects that are transmitted to the end user. There is also a variety of options available to designers seeking to overcome the challenges related to transmit RWD heavy sites. First, it is necessary to move the content as close as possible to the end user (using, eg., A network content delivery Content Delivery Network (CDN) and avail the best transmission mechanisms, such as SPDY, a protocol open network for the transmission of web content, which are particularly important in the case of wireless networks.

Then, focus on the components of the RWD application, HTML code, images and JavaScript and CSS objects. To provide faster pages, focus on:

• Reduce the number of applications: The fastest application is not done. Each combination of HTTP client request and server response represents at least one complete route network. Depending on the location of the end user and its proximity to the source server, the path of a single application may take several seconds to complete. A single web page may require dozens of HTTP requests before they can display the content, which often means that these requests are delayed each other due to the number of connections limited by the specific browser. To reduce these tours you can use several techniques to eliminate unnecessary requests, such as consolidating multiple CSS and JavaScript files, embedding small images and take advantage of new features HTML5 cache.
• Reduce the number of bytes: The calculation is simple: the bigger is a page (in bytes), the longer it will take to pass it through a limited network and the longer it takes a browser to process and display the content. The images are a special problem for RWD sites. It is important to keep the file size under control by adjusting the image formats, improving the management of the cache, and deleting data by compressing files as comments, blanks or image metadata. There automated solutions that help convey the appropriate image resolution for the corresponding device and avoid too large images while maintaining image quality within the limits of what the user can see, both large and small screens. For example, you can optimize a page to load only the images that are visible within the current window. As the user scrolls down, new images will be loaded on request. Loading pictures on request helps improve the loading time of the page and reduces the bandwidth in cases where a user is not actually move down the page. In the case of websites RWD, this measure prevents the download pages hidden images, designed for other conditions or display sizes.
• Speed Up: Process a web page is a complicated process. Unfortunately, the browser does not know beforehand sites and is forced to apply a general logic when processing a page. This logic changes from older browsers to new, is limited to backward compatibility and does not adapt to a specific site. Techniques such as delaying style sheets for printing, block the display of social networking buttons and retrieve the next page are ways to guide the browser to do the right thing. As a result, users get a truly rapid experience, tailored to your needs.

RWD websites offer fast is not necessarily an easy task and requires considerable expertise and resources. Few organizations have designers or internal experts who can carry this out. As the RWD evolves, new models that will provide a fast, quality web experience to all users arise.

There is an approach called RESS (Responsive Web Design + Server Side Components) that seems to combine the best of current mobile transmission techniques particularly well, while maintaining performance in the foreground. In addition, there are a variety of options available to help designers who try to overcome the challenges associated with the transmission of heavy RWD sites such as move content to a Content Delivery Network (CDN), which has the technology to accelerate performance web or avail the best transmission mechanisms such as SPDY. The adoption of the techniques highlighted here also useful and, if followed, can radically improve their ability to provide fast and quality web experience, while attract mobile users.