A Responsive Web Design Podcast

What if site speed were actually a life-or-death matter? Kim Conger from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty worked with Dan Mall and Tim Kadlec to make performance the top priority. Read more »

Think no one wants to read long articles on their phone? Ryan Essmaker and Brad Smith tell us The Great Discontent readers spend more time on their phones, so responsive design makes sense. Read more »

Who visits the Royal Albert Hall on their phone? Louise Halliday and Jake Grimley report that designing mobile-first means a website that works better for everyone. Read more »

Should retailers just accept low conversion rates on mobile? Eoin Comerford and Steve Anders from Moosejaw say it delivers business value to design—and redesign—responsively. Read more »

Do you need to make your entire site responsive from the start? David Sleight from ProPublica explains that starting with individual feature stories is a safe way to experiment. Read more »

We’ve recorded an entire year of podcast episodes. In this year-end retrospective, we talk about our forthcoming books and discuss the whole adaptive versus responsive debate. Read more »

Responsive design is about more than fluid grids and media queries. Dave Olsen from West Virginia University explains how he advocates for content audits, pattern libraries, and in-browser prototyping. Read more »

How do you support mobile users across more than 460 university websites? Turns out responsive design is the best answer, according to Erik Runyon from Notre Dame. Read more »

How does a responsive design support storytelling? Sarah Thompson and Ethan Winn show how a collaborative process and a modular architecture helped Seventh Generation support their content strategy. Read more »

Most companies have an existing website they want to make responsive. Ryan Mannion from OZY tells us about building and maintaining a site that’s been responsive from the start. Read more »

Why would people browse fonts on their phone when they’re buying fonts for desktop computers? Jason Smith and Marcus Taylor explain why Fontsmith needs to work on every device. Read more »

Can a responsive redesign change the way city government works? Geoffrey Daniel and Steve Fisher explain how this website project changed the way the City of Surrey interacts with citizens. Read more »

How does Google make a responsive site that performs as fast as possible across a variety of different browsers? Malte Ubl and Wahbeh Qardaji explain their responsive design process for Google+. Read more »

One of the most innovative digital publishers is 150-year-old The Atlantic. Libby Bawcombe and Betsy Ebersole explain how responsive design serves their customers who visit on both mobile and desktop. Read more »

The BBC has spent the past four years developing their Responsive News site. Niko Vijayaratnam and John Cleveley provide an in-depth look at the process required to deliver this massive project. Read more »

Game of Thrones’ rabid fan base means lots of social sharing on mobile. Joey Marburger and Shelly Tan describe their process for creating a responsive interactive feature for The Washington Post. Read more »

Responsive and adaptive solutions can work together. Tom Stovicek from OpenTable explains why they went responsive but also maintain an m-dot site for some device-specific scenarios. Read more »

A redesign of the Audubon website performed better than their wildest expectations. Mark Jannot and Mike Monteiro explain there wasn’t even a question about going responsive. Read more »

“Responsive design is great if you have a blog, but it will never work for a complex financial application.” Einar Thor Gustafsson and Tinna Karen Gunnarsdottir from Meniga prove that myth false. Read more »

The Wired redesign has it all: a new process based on prototyping, fresh design, structure, and publishing tools, increased ad inventory and viewability, and team-wide focus on speed. Read more »

Brandon Rosage and Sophie Shepherd from Ushahidi tell us that focusing on performance and designing with a pattern library make a focused, usable product—in the developing world, and everywhere. Read more »

Why build a responsive intranet? Mike Donahue from Citrix explains that thinking mobile first and focusing on content and accessibility means an intranet that works better for everyone, everywhere. Read more »

Responsive web design is just web design. Justin McDowell and Elaine Nelson tell us how responsive fits in to their overall web strategy and management at Evergreen. Read more »

If customers are mobile, retailers also need the ability to manage their stores on mobile. In the second of a two-parter, Jonathan Snook from Shopify talks about making the admin experience responsive. Read more »

Customers use their phones to shop—but merchants are also mobile. Monika Piotrowicz from Shopify tells us the responsive redesign of their marketing website helps them reach retailers. Read more »

A responsive redesign of MTV News resulted in a 570 percent increase in referrals from social, nearly tripling their traffic. Ryan Shafer tells us how it changed their process at MTV.com. Read more »

Suzanne Connaughton and Frank Punzo from CHOP tell us that a responsive redesign and CMS replatforming helped make their team more collaborative. Read more »

The A.V. Club, The Onion, and ClickHole are truly digital publishing brands. Kelly Pratt and Kristi-Lynn Jacovino explain how they made them responsive, running off a single codebase. Read more »

Airbnb has robust native apps and a majority of web traffic from desktop—and they still went responsive. Dave Augustine tells us a front end framework made it easy for them. Read more »

Sixty-five percent of Outside Online readers are, well, mobile. Todd Hodgson and TJ Pitre show how a responsive redesign can deliver improved performance on a tight budget. Read more »

In part two of our conversation with Expedia, Travis Fleck and Tyler Fleck go into the details of what they learned rolling out and testing a responsive framework across the enterprise. Read more »

Travel users are mobile, right? Expedia has experimented with native apps and separate mobile websites. Scott Kelton Jones and Jason Chandler explain why responsive design performs better. Read more »

NPR famously publishes to many different platforms. Patrick Cooper and Scott Stroud explain why they went responsive: to get more value from their limited resources. Read more »

Chris Balt and Trent Walton explain how the high-profile initiative to redesign the Microsoft.com homepage demonstrated the benefits of going responsive to a large organization. Read more »

Bill Scott and Mausami Dave-Shah from PayPal implemented a lean development methodology, which treats responsive web design as the foundation for their products in 203 countries. Read more »

The interwoven historical perspectives shown in Lapham’s Quarterly are perfect for the web. Michelle Legro and Rebecca Smith explain how a new CMS and editorial workflow support a responsive design. Read more »

Sixty percent of traffic to AIDS.gov comes from mobile devices. Users need critical and intimate information—quickly. Miguel Gomez and Jeremy Vanderlan explain why responsive was the right solution. Read more »

Some large companies go responsive at scale—what about sites built by one person? At the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, Josh Benton wears many hats: editor, writer, designer, developer, even QA. Read more »

After some awkward finger-pointing over who forgot to book this week’s guest, we discuss what we learned this year, hosting corporate workshops and running this podcast on responsive web design. Read more »

More than five million DJs discover new music using Beatport Pro. Robert Petro and Nikki Lee explain why a responsive solution that works across platforms was a no-brainer for their relaunch. Read more »

How do you improve on a news site that’s already successful and already minimalist? Zach Seward and Daniel Lee explain that a mobile first mindset helped refine and enhance the redesign of qz.com—for both users and advertisers. Read more »

Do people really look at their retirement plan website on their phone? Kevin Ackley and Brian Greene from Nationwide explain that responsive design provided support for the significant population of customers coming from mobile devices, improved collaboration between UX, IT, & business stakeholders, and led a major industry research group to give them top rankings. Read more »

For some organizations, “mobile” means a website that works on tablets and smartphones. For Alex Breuer of The Guardian, mobile means challenging editorial conventions and rethinking the fundamental form of a 200-year-old publication. Read more »

To reduce management costs and maintain a more consistent presence across platforms, Tina Alexander rolled out a responsive web redesign for Celebrity Cruises that works together with their app strategy to take advantage of a 3× increase in traffic from mobile devices. Read more »

You’d learn a lot if your first responsive project was for SB Nation, one of the most popular sports sites on the web with more than 70 million unique users. For Trei Brundrett, Chief Product Officer for Vox Media, going responsive means iteratively improving an entire network of media brands. Read more »

Starbucks considers mobile to be the first customer touchpoint. Lincoln Mongillo tells us why managing for “one web” forces them to focus on what’s important, and puts performance, accessibility, and security at the center of their design process. Read more »

Sure, the page is dead, but now what? If you’re Code for America, you work with Clearleft to develop a pattern library and a component-based CMS built in Jekyll to deliver a new responsive website. Cyd Harrell and Jeremy Keith tell us about their fast-paced, iterative process. Read more »

One of the questions we’re often asked is “Responsive is great for consumer sites, but is it really necessary for B2B brands?” Chris Collette explains that “lawyers are people too” when he talks about implementing a mobile first, responsive redesign for one of New York’s largest law firms. Read more »

Publishers must take advantage of increased traffic on mobile. But how? Scher Foord of Condé Nast explains how rolling out responsive redesigns across all their magazine brands helps them adapt to changing consumer behavior and meet advertiser demand. Read more »

When you step onto the grounds of Harvard University, you expect well-kept lawns and good signage. The same is true when you visit any of Harvard’s digital properties. Chief Digital Officer Perry Hewitt tells us how they focus on strategy and a collaborative process. Read more »