I’ve been doing a lot of reading on responsive design lately (because my library is headed towards that), and that made me think. When designing websites, we tend to design for devices. That’s what responsive design is all about – it’s coding in such a way that your website “responds” appropriately to different screen sizes (i.e., desktops, tablets, smartphones). We design for things: for a desktop; for a screen; for a browser; for a tablet or smartphone.

Nothing wrong with that – a modern website has to work on all those devices, right?

But I also think we need to shift our focus a bit, to where it really counts. And that focus is not on the screen.

We need to design for people.

What’s that change?

We still need to do all the usual stuff – i.e., use great css, work on making our websites responsive, think about screensizes, readability, contrasting colors, etc.

But let’s also focus on people:

• Put content first.
• Ask customers what content they want … and then create that content!
• Answer the why, what, and who questions.
• Provide next steps and calls to action on ALL content.
• Make asking questions and getting responses easy and seamless.
• This works for our physical and our digital branches.
• What else? Add to my list in the comments…

Simply put – put people first.

pic by Nicola Albertini