The Case For Responsive Design

By Susan Wall, Vice President of Marketing, Bronto Software

You’ve got an email from your favorite brand announcing a promotion too good to pass up. You’re on your lunch break, or on the train home, or just chilling on the couch with your smartphone and you click on the link. But you can’t shop. A pop-up obscures the text, the photos are rendered awkwardly, there are too many steps to purchase that are hard to navigate on a small screen. You give up.

But personal experience isn’t enough to persuade your company to invest resources in mobile design, so let’s look at some numbers. We recently commissioned a survey of 1,000 US adults to explore how people browse and buy online.

Here are a couple of numbers to think about:

• Smartphone ownership among U.S. adults has increased from 51% to 75% in the three years we have studied this phenomenon.
• Nearly two-thirds of smartphone-owning shoppers are using their device more frequently to buy items than they did 12 months ago.
• More than half of shoppers ages 18-24 use their smartphones to buy products.