Responsive Responsibility

According to Liferay:

Digital Experience Platform (DXP) is an emerging category of enterprise software seeking to meet the needs of companies undergoing digital transformation, with the ultimate goal of providing better customer experiences.

The focus here is the customer experience.  Better experiences, regardless of whether they come to you from a desktop computer or a mobile device, lead to better outcomes (happier customers, returning viewers, more sales, etc.). That is why the DXP is garnering more focus from the enterprise than ever before.

So part of the better customer experience is the recognition that your site, whether as an intranet, extranet, corporate internet site or even a B2B bridge, must acknowledge the strength and reach of mobile as a platform, and mobile support must be considered as an unwritten requirement for our projects.

For most developers, this often gets reduced down to needing to support responsive in the website.  If the website supports responsive design, as the screen size is reduced the view changes to better serve the device.

It is easy to assume that the theme and layout developer(s) are the only ones responsible for managing the responsive aspects of your website. After all, that is the primary place where your responsive design is implemented to manage how your navigation is presented, how the multi-column layout adjusts to the shrinking size, etc. That is handled by the theme and layout developers, so they are the only ones that have to worry about responsive design.

But that really isn't true. Responsive is a responsibility of content creators and portlet developers too.

As a content creator, you may have some fancy ADTs or web content templates that look great under the desktop view. You have your content, you have a side bar with some details, ... But here's a question - have you tried looking at your page on a mobile device? Does your side bar or localized grid look as good in the mobile view as it does on the desktop view?

As a content creator, it is your responsibility to incorporate responsive and mobile-first design rules into your ADTs and templates. After all, the theme/layout developer is only going to manage the outer column that your content is in, they will not have any responsibility for restructuring content within the column, that is your job.

And portlet authors are not off the hook here either. As a portlet developer it is easy to fall into a pattern of testing your portlet on the desktop and verifying it works there. Even the testing team, unless they have a mandate to test for mobile, can miss this kind of verification. But if you currently have mobile support requirements or you believe that will have mobile in your future, developing with responsive in mind and testing for responsive and a good mobile-friendly experience is important.

If you use the Liferay AUI tag framework appropriately, you're likely a good way towards being mobile friendly. If you're using another framework, well then responsive is totally up to you and your framework.

In either case, you should take some time to test your app, including your tables and forms, in a mobile view and verify that it is still usable. After all, a form that looks great and works great in a desktop orientation can easily become unusable in a mobile presentation. Take Liferay's OOTB login portlet - that portlet works whether shown in a full page view or if it is dropped in the small column of the 30/70 layout - it is fully responsive and adjusts to the space it has available. Are your portlets equally as responsive?

How do you know when responsive is your responsibility? There are some key indicators that you can look for. Are you using a one column layout? That is the clearest indication that you are taking over responsive since you are trying to take advantage of the full page width. Even if you are only targeting the large column (the 70 in the 70/30 or 30/70 layouts for example), you also have responsive aspects that you should consider.

So responsive is everyone's responsibility. It's also one that many of us forget to consider unless it is a requirement of the project that we're currently on.

Incorporating responsive tests and creating sites that are mobile-first/mobile-friendly in every phase of development or content creation is a key aspect of implementing your own digital experience platform.

Remember, this is all about the user's digital experience, not your development project convenience.