Responsive web design and its use by an e-commerce website

Abstract

Responsible architecture design is believed to be the most effective answer to the incompatibility problem of webpages across devices with varying sizes and resolutions. Online shopping behavior is cross-device and continuous; therefore, we believe that it is also important to explore and discuss how to provide a fluent and consistent user experience for the same webpage across various devices (other than simply using the fluid grid technique to maintain cross device compatibility). Inspired by the fluency theory, we assume that the fluency of processing webpages on different devices affects a user's responsive web experience. In this paper, a case study of etao.com was performed to explore how to improve user experience fluency with responsive web design on mobile phones. The study consisted of two experiments: a PC test and a mobile phone test. The PC test was designed to understand the interactions between the users and the information content on etao.com (desktop version), which could facilitate the identification of user preferences and expectations and guide the design layout of the responsive webpage on mobile phones. During the mobile phone test, we examined the responsive webpage, which was designed according to users' preferences and expectations, to determine whether this type of layout could be approved by users. The results showed that users rated the new version of the responsive webpage higher than the traditional responsive page, which was designed by using proportion-based fluid grid technology alone. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.