SAP HANA Cloud Portal Movie Critic: What is Responsive Design?

Just in time for the end of the year, here is my own blog post to participate in the Movie Challenge Announcement Blog.

“Responsive Design” is a concept we heard about from SAP in the last year, usually in the same sentence as “Cloud” and “Fiori”. This video sums it up very well :

It is about designing applications that adapts to the many digital devices that surrounds us now that were not really there just 3 years ago.

Smartphones and tablets are everywhere and I know many users just like the video’s Sara who expects to be able to use any of those devices to perform daily tasks. Instead, they find themselves overwhelmed with tons of different applications in different systems, all working in their own specific way, all needing specific training just to be able to use them.

I decided to write about this video because it is more than a sales pitch or a concept primer. It is about the user’s expectations in a digital world were applications are available from a single point, with similar user interfaces and self-explanatory functionality.

Soon, the time when we had dozens of different logins, for as many different systems with as many different user interfaces will be gone. As software developers, this is were we should be headed and what we aspire to build.

(This blog post was written following the Movie Challenge Announcement Blog.)