Most people visiting our homepage are small business owners looking for a new payments solution - this is typically done from the office, behind a desk.
By way of comparison, we also host payment "checkout pages" which allow these merchants to accept payment from their customers. These customers are much more likely to be using mobile devices, so we spent a lot of time making these checkout pages responsive & fast-loading by stripping out unnecessary javascript & other assets etc.
I'm a decision maker on products like this and in my case much of my new product research is done initially from bookmarks I check out from my Galaxy Note II while horizontal on my couch at home.
A site that adapts to whatever form factor I'm on screams "current technology" to me and delivers the expectation that the product its selling probably has equal attention.
In a similar vein, how likely would you be to rely on shopping cart technology if the company's website had the old "Built for Internet Explorer" animated gif from the Geocities days displayed prominently on its front page?
On the other hand, as someone who is also a decision-maker and currently integrating with GoCardless, we have been far more interested in what our customers are going to experience than in what we see ourselves.
I’m going to give GC a free plug and say that so far what we’ve seen on the information and back-end pages has also been nicely done, and as the guy using it and juggling many other things as well I do appreciate that. But they’re also a relatively young business, and if they have limited resources and need to prioritise, I’d definitely prefer they prioritise improving the experience for my own paying customers than for me as the admin guy.
I couldn't agree more. But what I gather from the article is that they actually went back and started over and eschewed the design they already had...
As a non-customer of theirs, I'm speaking from an impressions point of view. Any new service I look at I am weighing my decision to dig further based on the presentation of their product. Having it be too "markety" is just as bad as having an e-brochure that looks 10 years old.
Do you think a higher % of first time visitors come in on mobile? I'd worry that you are losing an opportunity to make a great first impression. Some people see a great responsive site on mobile and think "yes, I love when sites work like this."
For most sites using tools like Bootstrap, etc. to make responsive sites using media queries should in my opinion be the default strategy.