Great post and great reality check. If the data really showed that people shopping for Direct Debit do so from the desktop then this makes a tonne of sense.
There is a certain mob dogma that occasionally overwhelms the design community. The passion around responsive design today reminded me of the heated advocacy of accessible design back in 2004. It was a good thing and opening up the web to more people and especially people who are isolated in the outside world is a wonderful thing.
When a site or a service isn't yet fully formed and doesn't know what it is or who exactly wants it, "enabling it for everyone" can accidentally be paid for by "making it appealing to no-one". You need to start by figuring out why people want to go into your site and once you know that, let more of them in.
Some sites which are already useful can best improve themselves by making themselves available to more people on more devices. During the teenage self-discovery phase though, when a service is still learning who its customers are and what it itself is, there's no point optimising that for everyone because it could be different tomorrow. The important thing is to first of all find out what is right.
There is a certain mob dogma that occasionally overwhelms the design community. The passion around responsive design today reminded me of the heated advocacy of accessible design back in 2004. It was a good thing and opening up the web to more people and especially people who are isolated in the outside world is a wonderful thing.
When a site or a service isn't yet fully formed and doesn't know what it is or who exactly wants it, "enabling it for everyone" can accidentally be paid for by "making it appealing to no-one". You need to start by figuring out why people want to go into your site and once you know that, let more of them in.
Some sites which are already useful can best improve themselves by making themselves available to more people on more devices. During the teenage self-discovery phase though, when a service is still learning who its customers are and what it itself is, there's no point optimising that for everyone because it could be different tomorrow. The important thing is to first of all find out what is right.