On the design of a responsive user interface for a multi-device web service

The introduction of numerous new, web-enabled devices is leading to a change in the mindset in the design of web systems. Increasingly often, they are designed to take into account the special characteristics of different devices. In terms of implementation, designing these responsive web services requires frameworks and guidelines for user interface design for both desktop and mobile devices. In this paper we present a case study which was done during the implementation of opendata.fi service. During the project responsive mobile user interfaces were implemented to existing open source software with preserving as much of the original layouts as possible. We provide some insights to tools and libraries used in building the responsive user interfaces and share some of the findings that work well in customizing existing software. We also provide examples of solutions that wont work so well and look how to solve them properly.