The term "Responsive Design" comes up more than often for web designers today. Responsive web design is one of the most effective ways to approach visitors not limited by the platform they are using.
Every design and development decision made during the process of designing a user experience for a website ultimately ties back to the main goal: creating a relevant, intuitive, and impacts to experience for the audience. And with the latest projection having mobile audiences, whether on smartphone or tablet, not having a plan to meet mobile audiences on their terms is a way to deliver a bad user experience that can frustrates visitors to a website
Before, designing for mobile audiences was viewed as a luxury, and meant for just a few types of devices. With today's innovations, website design is becoming a mean of delivering user experience to a seemingly infinite variety of screen sizes and resolutions.
This is where the role of responsive design comes into play.
Responsive design is a very efficient, cost-effective way to make a website's layout adjust on the fly for hundreds of different screen sizes where its information can be displayed on. With a little bit of smart front-end coding, and thoughtful user experience design planning, a responsive website will customize how it presents content and delivers the user experience for an almost infinite user base.
As with any designed solution, there's a difference between good and great. What exactly goes into executing a successful responsive design plan for mobile websites? To answer the question, below is a non-technical primer to provide some insights to address key issues in a responsive design websites.
Delivering Content
More than often, contents is added to a website far after web design have been approved and site development completes its cycle. Content is invaluable in helping designers and developers plan and create a user experience, especially for mobile, that effectively helps reaching your goals.
Unless a design firm is creating the content, it's probably going to be difficult to get contents ready early on in a website redesign. But having the content early in the initial design phase pays big dividends and makes it far more likely that the design solution will translate properly when real content is added.
Limiting Functionality
Mobile phones have limited capabilities compared to desktop computers. Mobile friendly design should comply in its early process to tell what the website's contents will look like on mobile devices. Users must understand how the website's key features will work on both desktop and mobile.
Design processes like mobile-first attempt to address this by limiting initial planning only to what's possible on mobile, and then adding from there.
Some web designers prefer to not design for mobile-first, but rather be mindful of decisions they're making during initial design, and simply have a plan for dealing with the troubles as they translate desktop appearance to mobile devices. This often means turning off certain features that won't show well on mobile. Whatever process preferred, as long as the plan to deliver a great experience across all platforms is a priority.
Image Sizes
With the range of screen sizes and resolutions, websites need a way to deliver images effectively to everything from a large screen desktop computers to small screens in the smallest smartphones.
CSS Media Queries are little pieces of code that analyze the size of the user's browser window, then instantly deliver the proper code for that specific browser.
Responsive Frameworks
As interactive design for mobile has increased over the years, responsive "frameworks" and custom libraries of code, have been introduced to speed up the process. What they do is instantly provide a grid or general foundation for rapid prototyping of different mobile layouts and functionality, letting web designers spend their time on the details of an effective brand experience.
Retrofitting Responsive
It is absolutely doable for a website owner that has a website that he/she is happy with and want it to be mobile friendly. But ones should be prepared to engage in a meaningful discovery process and make some compromises. Depending on the current design and structure of the website, this could be straightforward, or could require some intensive design alteration.
It all depends on how a site's HTML and CSS are written, and how well your site's design lends itself to mobile layouts. The only way to find out is to audit the site's existing code and discuss priorities and potential complications.
A word of caution with retrofitting is to expect the unexpected. When retrofitting a website's code, there are usually unexpected surprises, and things may take longer than estimated to solve. Choices about functionality that may have worked perfectly on a desktop also may turn out to be unfavorable to mobile environment.
While retrofitting is not an ideal approach, it's likely to be more cost-effective than remaking your entire site. So if someone is happy with a site's design and have no user experience or CMS issues to address, retrofitting may be a good approach.
Planning thoroughly and thoughtfully for responsive design process as early as possible is the best way to ensure fewer problems encountered at the end of the project.