In today’s digital landscape, designing a mobile-friendly website is not just a good practice, it’s a critical factor for modern website design. As web designers at Relevant Audience, our highest priority is to maintain consistency across multiple viewports. To achieve this, we have learned to speed up responsive web design with a code-to-design approach, bringing UI coded components to platforms like UXPin to enjoy full interactivity in prototyping. One of the best ways to stay on top of the latest responsive web design trends is by researching competitors and industry leaders. For example, when designing an eCommerce website, it’s beneficial to look at how major global brands like Nike, ASOS, and H&M design their stores. These brands invest heavily in researching and testing best practices, making it advantageous to leverage that research and development to my advantage.
What is Responsive Web Design?
Responsive web design is the process of designing a mobile-friendly website that adapts depending on the visitor’s device—be it a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Developers use CSS media queries to set breakpoints for each screen size so that users can browse a website within the constraints of their device. These media queries change column layout, typography sizes, image sizes, or hiding and revealing content. The website’s functionality remains the same, but the content and structures adjust to different screen sizes.
Responsive web design is not just about adjustable screen resolutions and automatically resizable images, but rather about a whole new way of thinking about design. It’s about creating a website that automatically responds to the user’s preferences, eliminating the need for a different design and development phase for each new gadget on the market. This approach ensures that the website looks, works, and feels perfectly on any device, providing an excellent user experience.
To truly assess the user experience of a responsive design, it’s essential to test the designs in real-world conditions. Venturing out into various environments with a smartphone, such as between tall buildings in a city, in remote areas with spotty connectivity, or in known trouble spots for network connections, can provide valuable insights into how the site performs in varied conditions. Responsive design is a tool, not a cure-all. While it has many perks, it does not ensure a usable experience. Teams must focus on the details of content, design, and performance to support users across all devices.
Examples of Responsive Web Design
There are numerous examples of responsive web design in practice today. For instance, Dropbox has done a great job of using a fluid grid and flexible visuals to design a standout responsive website. The font color changes to accommodate the background color when shifting from desktop to handheld devices, and the image changes orientation as well. This tailored experience across each device prevents users from bouncing and offers a seamless experience. WIRED is another example that uses flexible images, with the crop on their feature images changing across platforms. On desktop and laptop computers, images vary between squares and rectangles, while on handheld devices, all feature images are cropped using a 16:9 ratio. These examples demonstrate the effectiveness of responsive web design in providing a consistent yet tailored experience across different devices.
In short, responsive design is not just a trend – it’s the future. When it’s done right, it offers users a streamlined, universally optimal experience. This eliminates the need for multiple development and maintenance strategies, and allows you to delight users on a growing number of platforms. Working with a professional website company is highly recommended in order to get the best results and not to throw good money after bad money. In order to get the most reliable, best website for your business, you will benefit from working web developers, like our team at Relevant Audience, who understand responsive design inside-and-out, and (most importantly) understand the goals of your organization. So keep the principles and best practices covered in this article in mind, and your site will be smooth no matter how your users choose to view it.
