What is Responsive Design?
People nowadays tend to access the internet more from mobile devices. So, it’s no longer enough to maintain a perfect website design that only looks good on a computer screen. When designing a website, we need to consider mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. Other than that, it is essential to focus on the model of these devices and the technologies used. Responsive design helps you to build a website that looks best on every device. So basically, Responsive design is an approach to web design that makes your web content adapt to the different screen and window sizes of a variety of devices. Responsive Design makes it possible to deliver various layouts of our content depending on different devices and screen sizes.
Evolution of Responsive Design
Ethan Marcotte was the first person who mentioned Responsive Web Design, in his paper, ‘A Book Apart’. There, He described the way of design landscapes changing with the increase in mobile use. He mentioned that the only way to go forward with this was to respond to these changes using a flexible and fluid web design method.
When it comes to Responsive Web Design, it mainly combines media queries, flexible images, and flexible widths. All these concepts were neither new nor revolutionary, but according to Marcotte, the combination of these three concepts forms the idea of Responsive Design.
Before Responsive Design was implemented, many approaches were developed to solve most of the screen compatibility issues. Cameron Adams wrote an article on resolution-dependent layout, in 2004, which described a method of creating a design that enables different screen resolutions. That approach used JavaScript to detect the screen size and load the required styling. Zoe Mickley Gillenwater also described a few ways of creating sites that have flexible screen resolutions by either filling the screen or by completely fixing the size.
Importance of Responsive Design
Responsive design helps us to make a website accessible to a higher percentage of users. The majority of website traffic comes from individual website searches. When a website is easily accessible to all devices and the users can search for anything easily, it helps to increase the lead generation, lead conversion, and organic traffic of a website. In another way, responsive web design enhances the user-friendliness of the website and can make it easy for everyone to view across different devices.
Responsive Design enables a website to update more quickly and it makes any number of changes in a single resolution size. It saves both time and cost for businesses by getting sales through a single website. It is really convenient and helps small businesses also. Websites that have responsive designs get support from the Google ranking algorithm. It helps them to get ranked quickly in local areas. The reason for that is the heavy usage of websites through mobile devices. Responsive design allows a website to be mobile-friendly and creates high traffic toward the website, which is very important for SEO. When a website does not utilize responsive design, users cannot get the best user experience or may find it difficult to find the required information. Useless popups, irrelevant images, and baseless textual information can distract the users but when you have a responsive site, the users will get the important information in a straightforward manner.
Responsive design also gives good navigation to a website. It makes it easy to use across devices and makes browsing convenient. Improving the user experience has become much more important due to the fact that,
- 61% of users leave a website when they do not get accurate information on the first attempt.
- 57% of users purchase goods when they have a positive user experience.
- According to a survey conducted by Google, 48% of users think that businesses are irresponsible when the site is not responsive.
Also, when a person shares the link of a certain website with another, through smartphones, a responsive website makes it easier to navigate the layout of that website quickly. If the website design is not responsive, the user could get disoriented and may navigate to another website or a totally different setup diverting potential business away.
Small businesses can take advantage of the benefits of responsive design, to utilize features such as web analytics, to identify their customer's browsing habits, devices, behavior, and engagement time, to tailor the content accordingly.
Future of Responsive Design
Do you remember anything that has evolved faster than the web? Well, mobile screens are the latest trend in web design due to the heavy use of Smartphones to browse the web. After smartphones took over the desktop, responsive design stepped up to play the main character in web design’s future. A sudden increase in smartphones and tablets emerged due to the various advantages they provide over desktops. The ‘mobile-first’ approach was the key to responsive design. This theory provides a dynamic interface for the developers to build a website that focuses on its content fitting any screen size across various devices. Designers use flexible grids or layouts with CSS media queries to build these websites, and it makes them compatible with mobile devices of various sizes. This innovative method has saved up to millions that were previously wasted due to developing and maintaining websites for various individual platforms. Responsive web design is ideal for SEO because the algorithms used there allow surfing in a mobile-friendly environment which optimizes the content for mobile.
But again, most organizations are still stuck on websites that cannot give the same browsing experience through mobile as it provides on desktop. But we now see the trend to use responsive design in order to achieve the best experience when viewed through any screen. This approach raises the question “what’s next in responsive design”.
After most corporate websites have gone ahead with a responsive web designing approach, it is very important for businesses to know which aspects will match them and which would not. Let’s have a look at future trends of responsive design, and the ability to serve companies and businesses to achieve their expectations in web designing and user experiences.
Rapid Prototyping Tools
These are the tools that can be used by all types of designers including UX, UI, and Web designers. These tools enable designers to develop high-fidelity prototypes of websites easily and quickly. It also helps designers to measure the aesthetics and the usability of a website without performing any sort of coding at any cost. Designers can create a website in the browser itself and they can directly launch it through the tool. The functionality and simplicity of these tools allow designers to get an idea of how the finished product will appear in the end. This option of working using the browser allows designers to save their precious time and resources.
In another way, these rapid prototyping tools also save designers from using the traditional troublesome methods of creating static mockups and wireframes for each and every client. Designers now can use the tools to explain every subtle animation and transition, with more efficacy and accuracy. This approach will help to avoid not only confusion but also lengthy conversations on transition speeds and also improve the overall user experience.
Personalized Visuals
When features and illustrations are tailored to match the characters of a brand, it helps the brand to achieve its own individuality. Most brands are striving to achieve that. And illustrations that are unique in style and have their own personality can make that happen. Brands can design a unique appeal to their target audience by using a distinctive set of images and iconography combined with delightful animated visuals. Designers working with responsive web designs are now intensively focusing on making the illustrations more vivid to the viewers.
Typography is also a visual medium that helps brands set a tone and evoke the emotions of users. With sharper resolutions and user-friendly screens of RWD, brands can have a vivid effect on the viewers by further pushing the limits of typography.
Using authentic photography makes a brand more fashionable. If a brand wants to create a connection with its audience, they need to minimize the use of stock photographs, which are easily recognizable by the viewers. Using authentic photographs with responsive web design can help a brand to achieve more credibility.
Uncomplicated User Interface
The use of pre-designed themes along with the responsive approach to web design has impacted the way websites look and function today. It has simplified the way users get involved with websites. The number of complex features of a site also provides a holistic simplified approach to the UI and it automatically improves the UX.
Videos and Animations
While pictures give a more definition to a concept, videos have been shown to bring about a much more effective approach to web design. Videos are capable of capturing more attention of users more quickly than images. And the way videos are optimized in order to load on a website is crucial, while videos are integrated with intrinsic patterns of responsive web design.
Overall, the design of the world of the web is an evolving fluid system, and when treated well with respect and simplicity, can bring about the best that a brand has to say and offer to its customers. And with the way the digital world is changing, the future of the web and design looks promising.
