Responsive vs. Adaptive Design
A simple insight to plan and execute designs with better aim
The number of ways that users access information has increased swiftly. With the latest technological advancements, the device counts vary from large scale monitors to advanced tech smartwatches. Responsive design and Adaptive design comes to play, to bridge the gap between devices.
No doubt it’s a challenge for designers, the end goal is that the user experience needs to be addressed in either way whether it’s responsive or adaptive.
What is Responsive Design?
In simple terms, a responsive design means developing a website using responsive styling properties such as media quires, where the device will determine how the design will display based on the device that you are viewing. The most common phrase that’s been used is the “Mobile First” approach.
Responsive designing is pretty much straightforward. As the layout is fully based on the fluid format whatever the device that you access starting from standard desktop screens to mobile devices you will be able to view the user interface in the appropriate, re-arranged, and resized format.
The three key principles of responsive design are,
- Fluid Grid Systems — The columns will re-arrange automatically depending on the screen size
- Fluid Image Use — Setting the image max-width for 100% to scale and fit with in the container
- Media Queries — Is a CSS technique that can be used to alter the layout of a site when a condition is been called. By using the @media rule we can add a set of CSS styling properties only if a certain condition is true
Responsive Frameworks
The commonly known most popular framework is “Bootstrap” where you can easily create responsive UI designs with less hassle. I got the opportunity to work with bootstrap when it was introduced as Twitter, bootstrap in 2004. It is really nice to see the evolvement of bootstrap has made and hands down it’s the simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript framework in the business. I simply adore it.
What is Adaptive Design?
Talking about adaptive design, it’s about creating multiple layouts to fit appropriately identifying the user’s device (browser size) and it selects the most suitable layout design that aligns with the screen whether that’s a mobile, tablet device, desktop computer, or something in between.
It does sound the same as responsive design right? but the key difference between adaptive and responsive design is that the content follows a fixed layout size in adaptive design, while it moves dynamically in responsive design. In other words, the adaptive design uses a few fixed layouts and then selects the best layout for the current screen size.
In adaptive design, the standard practice for designers is that they have to develop the six most common screen widths 320, 480, 760, 960, 1200, and 1600 pixels
Conclusion
In my opinion, I personally believe that the key strength or the advantage of adaptive design is that we get the opportunity to customise the content. Since it’s accurate exactly for the device compared to a responsive site it feels more appropriate.
However responsive designing is still leading when it comes to easy development and maintenance whereas adaptive design it’s a bit hard to maintain and manage. I believe that until adaptive design finds their room for evolvement bootstrap will run the world.
