Responsive design is less about the way a website looks, but a way to fill up a small device’s screen with larger fonts and streamline the way the site looks. This significantly helps with readability, and makes the surfing experience more pleasant on phones and tablets. As more of your visitors will be coming in on mobile phones, make it easy for them to learn about you.
By the myBusiness techblog team
Responsive design is one of the latest buzzwords on the scene in website design. It refers to a way to make sites adapt to the device that is displaying them. For example, when you load the Gmail site on a desktop, you get the full email client. If this were loaded on a phone, however, it would be too crowded to use effectively. As such, the site adapts to its mobile version, which enlarges all the buttons and allows you to navigate by scrolling up and down, rather than left-to-right with the desktop version.
This ability is especially important in an age where websites are just as likely to be pulled up on a phone as it is on a desktop screen. The phone’s smaller dimensions and vertical orientation can make websites designed for computers hard to read and navigate. Constantly pinching at a screen to zoom in and out of a big site can turn users off—and result in lost business, if what they’ve closed is your company’s site. Responsive design will allow your users to scroll up and down instead, which is what they’re used to, and help them navigate your site easily.
And the chances of users coming in to your site using a mobile phone is high. Just look at Singapore’s numbers. According to an Ericsson ConsumerLab survey, users here are ranked number one in the world for how many people use smartphones and tablets, at 74 percent and 31 percent of users, respectively.
And more of those users are choosing different screen sizes, ranging from smaller tablets like the iPad Mini, or large-screen phones like the Samsung Galaxy Note.
You can check out some great examples such as The Boston Globe. Access it on a desktop and you’ll see the main news in two sections, with added content. A tablet will show just the main section because it’s narrower, and a phone will show just one section. All the information gets streamed in a single column instead of being spread out, and the user doesn’t miss a beat.
It’s not just for newspapers. Try Target’s corporate site, or BarackObama.com, and you can see how the content flows with readability in mind for each device.
Is your company website responsive? Test it out with this tool to see if it can handle different screen sizes.
Why can’t I just get an app made?
When the iPhone first came out, it was common for companies to make app versions of their sites and list them on the App Store for download. But this provided significant friction for users who have found you by googling you and simply wanting to visit the site through their mobile browsers.
Users might not want to take up storage space on their phones by installing an app. Providing a responsive site is the next best thing to achieving the user experience of an app.
Besides usability, a well-designed site will load quickly on the mobile, because it sheds the complicated layout of a larger page. Larger pages bog down browsers and also require the phone to download bigger images, which can be time-wasting.
One more downside to an app is the cost of building one. Apps can cost upwards of $20,000 for a simple one, towards $100,000 for more complicated designs. A responsive design, on the other hand, can be coded at comparable cost to your existing design, and can be done by a competent design house.
SMEs which should consider responsive design are those with sites that customers need to refer to constantly. Those which allow customers to order and transact with them should also make responsive design a top priority.
The bottom line about responsive design is keeping a page agile and at its best usability for whichever device type is being used to access it. It’s putting the page’s best face forward—and your company’s, too.