What’s the Best Choice for Designers: Responsive vs. Adaptive Design

1. Responsive vs. Adaptive Design: What’s the Best Choice for Designers? Presented by Priya Rana

2. Table of Content Introduction What’s the Difference? Why Use Adaptive? Why Use Responsive? Considerations to Take into Account The Decision Conclusion Contact Us

3. Introduction Google has always recommended responsive web design (RWD), especially after rolling out a big update on the 4/21/15 which ranked mobile-friendly sites higher. It doesn’t specify in the update that you must use responsive design though, just that a site be accessible on mobile, with good UX and performance. With that in mind, let’s examine the pros and cons of adaptive vs. responsive design with regards to performance and UX. One of the biggest debates that we’ve seen since the rise of mobile is whether you should choose to develop a responsive, adaptive web design (AWD) or standalone mobile site (with its own m. URL).  For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll leave out standalone m. sites as it appears to be the least favorite solution for designers and businesses since they must be created separately (which accrues more upfront cost and maintenance costs).

4. What’s the Difference? • So first up, what’s the key differences between responsive and adaptive design? • Put simply, responsive is fluid and adapts to the size of the screen no matter what the target device.  • Responsive uses CSS media queries to change styles based on the target device such as display type, width, height etc., and only one of these is necessary for the site to adapt to different screens.

5. What’s the Difference? Adaptive design, on the other hand, uses static layouts based on breakpoints which don’t respond once they’re initially loaded.  Adaptive works to detect the screen size and load the appropriate layout for it – generally you would design an adaptive site for six common screen widths: 320 480 760 960 1200 1600 On the surface, it appears that adaptive requires more work as you have to design layouts for a minimum of six widths.  However, responsive can be more complex as improper use of media queries (or indeed not using them at all) can make for display and performance issues.

6. Why Use Adaptive? Adaptive is useful for retrofitting an existing site in order to make it more mobile friendly. This allows you to take control of the design and develop for specific, multiple viewports. The number of viewports that you choose to design for is entirely up to you, your company and overall budget. It does, however, afford you a certain amount of control (for example over content and layout) that you won’t necessarily have using responsive design. Generally, you would begin by designing for a low resolution viewport and work your way up to ensure that the design doesn’t become constrained by the content. As mentioned previously, it’s standard to design for six resolutions.  However, you can make a more informed decision by looking at your web analytics for the most commonly used devices and then designing for those viewports.

7. Why Use Responsive? The majority of new sites now use responsive, which has been made easier for less experienced designers and developers,  thanks to the availability  of themes accessible through CMS systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Responsive doesn’t offer as much control as adaptive, but takes much less work to both build and maintain. Responsive layouts are also fluid and whilst adaptive can and does use percentages to give a more fluid feel when scaling, these can again cause a jump when a window is resized.  For example, in the image below, which shows a fluid layout, the designer is using percentage widths so that the view will be adjusted for each user.

8. Why Use Responsive?

9. Considerations to Take into Account As discussed earlier, responsive sites can suffer when it comes to site speed (if they aren’t properly implemented). Responsive also requires more in the way of coding in order to ensure that the site fits each and every screen that access it.  However, the extra work is debatable (compared to adaptive design) since adaptive design requires that you develop and maintain separate HTML and CSS code for each layout.  Modifying adaptive sites is also more complex since it’s likely you’ll have to ensure that everything is still working sitewide (such as SEO, content and links) when it’s time for implementation. You should, of course, also consider the user experience. Because responsive essentially shuffles the content around in order to fluidly fit the device window, you will need to pay particular attention to the visual hierarchy of the design as it shifts around.

10. The Decision When it comes down to it, the key is to consider your audience first and foremost no matter what design technique you adopt. Once you know exactly who they are and what devices they tend to access the site on, then it’s easier to design with them in mind when it comes to layout, content and so on. 

11. The Decision It will also depend largely on whether you have an existing site to work with or you’re starting from scratch.  Responsive design has become the go-to design technique and it’s thought that around 1/8 websites now use responsive (while there’s little to no data on how many use adaptive). Adoption rates for responsive are growing quickly too and have almost reached the same level as standalone mobile sites. With all of that in mind, it’s safe to say that responsive is usually the preferred technique if only because of the ongoing work that adaptive design demands. However, if a client or company has the budget, then adaptive might be a better choice, according to a test carried out by Catchpoint. They built two sites in WordPress, one using the standard WP TwentyFourteen responsive theme and the other using a plugin called Wiziapp.

12. Conclusion Responsive design will remain popular, but that might be because we have not yet found a decent solution to the heavy maintenance that adaptive demands.    Adaptive design hasn’t died out though, despite the web’s apparent love of responsive, so it’s possible – in theory at least – that we’ll see some improvements emerge yet that will blow responsive web design out of the water.

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