Responsive vs Mobile Web Design vs Mobile Focused Design
Reade Milner
Founder / Chief Marketing Strategist @ Rogue Pine | Sharing lessons learned in The Grow Rogue Newsletter
In the past few years, the world has shifted to mobile. Sure, desktop computing has its place in homes and businesses, but smartphones and tablets account for 60 percent of digital time spent in the U.S. alone. Although apps drive the majority of media use, more and more people every day are browsing the Web on their mobiles devices. As consumers fall more in love with their smartphones, businesses need to make the jump to mobile-focused marketing and mobile web design.
Responsive Web Design vs. Mobile Web Design
Responsive web design refers to adapting a desktop-focused website to a screen size that works on mobile devices like an Android phone or an iPad. It creates better readability and navigation and provides a more touch-friendly interface for smaller screens. Many businesses use responsive web design to create a nicer experience for consumers. However, there’s a better way to go about it. Traditional mobile web design, or a mobile website, differs from responsive web design, also known as adaptive website design. With mobile website design, a different website is displayed if it detects that a user is on a mobile phone or a tablet. Although this design tactic works, it’s not the most efficient or effective method available. This approach requires updating multiple websites, which is much more time consuming than a responsive or adaptive website. For a truly optimal user experience, steering clear of standard mobile web design and shifting to a Mobile Focused? design is the way to go.
Mobile Focused? Design Approach
The term Mobile Focused? refers to mobile web design that puts a priority on the mobile interface, making sure that the website looks good on smartphones above all other devices. Once the mobile interface works across all smartphones, it’s designed further to display just as well on larger devices. Because more people are now using mobile phones to connect online, it’s important to have a mobile-focused website than a traditional site with an enhanced responsive web design.
A Future-Proof Website for All Devices
A mobile-focused website has all the elements of responsive web design and more. It reacts to different monitor sizes and adjusts the page’s elements as the user shrinks the browser on the desktop. Because it has mobile web design at its core, the site looks amazing on smartphones and is just as easy to navigate, read and interactive with on small to large displays. Mobile web design has come a long way since the first commercial launch of a mobile browser in 1999. With mobile-focused design, a website will continue to look and act just as well on any mobile device long into the future.
Reference:
ComScore – https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Pr...
This originally appeared on the Web Chimpy blog
Likes Geometry
8 年I have to disagree. Mobile focus is gradually making website cumbersome on desktop, huge fonts, entire pages with one or two enormous buttons. As if computer users suddenly reverted to children and now have a UI designed for the playpen. When responsive was the fashion I argued that the best answer was to have a desktop site and a mobile site. I believe that it still the best solution. This is more of a fashion statement than a real observation on usability. Computing devices have different screen sizes and input systems and browser design doesn't handle that very well. For example, there is no way for a browser to detect whether a device has a touchscreen or a mouse. There is supposed to support for a "real world sized pixel" but its broken so we end up making design compromises. Mobile is currently short hand for "small touchscreen screen" and forget the people who might use a site on a large touch screen.
Great article!