Responsive Design: Staying Ahead in a Mobile-Driven Market
Whatever device a customer uses to interact with your digital brand—whether it’s a desktop, laptop, smartphone, tablet, or other technology—they expect an enjoyable, engaging user experience. Flawless performance across screen sizes has become a requisite for many users, and failure to deliver it can be disastrous for an otherwise well-executed digital product. Fifty-seven percent of users say they would not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.
The importance of having a responsive site isn’t news to today’s companies, yet this area remains a challenge for many product teams due to its complex, fast-changing nature. With data-based insights into your audience’s behaviors and preferences, however, you can adapt your UX/UI seamlessly to a mobile-driven world.
Many Screens, One User Experience
What is responsive design?
Responsive design, or responsive web design, refers to the creation of a page that resizes itself based on the screen being used to view it. On a responsive site, factors such as image size, resolution, and scripting abilities are automatically adjusted to provide the best viewing experience possible on the device at hand.
As a result, your audience can interact with your brand wherever and however it suits their environment, lifestyle, and preferences. Virtually anywhere they are, users can complete all the actions they would be able to on a traditional desktop experience. This presents digital companies with new opportunities to increase conversions, customer satisfaction, and more.
Taking the time to create a responsive site may seem like a burdensome task, but its long-term ROI is unmistakable. A professionally designed responsive site is an investment in the integrity of your product and overall brand, positioning you as an innovative, customer-focused company.
What goes into a successful responsive site or platform?
High-quality responsive design considers not only how to adapt to individual screen types but also how to optimize the transitions between them. Today’s customers tend to switch from device to device throughout the day, often even during a single task. With this fluid behavior in mind, it is critical to make the experience of moving from desktop to mobile (to any other screen) quick, frictionless, and cohesively on-brand. Otherwise, you risk interrupting the user journey and losing valuable momentum.
3 Reasons to Put Responsive Design at the Top of Your List
Digital companies across virtually every sector are turning to responsive design to engage their target audiences better. This is because the ability to adapt to any screen size accomplishes these and other business goals:
1. Removing obstacles to conversion
When viewing an unresponsive site on a phone or tablet, the user is likely to encounter jumbled text, misaligned or distorted images, unclear navigation, and other issues. This experience makes the customer unlikely to go deeper into your site, and even unlikelier to complete a purchase or other desired action.
Preventing this scenario is one of the primary benefits of responsive design. Designing your responsive site, or improving your existing one, helps eliminate pain points and bottlenecks within key conversion pathways. As a result, you can anticipate a reduction in bounce rates, cart abandonment, and other signs of user frustration.
2. Reducing site maintenance
Providing both a desktop and mobile experience used to require two separate versions of the same website. This approach is no longer the right fit for most of today’s digital businesses, as it requires significant time and maintenance. With a responsive design, it only takes one website to address the requirements of all possible devices. This consolidation increases efficiency by reducing setup time and freeing your development team to focus on other work.
In addition to minimizing overhead, relying on a single version of your platform (rather than multiple device-specific ones) helps maintain the most consistent UX/UI possible. A responsive site keeps all the necessary code in one secure place, further reducing the risk of broken or inconsistent elements.
3. Improving SEO
Especially following Google’s 2015 “Mobile Friendly Update,” which added mobile functionality as a factor in its search algorithms, responsive design has been closely tied to companies’ SEO goals. Digital platforms that look great and work flawlessly across screen sizes provide both a better user experience and make it easier for users to find your platform in the first place.
When implemented correctly, responsive design serves as a powerful driver of web traffic, search rankings, and other KPIs.
Summary
To gain and keep traction in the current market, your app, product, or other digital platform needs to keep pace with the rapidly-evolving demands of responsive design. Especially with smartphones and other intelligent devices becoming increasingly accessible, cross-screen thinking must play a central role in product development.
The key to unlocking the right responsive design strategy for your digital business? A solid UX foundation. The more audience information you have to help inform your design choices, the better you can deliver what your users want on whatever screen(s) they want it.
At Morphosis, we build custom responsive solutions for a wide range of digital businesses, customers, and platforms.
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