Optimize User Experience with Responsive Website Design Tips

The number of people using their mobiles to do research online before buying a product or service has been going up in an unprecedented way. They also catch up on the latest news on their handsets and use social media too. Considering this trend, can your business afford to develop a non-responsive website? Those days are over when a website was designed for a single desktop screen. Technological advancement and the evolution of mobile websites are compelling web designers to re-evaluate how their work is presented on various devices. Obviously, these days we all browse a lot on our phones and not on our desktops. Here comes a responsive website design.

What is responsive design?

In layman’s terms, responsive web design (RWD) is a methodology that permits design and code to respond as per the size of a screen of a device. This means that it offers you the ideal viewing experience – be it on a small android mobile, a laptop, an iPad, or a 40-inch cinema display. The main objective of a responsive design is to provide a good experience to the user across various devices, though the design could look slightly different. However, in a responsive design, you can be assured of minimal scrolling, zooming, panning, etc.

How to Implement Responsive Web Design

If you are a web design company, you should always keep the following tips regarding responsive design in mind while designing mobile websites. So, if you want your e-commerce solutions or the website to be responsive and mobile-friendly, then go through our best tips to attain responsive web design:

  • Find How Your Visitors Use Their Mobile

It is important to understand that people use websites differently when they are on a desktop computer versus mobile devices. Surveying the website visitors or employing analytics to find out the reason they are accessing your website with a mobile device and what are the specific pages or elements they open the most. These details will help to find out the pages and elements that are required to be readily available on mobile devices or smaller screens.

  • Adopt a fluid grid

Many years ago, websites used to be laid out according to a measurement called pixels. But now due to technological advancements, designers have moved to use a fluid grid. A grid helps size the important elements of your website proportionally and does not make them in one specific size. Because of this, it is easy to size things for different screens and all the elements would respond to the respective screen size (that is, the grid), and not as per the size they are set to be in pixels. What’s more? You can also set rules for a fluid grid by altering your website’s CSS and additional code.

  • Consider the images

Image sizing is one of the most challenging facts of responsive web design. The first step is to create rules in the CSS that ascertain how images will be handled on various screens. You need to be careful about your navigation on the mobile. There are various methods commonly used for collating large menus and content. You could use a familiar hamburger style menu, expand/collapse fields, a simple selection through a drop-down list, or tabs that ley you scroll horizontally like in YouTube.

  • Enable Compression

Always compress the resources by using the zip functionality to decrease the number of bytes that a page sends across the network. This makes it a lot easier for people to access and navigate the website because of faster loading pages and by using your web server resources more efficiently. Also, remember to minify CSS and JavaScript by eliminating any redundant line breaks and blank space, as that helps to reduce the file sizes and increases the speed with which they are downloaded and parsed.

  • Engagement

The layout hierarchy is another very important factor, especially on mobile. Compared to the desktop, the mobile experience is a lot more focused as it has a limited amount of space. Hence, the way a person would move and read on your site needs to be very clear so that the main messages are passed successfully. You should also think about the main objective and action of the page. If your main aim is to get a user to click a ‘contact us’ button, then ensure that it is not hidden at the bottom of the page underneath some slabs of text. Customize your content and design accordingly around that experience.

  • Think about a Mobile-First Approach

Another way to go for a responsive design is to first create a mobile version of your site. This enables you to find out how the text, images, your brand logos, and other elements would look on smaller screens. If they are displayed without any issues, then you can adapt your design even to larger screens.

  • Stick to a Minimalist Design

Minimalistic designs are more popular now as they not only eliminate all the clutter but also make it easy for the users to focus on the content, thus enhancing the conversion rates. It also helps the website to load faster as it uses fewer elements, and it gels well with responsive web design. A minimalist design also helps to highlight important areas on your website and attract attention to your calls-to-action (CTA).

  • Try Using a Pre-designed Layout

If you are new to this or do not have the needed time to design a responsive website, just use a pre-designed layout or theme that works for you. Then, you just have to update the colors, apply your company’s branding, and plug in the content to match your requirements. If you are thinking of using WordPress, then there are multiple free and paid themes that are available and are responsive. The same applies to various leading e-commerce solution providers who provide themes on their website.

  • Optimize Typography

Always ensure that the text you include is legible even on smaller screens. The ideal size for your text copy is about 16px or 1em and then you can adjust your heading size accordingly. You’ll also need to adjust the line-height of the text to about 1.5em to make sure that the lines in the paragraphs have enough space to breathe. Also, always use a legible font. Using decorative fonts for body copy or even in the menu items is a bad idea as it is hard to read, particularly on smaller screens.

  1. Get Skilled in Using Media Queries

The key role of media queries is that they enable you to optimize the layout of the site in a way that suits various screen widths. When you use media queries, your content would respond to different conditions on particular devices. To summarize, a media query would check for the width, resolution, and orientation of the device and accordingly display the suitable set of CSS rules. 

After you have followed the guidelines suggested by Google, you should test your website using the PageSpeed Tool. It will help you to determine how well your site is performing and accordingly make any changes for further improvement.