We all know how responsive designs have benefited us! The impact is such that some clients have started refusing to pay if their transaction is held up for extra time. Whenever something new comes up, myths about that get generated. It’s in human nature to create rumors so as to affect the common people. These misconceptions can be one of the biggest barriers while planning, scoping, estimating, and executing your next responsive project. So, here are common responsive web design myths busted by website design services companies.
- Responsive design has to be all about mobile:
It may be a fact that the sudden growth of the mobile web is the actual reason why the idea of responsive design came to life. But we also have to take into account the different levels of users involved whenever we are working with responsive websites. We need to take into account the device a user can use (whether it’s a mobile or a desktop or even, a TV); we need to consider their locations and the approach they have while accessing the particular web design. If your users are relaxing and playing beach volleyballs, then it will not matter how well your content is if the page takes an eternity to load itself.
Content matters, but what matters more is how you approach towards presenting it to the user. Think about the resolution, layouts, and text sizes and in whichever way you can, please give a thought on increasing the performance of the design. It’s not all about mobile. Context shifts, and so it’s really important to maintain all the other aspects of a website while designing and developing it.
- You can’t get a responsive design for each and every use case:
Use cases matter, a lot. A design is not responsive if it can’t take into account each and every use case. The website should work for anyone in any situation, and that ‘any’ includes ‘everything’.
- Your device breakpoints matter in responsive designs:
Most developers nowadays have this style of developing websites where they scale the resolutions down to fit those of particular devices. This is wrong! If a design is being claimed as a responsive one, then one has to make it accessible for all devices, not just some particular ones.
Developers need to be aware of having some kind of framework to work with, which will help them to deal with breakpoints. Better still, build your own framework. Get yourself a few wireframes in order to get a general idea about the whole thing, and then get started off with putting down the pixels. Creating a live prototype may be one solution. In fact, if you do that then you can also add breakpoints after creating yourself a fluid mockup.
- Typography gets harmed due to responsive designs:
This is one big flaw associated with many responsive websites. Most often in these cases, the typography is not taken care of properly as the developers think more about the device than the design. This is not the approach to building a responsive website. You have to think about the user who is the ultimate consumer of the content your website contains. The content should be readable. If you throw the typographical aspects of your website to the dogs, then the website loses half its meaning and intent.
- Content gets hidden in responsive designs:
This is a really absurd myth; probably the most absurd of all. The whole idea of responsive design is to make the websites accessible to all. Then why should anyone give any thought to hide contents? Hiding content is seldom a brainwave. Most importantly, if you have to hide content, then what was the point in putting it on the website?
It’s not a good idea to hide content in a design where you have used your imagination in order to come up with a decision. It’s likely that because of your unnecessary assumption, a user somewhere in this big wide world is up to his neck in trouble. Mostly these assumptions are done in the navigation areas of a design. A better way to approach the whole thing is to get the idea of hiding content away from your head while you are sitting down to build a responsive design. Accessibility is all that there is to it.
- Conclusion
The internet explosion has occurred and with the new-age smartphones flooding the markets, any content anywhere is now accessible. The real importance lies in reaching out to all of your users and giving them exactly what they want. Responsive design is the solution to this phenomenon.
