November 9, 2015

Mafia Games Monday (MGM) – Mobile Design

If you work in development in any way, I am sure that you have heard the terms responsive design and adaptive design at least to some degree. Those are big buzz words nowadays, and many people who have no idea what those mean are saying them. If you are one of those people using these words, just know that those of us who know what these actually mean do not think that you are “up with the times”. Try to use words you understand!

Dunce

Anyways, so what do these words mean?

Shurg Question

To explain this, I have to first tell you about mobile design…

Mobile design is (in case you haven’t guessed) a website that has a look for a mobile device. I know, that was difficult to grasp (you should be able to taste the sarcasm in that sentence). Mobile design however is not such an easy task, especially when you have a website with all kinds of images, tables, and text. Enterprise websites can take years to finally be a website that has some sort of design for a mobile device.

With this in mind, two terms became known: responsive design and adaptive design.

What do these mean?

Adaptive design is a mobile design that is entirely separate from the other website. Essentially, with adaptive design, there are two different versions of your website: one for desktop computers and one for mobile devices. For enterprise websites, this may be a great solution to at least have a mobile presence.

Responsive design is a mobile design that is adjusted based on the screen size. So with a smaller screen, the design will adjust to accommodate that on-the-fly. With responsive design, you have only one version of your website, but this will require a lot more work for enterprise websites as all of their content will have to become mobile friendly.

Below is a basic diagram to show what these two mean:

adaptive_responsive

What are the pros and cons to each? Well, quite frankly, this table below explains it quite well:
Adaptive_Reponsive_Pros_Cons

So which one is best for you? That really depends on the complexity of your current website and the amount of time you have. Quite frankly, I personally like the responsive design idea better (as you only have to make the design once!), but adaptive design certainly has its purposes and uses.

Which do you prefer: adaptive design or responsive design?

That’s all for now, until next time…keep that tech gear ticking.

~Goliath7470