8 Responsive Design Mistakes That Drive People Nuts
Responsive design is already at its heels and there are reasons for that. Creating a beautiful responsive experience is crucial, these days, to let your audience feel engaged and connect with you on mobile devices. However, when we talk about Responsive Design Mistakes, that webmasters commit, which yield them nothing, except wasting their efforts. After all, the nature of an intuitive and coherent mobile-optimized design dictates certain rules we are required to follow to make sure things won’t go wrong.
In this article, we’ll look at several responsive design mistakes that you’re probably making and tips to ignore them. So, let’s start!
1. Not Paying Attention to the User Behavior:
It’s happened with many of us. Not analyzing the user behavior properly can put you in a big trouble, especially in terms of customer retention. When approaching responsive web design, it’s crucial to glean information about your user’s preferences, personality type, their tastes and interests, and so on to create a seamless mobile experience. An analysis is a critical tool, which reveals about the kind of mobile devices are used frequently, for what purpose devices are being used such as browsing, online shopping, etc. There are many lessons that designers can learn by understanding the user behavior, which ultimately encourages them to create a responsive design in a more sustainable way.
2. Thinking About Desktop First:
This is probably one of the most common mistakes that designers make while creating a responsive website. There are so many online players who look at desktop version first, even though, it’s far easy to start with mobile screens. The reason why designers need to train themselves to think about mobile-first is that from the smaller screen and then scaling up the design for the desktop makes it easy to foresee any loophole that may arise to hamper the user experience. Things like breakdown points, navigation, information design, and unscalable information graphics are some common issues which can be fixed earlier through the mobile-first approach.
3. Hiding Content From Users:
Responsive website share a single code, so that content parity can be achieved effectively, which is a good practice. But, unfortunately, there are so many responsive sites which still hide or remove content for smaller screens to tackle real estate constraints. People visit your website with some expectations, and it’s your responsibility to make sure they are able to achieve their goals. Mobiles have all the functionalities of desktop, these days, so the information must be rendered to them in a useful way.
4. Overlooking Testing:
Testing makes sure that your design and code are flawless beforehand. A nice design with a clean set of code can go in great lengths to offer a meaningful experience on your website. Despite of so many advantages that testing has to offer, responsive sites are often launched with no or inadequate testing. Testing is an essential aspect of a design and shouldn’t be ignored at any cost.
If not everything then there are some specific things which you can consider testing. They are: compatibility of your website with all the leading browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, along with operating systems such as Window, Mac OS and so on. This is something which needs to be done with any change you introduce within your design. If you can stretch your budget, think about investing in a device-testing lab. Start collecting device and make it an integral part of your responsive design process.
5. Disregarding Page Loading Speed:
No matter how much magnificent your responsive design is, if it takes too long to load, it’s completely useless. According to experts, if a website takes more than 3 seconds to load, it needs to be double checked. And when it comes to designing for mobile, the issue becomes all the more grave.
Keep images, forms, texts, and buttons as short and unintimidating as possible. Use different tabs for lengthy content. For example- a product page might have a description, image, pricing options, payment button, customer reviews, and videos etc., in such a scenario, it is recommend to use separate tabs to reduce the page and increased page speed.
6. One Size Fits All:
Here we are talking about images. Most of the web designers use a single image to target different platforms. This isn’t a good practice. An image with compatibility issues can disturb the user experience and make them feel annoyed. There will be scaling issues too. While designing a responsive website, it is recommended to design images by considering the device needs.
7. Forgetting Touchscreen Experience:
Most of the handheld devices that are developed today utilize touchscreen technology. With more and more users are opting for touchscreen devices, it has become critical to pay heed to touchscreen experience. While designing, make sure that the navigation and action links are large enough to be pressed conveniently. As a general rule, not to scale less than 40 by 40 pixels, as it’s being regarded as the most suitable size allowing visitors to press comfortably.
8. Small Call-to-action Buttons:
Creating small call-to-action buttons can frustrate your mobile users as they can prevent them from performing completing the task. If your users have to zoom in to press a button or end up clicking wrong buttons because of their small size, your website is completely vein. So, make sure your interface is designed using buttons with an appropriate size, so that a seamless experience can be guaranteed.
To Conclude:
Responsive design is rapidly and constantly changing the web with great possibilities. In order to make most out of this growing technology, one must learn to avoid the above mentioned pitfalls, and make sure we reach people in anytime, anywhere.
About The Author
Great tips.
I think the most common mistakes include not paying attention to page load time due to using heavy images or scripts, and neglecting image scaling on different devices and screens.
This is incredible. Very informative post. Thanks for sharing your experience. I am glad that I foun your blog. I must say nice content and very helpful as well useful too. Top Tips!!