Responsive vs. Adaptive Web Design

February 6, 2015In Web, UI/UX3 Minutes

In my agency, we daily go through assessments of analyzing and auditing web user behaviors and online experiences for a variety of different brands. Nowadays it all sums upon making decisions of what technology is best to use on the back end to create that great front end UI/UX.

Deciding on using responsive design or adaptive design on as platform depends on a variety of factors and discoveries we due-diligently exercise in the discovery phase of the project. I wrote a post over on our company blog about differences that articulates a little bit more about the pros and cons of each. However, this is a complex matter and decision involves a lot of different factors.

Instead of segmenting different parts of a website to format it differently, the adaptive design delivers a set version of a website that’s optimized for the user’s OS, browser, and device. It also delivers the website from the server side as opposed to the client-side setup from responsive where the user’s browser formats the website.

Web Design Agency

I hope that post above helps some brands make decisions more effectively and intelligently. In any case, either platform is a better choice then designing the site without mobile in mind.

According to Adobe’s cross-industry survey results that I was participating in this week, only 26% of participating companies are not using mobile optimization of any kind on their web properties. Interestingly over 50% of the sites are designed as responsive web design, and only 19% are using adaptive design principals.

Another very interesting fact I learned from this survey is that most of the participating companies experience 9% or over conversions from mobile devices. This is a huge number compared to other percentiles on this chart. Average mobile conversion rate is the rate at which web site visitors perform the actions, ordering the product from your site or filling up the form you designed.

I’ll end this summary with the interesting fact about what companies declared with respect to this year’s budgeting in mobile and digital marketing. Lets just quickly look back to last year’s survey. In last year’s survey report indicated that companies that invested more in optimizing conversion experienced a competitive advantage. For this year most of the budgeting will remind the same or increase, where a very small percentage of the companies will decree marketing budgets or are unsure what to do at this point.

I think the message is more than evident, mobile is a future of the web and adaption and reach is tremendous. I don’t believe that any company that understands this impact would be able to afford to further ignore the mobile as one of the primary interfaces for their web content.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

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