Responsive vs Adaptive UI – What’s the Difference?

After multiple recent studies and research, is it considered that consumers tend to navigate a website more directly from a mobile device rather than a desktop device. So, businesses and companies need currently to assign significant efforts in order to create a website that works without flaws and issues on different platforms as well as devices. 

Designers must choose from two UI/UX strategies: Responsive vs Adaptive design. Even if they seem the same thing at first glance, they represent two different UI/UX design practices. These can be found a lot in mobile-first design approaches.

If you are not sure what practice is best to use in your next project, this article aims to explore the main differences between responsive and adaptive web design, as well as best practices in order to make sure that your website project offers a smooth user experience for customers. 

The main idea of responsive design is based on that the digital navigation experience should always be the same on both desktop and a mobile device.

The responsive design focuses on providing a webpage design that will automatically change according to a certain screen size. Using CSS media queries, this approach is able to determine the user’s device properties and adapt the website in order to fit the design best. 

In this approach, designers must create a different website layout for each device’s screen. So, when the browser loads the webpage, the website will automatically determine the screen size in order to display the best fir for a certain device. Usually, designers choose to create six screen sizes that are the most common across-screen devices. It starts from a small screen of 320px, 480px and 760px and goes to much bigger screens 1200px and 1600px. 

In order to minimize the effort, or just focus on those screen sizes that are the most common in website visits. Designers can find this by following the user analytics records. So, for example, if your website is visited most of the time from only 3 different sizes, you shouldn’t put more effort into creating the other 3 layouts that are not commonly used. 

Probably the most important advantage is that the responsive web design is able to offer a universal user experience across different devices as well as screen sizes, making it a cost-effective approach for website owners because it successfully avoids the need to maintain from time to time the website’s design. Try to use multiple device mockups to understand exactly how your design looks like.

Also, search engine optimization works really well with this design approach because search engines such as Google, tend to favor those websites that provide mobile-friendly websites. 

But of course, the responsive design is not as easy as it seems. It has a series of concerns and issues about image sizing, or clickable areas, which sometimes tend to not work properly when the screen size is changed. Even more so, if a website is not well optimized to be used on a mobile device, can have sometimes issues with the loading times due to unnecessary large files that are developed for desktop. 

So, it’s important to make sure that every responsive website is well-optimized in order to ensure ease of navigation and prioritize adaptability.

Here, the best example of responsive web design is Slack, because it is able to have a design that keeps the team connected regardless of their device size. They can choose to work from their own mobile device or directly on a desktop computer, and the user experience will always remain the same efficiency. 

Here the main advantage is the level of control that adaptive design offers. Usually, when websites choose this kind of approach, they want to provide for their users an experienced that is at the same time functional and elevated. 

On the other hand, adaptive websites will have the advantage of having faster loading times, because that design was especially developed for a certain screen size. This way, websites will be able to keep the customers more engaged and interested in the website’s content. 

But the main disadvantage is obviously the extra effort required to create all the layouts for different screen sizes. The maintenance of all design versions can be sometimes time-consuming and impractical. 

The perfect example of adaptive web design is Apple. The Apple website works seamlessly across multiple devices thanks to its advanced adaptive web design strategy, which is created to have different layouts of the same design according to the devices’ screen size. 

In order to determine if a website uses either a responsive web design or an adaptive web design, it’s important to check how that website acts across different devices.

You will see that the responsive design will maintain the same URL and adjust the screen layout according to the device, while the adaptive design will use a different URL for each of the screen format. 

Make sure that you balance this decision using multiple factors in order to determine what approach your website should follow. Consider the business goals, user needs, and all the resources that are required to make the website work seamlessly for customers. 

We at uinkits understand the importance of great user experiences and creating amazing UI designs. That’s why we’ve developed a Figma UI Kit with design components that include these essential UI elements that enable you to design intuitive and user-friendly interfaces effortlessly.

“You press the button, we do the rest.” – Kodak.

Inspired by this iconic tagline from Kodak, we believe in simplifying the design process for you. Our Figma UI Kit, uinkits, is a complete design system with UI components that allows you, as a UI UX designer, to create your products as quickly as pressing a button.

Our design system includes UI components, icons, variables, cards, buttons and everything you need for your design process. All you have to do is take your UI design component needed, and you’re ready to use it in your designs!