All right, so I want to talk a little bit about responsive versus adaptive. But then I also want to touch upon something that's called context-aware or context-sensitive approach, and that's where your opportunity is going to be with mobile. Now, just to start off by saying responsive is a default.
Responsive is not an option – *do it*. And the reason is because that's where the world is at. Everyone expects things to be mobile-optimized, and responsive just means that if I switch from my laptop to my tablet to my phone, the site's going to fit to that resolution; it's going to kind of follow me. And we know that users do that; that's the default. So, by doing responsive design, you're supporting device switching, and that's why it's important. You're also potentially making things a little bit more accessible
and SEO-friendly, which is a factor for Google's algorithm that prioritizes responsive sites. *Adaptive design* in short is really interesting, and not enough people do adaptive design approaches. It's like people are so busy just meeting the default responsive that they don't think about what adaptive design can offer. And so, let me talk a little bit about what that is and what's important for you.
So, adaptive design technically is about kind of making sure that things fit nicely, for example, on an iPad and on a phone – for example, the latest phone, a large phone versus maybe an older, smaller phone, and works nicely in that viewport or that buttons are in the place they should be instead of just being pushed by
the fluid layout of responsive design. But let me just say that probably in reality there's like a hybrid really because if you work with your developers and you tell them 'Hey, those icons that are big on the desktop, I want them to stack,' for example, is common responsive. So, you've got like a bunch of icons and then on mobile you want them to stack. But maybe they aren't showing up right; maybe they're too small, so you need to tell your developers, 'Hey can you make them larger and fill the space, and then make them stack?'
So, that's the role of a UX designer or a UX person is to help with – you know – it's kind of getting things right, so there is a little touch of adaptiveness there. But what adaptive design does is a little different. And adaptive design is illustrated by the following story. I remember getting off a plane, going to the bag check to get my bag,
and the first thing I wanted to do is get on Wi-Fi. I think I was working on a document and I had to upload it immediately, like right there; somebody was waiting for it. So, I flipped open my laptop, kind of set it on one of my bags, waiting for the other bag, whatever, and tried to go on the Wi-Fi. What was funny was that when I first tried on my phone, the link was, the thing that said connect – you know – it's like 'Do you agree that this is free Wi-Fi?' and then 'connect' – it was a tiny little link on the mobile phone.
And on the desktop it was a huge button. So, desktop – huge button that said, 'I agree. Connect.' On the mobile phone – a tiny little link. And what that really should have been is the opposite. It should have been a huge button on the mobile phone, and it could have been – I don't know – just a reasonable size button on the desktop. But it sort of always reminds me of the adaptive approach, which is to, say, if you know I'm on mobile and you know that there's this text,
instead of making me read all the text, you might say 'shorten the text on mobile' and put like an 'open, view more', especially because we UX people – well, I guess everybody knows that people don't read terms and conditions and a bunch of blah-blah text; they go straight to the call to action. So, like a responsive design would say, instead of showing the text, and maybe there's an image at the top and then the text here and it's going to size to different viewports responsively;
adaptive design is going to say, 'I know you're probably not going to read this. You're on mobile. So, I'm just going to make it really short and put a "read more" and then have a big old button the first thing that you see; so, a little bit of text and a big old button for the call to action.' So, adaptive design to me is the right thing to do. You'll see a lot of articles online about or people discussing, discussions about which approach to take and 'Is one more expensive or more hassle?' and I really don't think it's helpful,
because responsive design, in my experience, can be expensive as well because of the QA – you have to do a lot of quality assurance with responsiveness, just like the example I shared. You know – is it right? Is the icon big enough? Is it in the right place? And that's just in a responsive capacity. Think about how you can use the device, you know, whether it's geolocation,
whether it's the camera sensing light / dark. I mean you can have dark mode / light mode which you can set to the time of day and that's a version of adaptiveness. The more of that we get, the better, and it also extends to other products or services like smart watches, Internet of Things. It's just the future, I think! So, context-adapting, context-sensing and adaptive design in general.