The Internet is evolving and more & more multinational corporations like Sony, Microsoft, and Nokia and online behemoths like Expedia are swapping quickly to responsive web design in order to offer the most dynamic experience to the users and to reach a more wider audience of customers.
As more corporations and online giants are deviating towards responsive design, it’s essential to discern the limitations that arrive with it and how to deal with them.
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Helter-skelter visual stage
Designing has become a bewildering and mutating process of sketching and prototyping where the entire focus should be given on designing elements their rearrangement based on various device dimensions and different resolutions otherwise it becomes chaotic.
Although Navigation is so easy with the three bars at the top left corner of the page representing the navigation “button,”, yet some users find it difficult especially when the website is constructed in a convoluted structure.
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Background images and icon
In responsive web design, flexible images and icons play a great role to let users enjoy the graphics on high pixel density devices. So to assure that the images don’t appear fuzzy and clumsy is a challenging job for every dedicated website designer and developer.
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Displaying Data on Small Screens
Showcasing data tables like airline flight timetables on small screens is a big hurdle when the tables are complex and complicated.
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Not Offering Flavorful Experiences that Load Instant
Having a proportionate and standard balance between rich user experience and the speedy loading is one of the biggest challenges because the traffic attracted by the Responsive from both desktops and mobile gadgets sometimes slow down the loading times. This consequences loss to the business as most mobile users leaves the site without waiting for more than 5 seconds for the result.
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Lengthy durations of Designing, Developing, and Testing
As responsive websites perform fantastically on multiple devices while showcasing ample functionality and arduous design elements—they generally demand longer durations to design, develop, and test.
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Concealing and Deleting Content
Websites with complicated UI elements, advanced search specifications like data tables, multi-step forms, calculators, dashboards with third-party scripts, etc have superabundant information that they need to conceal or delete or content from users. In such cases, people are unable to approach all information/the full interpretation (version) of the website they are browsing.
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Incompatibility of Older Versions of Internet Explorer with CSS3 Media Queries
Websites do not give a proper presentation on older versions of IE with mobile-first techniques. The problem here is the incompatibility of an older website on mobile devices with CSS3 media.
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Methodologies for responsive design are still undergoing improvements
The methodologies for responsive design are still not fully refined and tested. This leads to ambiguity and bewilderment for clients.
How to Fix these loopholes?
- Helter-skelter visual stage
There are two ways to fix this problem.
- One way is to design sketches for a desktop home page and for another website page also, and then acclimate them for the screen sizes and dimensions of the most preferred gadgets (tablet, mobile etc).
- Another way is to use paper followed by the communication with the client to exhibit design layouts and their outflow on various screen sizes.
- Navigation
Designers should deeply dig and understand users—how and why they browse the site and analyse the website’s content and information structure to tailor a website with perspective and self-explanatory navigation followed by its testing on as many products and times as possible.
- Background images and icon
Making icons which are retina ready and scalable, by using the SVG format which maintains the high quality while keeping them lightly, is the solution to let users enjoy the website without lowering down the quality in the form of sluggish loading & dull images on any gadget.
- Displaying Data on Small Screens
Responsive tables are the chalk for now. The other solutions include
- Discarding the grid layout and building a smaller table that doesn’t have horizontal scrolling;
- Creating condensed pie charts from tables;
- Substituting tables with shorter versions while providing a link to the complete bigger version;
- Concealing insignificant stuff on small screens accompanied with the drop-down menu to access the full table;
- Rainbow tables where hues replace columns;
- Flipping the table on its side to fit in the space.
- Offering Flavorful Experiences that Load Instant
Conditional loading is the solution for this as it allows loading of only what users need. It comes with many automation tools for scaling and caching images, it eases and quickens the future alterations to the site. Make sure that the user connection is perfect enough to offer high performance.
- Lengthy durations of Designing, Developing, and Testing
Instead of testing the website for long periods which are costly and lengthy, Responsive sites should be left for gradual evolvement, preserving owners’ time and effort in the long run. Step by step approach is best here.
- Concealing and Deleting Content
Prioritise and cut is the solution for this wherein unnecessary elements should be removed from early drafts and focus should be given on the core structure of the website while making the efficient arrangement of the content and offering the users with an option to access the full version of the website.
- Incompatibility of Older Versions of Internet Explorer with CSS3 Media Queries
- An experienced designer can readily change page layouts by using JavaScript on the basis of the size of the browser window.
- With a goal of maintaining the original layout, the fix is to use polyfill, code that let web developers utilise an API of regardless of whether or not it is compatible with a browser
- Another solution could be to use a conditional IE stylesheet with elementary styling.
- Methodologies for responsive design are still undergoing improvements
Showing the benefits of responsive design in action is the best idea to grab optimistic response and approval. Responsive design can justify itself by showcasing its major benefits like multi-device functionality, approach to the far-reaching audience and easy future fixing.
Conclusion
Talk about any technologies, it comes with pros and cons. Good news is the innovators of responsive design is not leaving any stone unturned to improve experiences and opportunities for users.