Originally posted by mreinoso on March 15, 2016
Hi everyone,
I came across this article that explains the difference between responsive and adaptive design, and when to choose one or the other. We are in the process of making our courses mobile friendly and, in our case (and several meetings later), adaptive design makes more sense, mainly because changing the website to a responsive design would take too much development time. For those of you who understand visuals better, this article has a great deal of concepts explained in animated gifs.
Adaptive design from a designer standpoint would be the better option as you have more control over your design. It provides the best user experience. As mentioned having an adaptive website does take a lot of resources financially and takes a lot of time since there are multiple fixed layouts to design for. Whereas, responsive design just moves the content to fit the screen size. I feel that many websites that take this route provide for sub-par mobile experiences since user experience is left behind. If designing a responsive website is the only option, I would suggest designing from mobile. Let the mobile device determine the layout and let the larger screen size adapt to it. There are so many websites I just don’t use on mobile because the experience is frustrating.
If you plan on designing websites that really does responsive design well I would suggest GSAP is a great javascript tool https://greensock.com/.
But I do prefer the adaptive design option. Apple does have a great adaptive design website. https://www.apple.com/apple-tv-plus/?itscg=10000&itsct=atv-0-tv_fp-hro_lrn-apl-200306
This is such a vital distinction when looking at designing and developing for mobile platforms. Having read through the article, it seems that responsive design is probably the best approach considering the diverse types and sizes of mobile devices available today. Adaptive design may be less glitchy, but would require a lot more specific time in the development phases to cater for all possible variations. Responsive design could even use machine learning to develop its own responses and adaptations to different screens, giving the online content a longer lifespan without the additional work of developers being required when new shapes/sizes of devices are released.