Responsive Design Guidelines
Introduction
Responsive design ensures that digital products adapt and display optimally across various devices and screen sizes, providing a consistent and seamless user experience. These guidelines outline best practices for designing responsive interfaces within our Design System, accommodating diverse user contexts and device capabilities.
Principles of Responsive Design
- Flexibility: Design layouts and components to be fluid and adaptable, accommodating different screen sizes and orientations.
- Scalability: Ensure that content and interactions scale proportionally across devices, maintaining readability and usability.
- Consistency: Maintain consistency in design elements, typography, and interactions across different breakpoints to provide a cohesive user experience.
- Performance: Optimize performance by delivering lightweight assets and prioritizing content delivery based on device capabilities and network conditions.
Key Considerations
- Viewport Size: Design layouts and components with consideration for viewport sizes ranging from small mobile screens to large desktop displays. Avoid only paying attention to certain screen sizes, but promote truly fluid design.
- Breakpoints: Define breakpoints where layout adjustments occur to accommodate different screen sizes and orientations. Use media queries to apply specific styles based on viewport dimensions.
- Content Priority: Prioritize content based on importance and relevance, ensuring that essential information is accessible and readable across all devices.
- Touch vs. Mouse Interaction: Design interactive elements to be touch-friendly for mobile devices while still accommodating mouse-based interactions on desktops.
- Performance Optimization: Optimize image sizes, lazy load non-essential assets, and minimize HTTP requests to improve loading times and overall performance, especially on mobile devices with limited bandwidth.
Implementation Guidelines
- Fluid Layouts: Use percentage-based widths and flexible units (such as em or rem) for layout components to ensure adaptability across different viewport sizes.
- Responsive Typography: Implement fluid typography using relative units to maintain readability and legibility across devices. Font sizes should be designed in dependence of the base font size (
rem) or in relation to the context size (em). On breakpoints try to manipulate only that base font size. - CSS Grids and Flexbox: Leverage CSS Grid and Flexbox for creating responsive layouts with ease, allowing for dynamic arrangement of content based on available space.
- Media Queries: Define media queries to apply specific styles based on viewport width, height, orientation, and resolution. Test designs across various breakpoints to ensure consistency and responsiveness.
- Image Optimization: Optimize images for different screen sizes and resolutions using srcset and sizes attributes to serve appropriately sized images based on device capabilities.
- Progressive Enhancement: Apply progressive enhancement techniques to ensure basic functionality and content accessibility across all devices, with enhancements tailored for more capable devices.
Testing and Validation
- Device Agnostic Testing: Test designs across a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, desktops, and different browsers, to ensure consistent rendering and usability.
- Usability Testing: Conduct usability testing with real users across different devices and contexts to gather feedback and identify usability issues.
- Performance Monitoring: Monitor website performance metrics, such as load times and page rendering speed, across various devices and network conditions to identify areas for optimization.
- Accessibility Compliance: Ensure compliance with our accessibility standards. Use the testing methods described there.
- Localization Considerations: Test designs in different languages and locales to ensure proper display and functionality, including text rendering and content alignment, for global audiences.