Responsive layout: a practical guide

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. This guide covers what responsive layout actually involves, where it usually goes wrong, and how to tell whether yours is in reasonable shape.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. Nothing below assumes a large team or a large budget — most of it is a decision somebody has to make and then write down.

What is actually at stake

Design for the smallest screen first and let the layout grow. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

For most businesses the question is not whether this matters but how much of it is worth doing right now. That depends on what you are trying to achieve in the next few months, not on best practice in the abstract. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets.

What good looks like

Breakpoints should follow your content, not device names. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

The measurable part of design is whether people can find what they came for and act on it without hesitating. The version that works in practice is usually less elaborate than the version described in the guides.

Test on a real phone, not just a resized browser window. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

A working checklist

If you want a quick read on where you stand, work through this. Anything you cannot answer confidently is where to start.

• Design for the smallest screen first and let the layout grow
• Breakpoints should follow your content, not device names
• Test on a real phone, not just a resized browser window
• Someone is named as the owner, not just assumed to be
• There is a date in the calendar to review it again
• The decision and the reasoning behind it are written down somewhere findable
• You could explain the current setup to a new hire in five minutes

The mistakes we see most

The most common failure is not doing this badly. It is doing it once, during a launch, and never revisiting it. Circumstances move, the setup does not, and the gap widens quietly until something breaks or somebody notices the numbers.

• It was configured during a launch and has not been touched since
• Different people in the business believe different things are true about it
• There is no way to tell whether the last change helped or hurt
• The only person who understands it has left, or is about to

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How we approach it

On our projects this gets handled during the build rather than added afterwards, because retrofitting it costs several times more than including it. We write down what was decided and why, so the next person to touch it is not guessing.

If you are working with someone else, the questions worth asking are simple: who owns this, how will we know it is working, and what happens when it needs to change?

What to do next

Pick the single item from the checklist above that would cause the most trouble if it turned out to be wrong. Fix that one, confirm it worked, then move on. If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.