Five mistakes teams make with responsive layout

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit responsive layout.

Design decisions are the ones clients feel most confident arguing about, which makes it worth separating taste from evidence early. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• Design for the smallest screen first and let the layout grow
• Breakpoints should follow your content, not device names
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Test on a real phone, not just a resized browser window. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Making it stick

How to tell if yours is fine

Consistency is the quiet half of design work: it rarely gets complimented, and its absence is noticed immediately. Three things worth confirming about responsive layout before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Design for the smallest screen first and let the layout grow — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.