The Role of Responsive Design in Web Development

Responsive design allows software developers to build a Web page that can dynamically adapt to the size of the devices. This development philosophy enables the rendering of Web pages in a fast and optimized way, ensuring a good user experience on mobile devices, tablet and desktop. In the scope of this study, we intend to explore the main advantages and limitations associated with responsive Web design. We adopted a quantitative approach based on a questionnaire filled by 181 professionals in the industry that allowed us to identify the reasons that lead software developers to the adoption of the responsive design and also address the limitations felt by them. The results obtained indicate that offering a good user experience and increasing accessibility stands out as being the most important advantages. On the other hand, the main limitations include the compatibility with older Web browsers, the higher loading time and the difficulties in optimizing user experience. Finally, it was found that the perception of the advantages and limitations of responsive design is distinct for professionals with more professional experience in the field and for freelancer developers.

[1]  James Hartley,et al.  Some thoughts on Likert-type scales , 2014 .

[2]  Meena Sharma,et al.  Recognition of Cross Browser Inconsistency by crawling and comparing extracted attributes , 2017 .

[3]  Nancy R. Glassman,et al.  One Site Fits All: Responsive Web Design , 2014 .

[4]  Kai Hansen.  Designing responsive environments through User Experience research , 2016 .

[5]  Williamson,et al.  The Mobile Apps Industry : A Case Study , 2013 .

[6]  Matthias Schonlau,et al.  Advantages and Disadvantages of Internet Research Surveys: Evidence from the Literature , 2002 .

[7]  Harry N. Boone,et al.  Analyzing Likert Data , 2012, Journal of Extension.

[8]  Manav Rachna,et al.  Cross Browser Incompatibility: Reasons and Solutions , 2011 .

[9]  José A. Monteiro,et al.  Approaches and Principles for UX Web Experiences: A Case Study Approach , 2017, Int. J. Inf. Technol. Web Eng..

[10]  M. Tavakol,et al.  Making sense of Cronbach's alpha , 2011, International journal of medical education.

[11]  Shauvik Roy Choudhary.  Detecting cross-browser issues in web applications , 2011, 2011 33rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[12]  Stewart C. Baker,et al.  Making It Work for Everyone: HTML5 and CSS Level 3 for Responsive, Accessible Design on Your Library's Web Site , 2014 .

[13]  Esther Parra,et al.  Strategies for Mobile Web Design , 2017 .

[14]  Seonghoon Kim,et al.  Cronbach’s Coefficient Alpha , 2015 .

[15]  Bhawna Dhupia,et al.  Review of Cross-Platforms for Mobile Learning Application Development , 2015 .

[16]  William Jobe,et al.  Native Apps Vs. Mobile Web Apps , 2013, Int. J. Interact. Mob. Technol..

[17]  Sandra C. Jones,et al.  Web 2.0 adoption and user characteristics , 2012 .

[18]  Zulkefli Mansor,et al.  Adaptation of usability principles in responsive web design technique for e-commerce development , 2015, 2015 International Conference on Electrical Engineering and Informatics (ICEEI).

[19]  L. Hamilton.  Statistics with Stata , 1990 .

[20]  James White.  Going native (or not): Five questions to ask mobile application developers. , 2013, The Australasian medical journal.

[21]  Abdullah Saleh Alqahtani,et al.  E-commerce Smartphone Application , 2012 .

[22]  Achmad Nizar Hidayanto,et al.  Analysis of User Experience Quality on Responsive Web Design from its Informative Perspective , 2014 .

[23]  Riaan Rudman,et al.  Defining Web 3.0: opportunities and challenges , 2016, Electron. Libr..

[24]  Stephen J. Andriole,et al.  Business impact of Web 2.0 technologies , 2010, Commun. ACM.

[25]  Fernando Almeida,et al.  STRENGTHS AND LIMITATIONS OF QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH METHODS , 2017 .

[26]  Mick P. Couper,et al.  Some Methodological Uses of Responses to Open Questions and Other Verbatim Comments in Quantitative Surveys , 2017 .