Adaptive vs. Responsive Design: Which is Best and Why?

Jason Withrow


Responsive and Adaptive Design are all the rage these days, but most folks don’t really know what they mean. Consequently, when they ask a design firm to build a responsive or an adaptive website, they end up with what they asked for, but not what they really need. What if neither was the right design approach? What’s another alternative? While Responsive and Adaptive focus more on the technical aspects of fitting a website on the various screen sizes, the Task-Oriented Design approach considers the different content, context, and usage models of the various devices and optimizes a site for each usage model, instead of merely squeezing the same site onto three different platforms. About the only sites that scale well in a Responsive or Adaptive Design are Consumption sites requiring simple user interactions. Responsive and Adaptive are terrible approaches for Interaction sites with complex, task-oriented interactions. Such complex sites are better served with Task-Oriented designs that produce different types of interaction models optimized for each device’s tasks and usage model. Many sites and apps fail miserably because they do not consider the task environment or device usage models. So, before jumping on the Responsive or Adaptive Design bandwagon, make sure it’s the right approach for your site.