Designing Responsive Experiences

Personalization goes beyond user characteristics and behavior; it also includes how users access and view the content. Responsive design enables websites to adapt to the screen size and resolution of the user’s device. From desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones, modern web solutions must provide the optimal viewing experience. With mobile devices accounting for over half of global page views, Clarity needs to ensure that their personalized experiences are just as compelling on mobile devices as they are on desktop monitors.

This lesson explores the tools and best practices for designing responsive experiences in Liferay.

Understanding Responsive Design

Responsive design is a core requirement of modern web development for several reasons:

• Consistent User Experience: Allow users to transition between devices while maintaining the functionality and visual identity of your site. Unified design boosts user engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.
• Reduced Maintenance Overhead: Eliminate the need to create and maintain separate solutions for different end user devices. This is especially critical for personalization, where you are implementing multiple variations of experiences. By making your baseline website responsive, you save time and resources and streamline your personalization workflow.
• Enhanced Product Visibility: Search engines often prioritize mobile-friendly sites when serving search results. By prioritizing responsive design, you can boost search rankings for your experiences and draw more eyes to your content.

To help you achieve these outcomes, Liferay offers several tools for implementing responsive designs, including

• Grid System: Build page layouts of all shapes and sizes with a flexible twelve-column grid system. Achieve granular control over how your content is rendered with adaptive configurations for typography and spacing.
• Image Optimization: Serve different image resolutions and dynamically scale media for different screen sizes and lower-bandwidth connections.
• Viewport Customization: Toggle between viewport options for desktop, tablet, landscape phone, and portrait phone directly within the page editor interface. You can configure the visibility and rendering of page elements separately for each viewport.
• Screen Size Simulation: Preview any page of your site at different screen sizes using the simulation panel. You can simulate at preset resolutions, or use the autosize option to see how your page responds to changes in the size of the browser window.

By using these tools to inform your design choices, you ensure that your site experiences are ready to go on any device.

Making Site Experiences Responsive

Responsive design complements user segmentation by adding an additional layer of personalization that enhances your experiences even further. Here are some general best practice recommendations to make your site experiences more responsive, especially for mobile devices:

• Start with a General Mobile Layout: Use the responsive grid system to implement a general layout for all mobile users, and then use it as a starting point to create experiences for individual user segments. Responsive design handles the layout, while experiences handle the message.
• Avoid Fixed-Width Images: Whenever possible, use relative sizing units (vw, %, em, rem) for images so that they scale naturally with the user’s viewport.
• Optimize Media for Performance: Compress images, use lazy loading, and avoid auto-playing videos when possible to make the mobile experience faster and more engaging.
• Be Conscious of Screen Real Estate: Avoid overloading mobile experiences with content designed for desktop screens. Ensure buttons and links are large enough to tap comfortably, and limit the usage of dense grids and long carousels that can make mobile navigation unwieldy.
• Test Across Devices: Preview content using the simulation panel, and then test it with real devices (or browser-based tools) to identify layout breakage, evaluate loading speed, and assess interaction patterns.

By following these best practices, Clarity can design responsive mobile experiences without sacrificing functionality or their personalization goals.

Conclusion

Responsiveness is a critical component of modern web design and a necessary consideration for any content management team building personalized site experiences. Responsive experiences not only improve user engagement and satisfaction, but also reduce maintenance overhead for your organization. For Clarity, responsive design is the key to delivering personalized site experiences to every user, regardless of device.

Next, you’ll help Clarity make their Resources page more responsive.