Responsive web design – an explorative analysis from an aesthetic, functional and technical perspective

Abstract: Since the third-generation’s mobile telephony was introduced, the use of the Internet changed significantly. Websites can nowadays be viewed from a wide range of devices that differ in type and size. This puts a demand on the design of web pages because the page should be equally useful regardless of the type of device used to view the page. Responsive web design is a design method that strives towards solving this problem by allowing web pages to customize their visual representation based on the medium used to interact with them. Although it is a well-used tool in web development, it is relatively unexplored from a technical, aesthetic and functional perspective. The goal of this thesis is to improve the situation by exploring the possibilities and limitations of responsive web design in relation to the above perspectives. To achieve this, common definitions of this approach were collected, together with an implementation of a responsive product. To give structure to the analysis, the development process followed the Double Diamond approach together with two experiential qualities, fluidity and naturality. By using media queries together with scalable units in the implementation, a fully responsive portfolio website was created. The creation of the product gave room for understanding possibilities and limitations of responsive web design. The encountered problems in this thesis, such as detecting different types of devices, concludes that responsive web design is yet not a fully developed approach and contains problems that limit the implementation.