A high-quality user experience is what businesses aim for when designing different online services or platforms. If you want the best user experience, sticking to one design for all screen sizes is a terrible idea.
The screen dimensions for a smartphone, tablet, and computer are different, but you need to cater to all of them. As difficult as the process may appear, you will be surprised how much it has evolved over the years. Moreover, creating responsive prototypes from Figma designs is relatively easy now, thanks to the numerous online tools.
Today, we focus on how to create responsive prototypes with Figma in this article. By skipping the coding aspect with FigmaFy, you can save a lot of time and resources. We will defer the process of responsive prototypes but first, let's quickly glance at how life before responsive designs had been.
Table Of Content
- Evolution Of Designs
- Building Responsive Designs With Figma
- Creating Responsive Prototypes
- Final Word
TLDR
- The process of designing websites, web applications, and mobile applications has evolved a long way.
- The article explores this evolution and then sheds light on how online services like FigmaFy can easily convert these designs into responsive prototypes.
- Here, we introduce one such conversion platform, FigmaFy, to address the journey of Figma designs to responsive prototypes.
Evolution Of Designs
Let's begin by quickly looking at the evolution of Figma designs.
Before Responsive Designs
Web design has advanced significantly since the static pages of the late 90s. Today, web apps and sites are compatible with multiple devices and are continuously evolving.
After the rise of smartphones, developers would generally build separate websites for computers and smartphones. Both these websites were treated as two individual projects with their own domains, but sometimes they’d share the database.
The computer website would be considered the real domain when the database was separate. An example of a typical domain name would be - www.domain.com.
The other domain for mobiles came with the letter “ m” in the name—for instance, www.m.domain.com.
Henceforth, maintaining the two separate products became unnecessary. It was too much work, highly inefficient, and annoying for designers and developers.
Overview: Responsive Design
Responsive designs were introduced to end the worries of such extensive troubles. Responsive design is the process of making one website or web application that automatically fits all its device sizes and type.
Thus, designers will only have to build it once, and their job is done. As a result, one website runs everywhere, rendering the same content with slight differences on every other device.
Advantages
Here are some of the key advantages of responsive designs:
- The domain remains the same irrespective of the type of device. A user will not find a mobile website on his laptop simply because he copied the website from his phone and shared it with his laptop.
- Since the code automatically works to fit itself, the website will also suffice for any future devices. The case of building two separate sites or apps for laptops and mobiles will be long gone.
- Including device size and type ensures the project adjusts to low-resolution laptops. The content expands to cover the screen even if the displays are limited to 4k or 8k.
Building Responsive Designs With Figma
Figma has gained popularity as an excellent platform for designing websites and app screens, offering quite a few advantages over static images.
For instance, you can reuse the styles and components and prototype the design. As a result, you can easily visualize what the final product may look like, make changes accordingly and then develop the designs. Not to mention, Figma enables you to create responsive designs.
Figma creates responsive designs based on the size of the devices. So altering the size of objects and frames changes the responsive design altogether.
Size-based responsive designs enable you to see the changes in real-time while designing. On the other hand, a device-based responsive design calls for changing devices during the process to see the actual result.
Disadvantages Of Building Responsive Designs In Figma
Although Figma does not always reflect the architecture of real-world code, its main purpose is to accommodate the designers’ freedom of expression. Figma wants designers to freely express what they want rather than worry over DOM structures in responsive designs.
Therefore, responsive designs give you and your design team a brief idea of how the overall designs look when the devices change. However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the designs reflow every time only to fill the frames.
We understand that attending to intricate media queries and ensuring the perfect flow of content may tempt you to design separate sites for mobiles and laptops. But different phone sizes will synchronize with one another through responsive designs. Moreover, phone designs should also work quite well for tablets.
Figma is like an open playground for various responsive designs and design aspects. Even though it does not always generate the exact code for development, it acts as a guide to developers. It helps them grab a sneak peek into how the website may turn out.
So, yes, responsive designs might not always reflect the perfect picture. But as a convenient tool, Figma can surprise you with its usability and playful characteristics, especially when building responsive prototypes.
How can FigmaFy help?
At FigmaFy, our primary goal is to provide support to companies who require assistance in their web development projects, regardless of the design tool they utilize. We specialize in transforming designs from various platforms, such as Figma, into functional and polished websites or software.
We specialize in developing top-notch websites that are visually appealing and designed to be highly responsive across all devices and screen sizes. We take great care in creating websites that are cross-browser compatible, meaning that they can be accessed and utilized on any web browser.
Our team of experts ensures that each website is designed to function smoothly and seamlessly across different platforms, so users can have a consistent experience no matter how they access the site.
Our workflow involves exporting assets from the chosen design tool and transforming them into clean, error-free code. We can produce code that ranges from basic HTML5 to complex and fully functional web applications.
Final Word
In short, responsive designs are crucial for ensuring a smooth user experience, and you can focus on crafting the most beautiful designs by delegating the technical aspects to FigmaFy.
Moreover, developers can use FigmaFy as well to create bug-free products. They can continue working in any environment by exporting the project to the ready-made code.
We are prepared if you are ready to convert responsive prototypes for your designs into a website. Send us your Figma designs and see the magic for yourself. Get started today!
