Devportals on Different Devices: Responsiveness
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In case of developer portals, mobiles are mostly used for browsing, reading documentation or watching tutorials. Most portals are optimized for desktop and tablet, which means that they look and work the best on these devices. When you are working with code it is handier to use a display, keyboard and a mouse than tapping a small screen, so it is not surprising that for developers the first choice of tool is a desktop computer: they can copy the code snippets or try them out instantly.
Internal portals - which make up a huge part of all developer portals - can usually be reached only from the secure network of the company. This again implies that users mostly work on their usual workplaces and the work device is mainly a desktop.
Despite all this, we should always consider users working on a touchscreen. Every interactive graphical element should be tappable and not just clickable. We suggest using at least 44px x 44 px sized interactive elements throughout the portal consistently because this is the minimal size that is easily tappable with 1 finger.
Also, thinking about readability and visibility, the body texts should be around 15px and the images optimized for retina screens to obtain a good user experience. But let’s talk about these later.
Regarding the structure of the developer portal, we suggest using a responsive, dynamic layout, where the components rearrange themselves and adapt to the different screen resolutions, filling in all the space. These fluid layouts look great on every device and browser.
The dynamic layout allows a highly flexible display of the content. It helps to deal with the different content lengths/amounts and provides an opportunity to easily add more content, such as:
Visual page builders in a CMS (for Drupal: Paragraphs, Layout Builder, for Wordpress: Divi, Visual Composer page builder, etc.) also help you to reach the desired look of a certain page and create a responsive layout. You don’t even need programming skills, just add the predefined page sections and elements, and adjust their appearance. If set properly, the portal will be responsive and look good on different screen resolutions. In some page builders you can even set how a section should behave and look like on various devices.
With a visual page builder you can usually:
When we use a responsive, dynamic layout, the mobile version will look similar to the desktop one, but the content, the different boxes and sections will be rearranged. When the screen width passes a breakpoint, they drop under one another.
However, there are solutions that we need to re-think completely. For example, the look and usage of the header, menu bar and the sidebar navigation (if there is a sidebar menu) should be totally different on mobile.
Because of the lack of space, we suggest creating a unique header for mobile, where the menu points are combined and appear inside a hamburger menu dropdown. We often use meaningful icons on the mobile version instead of the longer texts and big buttons (e.g. login, logout, profile, search) to spare space.
Some examples on great solutions:
The sidebar also needs modifications because on mobile we can’t use a 2 (or more) column layout. In most cases, the mobile version of the sidebar navigation can look almost the same as the desktop version but it should work differently. For example, it can be hidden by default and opened up by clicking on an icon.
The mobile version of large, multi-column tables and the swagger UI can also be improved as the whole data table won’t fit into the small screen width. The easiest solution is to keep the data table as it is and use swipe gestures to scroll through the table horizontally or simply just shorten the table.
You can read about other solutions for responsive data tables in this article.
If there is no mobile support at all (e.g. in case of internal developer portals), don’t forget to make a page that informs the users about this.
We hope that this article post provided you with useful thoughts and samples about the behavior of developer portal interfaces on different devices and explained why we prefer a fluid, flexible layout.
What comes next?
In the upcoming article, we will dive deeper into the structure of developer portals: we will show examples for 3-column and centered layouts, and talk about navigation solutions and common industry patterns regarding developer portal page types.
If you have questions or would like to work with us, contact us!
Developer Portal: Design Guide Series In this series you will learn about common design patterns, get an insight into Pronovix' project work related experience, and learn how we tackle the design of a developer portal user interface.
Gyöngy is a Senior Designer. She enjoys working with UX researchers, developers and content writers to find the best visual interpretation of an idea. Although she is passionate about design, she likes to maintain balance between design, functionality and content.
She graduated as a computer program designer and specialized in image processing. This IT background helps her establish an efficient workflow between the design and development phases of projects.
Before entering the company she has worked as a webdesigner and mobile application designer, so she has been working as a designer altogether for 10 years now.
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