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Responsiveness & Building Responsive Websites Using Flutter
Responsiveness & Building Responsive Websites Using Flutter

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Introduction
Day by day, the user’s journey across the internet is getting complicated one. Multitasking is unavoidable piece of a user journey. People hop between devices accessing the web from smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, TVs, and even smartwatches. To provide the most satisfying user experience, you have to make sure that your website looks equally good on screens of all shapes and sizes. That’s why it is important to have a website with a responsive design.

What is a Responsive Design?
Responsive design is something which gives same look and feel (user experience) to user irrespective whether its rendered-on web or on mobile. It also ensures to give same look and feel on multiple devices, browsers, screen sizes, resolutions & layouts.

Is Responsive Design and Adaptive Design same?
Its often confusing but are different. Responsive design is single flexible design which gets adjusted as per screen sizes and layouts. In adaptive for every screen size, there is individual template which get used for that specific resolution and layout.

3 Key Components of Responsiveness:

  1. Media query
  2. Web browser
  3. Responsive web interface itself

Key Benefits of being responsive:

  • Multiple versions need not to be maintained. Same code base for multiple devices, layouts
  • Faster development with lesser cost
  • As per various reports most of the traffic (>40%), is initiated through mobile. With responsive design, it offers better flexibility at low cost as its now becoming a key norm/guideline to ensure same user experience for small screens
  • Improved performance. Often its observed that maximum mobile users have shorter attention/interaction spans. If loading time is high, users are tending to move away from the website permanently. With responsive design with usage of modern techniques such as caching & responsive image display, performance is improved to good extent and pages are loaded faster. Thus, availability of business is more
  • Customer Conversion Rate – User definitely don’t want to opt or subscribe for service if its device specific. Responsive and optimized design always provides better and consistent user experience across devices. So, such single, professional & secure websites are seen interacted for a longer time by the users and tend to do more transactions & creates a win-win situation
  • Easier Analytics – where website traffic is coming from, how users interact/deal with website helps often with analytics tools to observe behavior and optimize the website. Single responsive website ease outs the monitoring process (getting traffic, conversion paths, redirections etc.) and integrating with analytics tools is its quite easy to get consolidated report so that you can actually see how your code/contents are behaving on multiple devices and their overall performance
  • Improved Search Engine Optimization – With lesser drop rates and stronger backlinks it actually translates into higher search ranking. It has another aspect of avoiding duplicate contents due to single responsive website which drastically reduces negative impact w.r.t search ranking
  • Now a days most of the mobiles & Tabs are supported with HTML5. Responsive user design helps & eases user to understand viewing content within HTML5 web applications without an internet connection ( Using HTML5 application cache)


Designing Responsive websites using Flutter
Flutter allows you to create apps that self-adapt to the device’s screen size and orientation.

There are two basic approaches to creating Flutter apps with responsive design:

  1. Using the LayoutBuilder class.
  2. Use the MediaQuery.of() method in your build functions.

Other useful widgets and classes for creating a responsive UI:

  • AspectRatio
  • CustomSingleChildLayout
  • CustomMultiChildLayout
  • FittedBox
  • FractionallySizedBox
  • LayoutBuilder
  • MediaQuery
  • MediaQueryData
  • OrientationBuilder

Designing Responsive websites Flutter Vs Other Development Platforms

Difference between Flutter versus Other Mobile Development Platforms:

  • Even if you are not an Android or iOS developer, by this point, you should have gotten an idea of how these platforms handle responsiveness natively.
  • In Android, to display multiple UI views on a single screen, you use Fragments, which are like reusable components that can run inside an Activity of an app.
  • You can run multiple Fragments inside an Activity, but you cannot run multiple Activities in a single app at the same time.
  • In iOS, UISplitViewController, which manages child view controllers in a hierarchical interface, is used for controlling multiple view controllers.
  • Flutter has introduced the concept of. They are the building blocks that can be connected to build an entire app.
  • In Flutter, every screen and even the entire app are also widgets!


Widgets are reusable by nature, so you do not need to learn any other concepts while building responsive layouts in Flutter.

Illustration:

IMG1

Observation:
By using all the widgets belonging to responsiveness we can build our application. Not only you can build your web design application but also you can improvise your design for different types of screen sizing for your mobile, web as well as ios applications.
 

Recommendations:
While working with responsiveness, some of the amazing Flutter plugins that you can use are as follows (These plugins are available in the pub.dev) –

  1. Device_preview
  2. Breakpoint
  3. Responsive_builder
  4. Responsive_framework
  5. Responsive_sizer
  6. Sizer

-By Sachin Mohol


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