Ask most teams where design reviews happen and the honest answer is: on a laptop. The desktop build gets checked, discussed and revised. Mobile gets a quick look on someone's phone near the end.
Which is odd, because for most sites, mobile is where the majority of visitors are. It's also where the build is most likely to have drifted from the design.
Why mobile drifts more
The design often doesn't exist
Plenty of Figma files have a full desktop design and a mobile version of the homepage only. Every other page's mobile layout gets decided during the build, by the developer, under deadline. That isn't drift from the design. It's the absence of one.
Breakpoints between the frames
Even when mobile is designed, it's usually designed at one width. Real phones and tablets fall in between. A layout that works at 375px and at 1440px can look broken at 820px, and nobody designed that width.
Spacing scales differently
Fluid type and spacing make sites feel polished across sizes, but they also mean values change continuously. A gap that's 48px on desktop might be 24px on mobile by design, or 31px by accident.
Agree three widths to review at: a common phone width, a tablet width and a desktop width. Check every key page at all three, not just at whatever size your browser happens to be.
How to stay on top of it
Design mobile for every template
Not every page, but every distinct template. It gives the developer a target instead of a guess.
Review on a real phone
Browser resizing is useful, but a real device shows tap targets, scrolling and text size the way a visitor experiences them.
Compare page by page
Put the mobile build next to the mobile frame, the same way you would for desktop.
Check the in-between sizes
Drag the browser through the widths between your designed breakpoints and watch for anything that breaks.
Responsive Review
5 checksAgree what counts as a match
Mobile is where a pixel-perfect standard breaks down. Devices vary, text renders differently and fluid layouts change continuously. Holding the build to an exact match at every width isn't realistic, and trying to will burn time on differences no visitor would notice.
A better standard is faithful to the design at the designed widths, and sensible in between. Agree that with the client early, and the review conversation gets much simpler.
Bring the designer into mobile review
Developers make dozens of small mobile decisions that the design never covered. Most are good. Some aren't what the designer would have chosen. A short mobile review with the designer, page by page, catches those before the client does, and keeps the designer's intent intact on the screen most people will actually use.
It doesn't need to be long. Half an hour with the staging site on a phone and the Figma file on a laptop covers a lot of ground.
Frank shows each live page side by side with the Figma frame you mapped to it, so reviewing the build against the design is a page-by-page job rather than a hunt through the file. Its accessibility check also flags tap targets under 24×24px. Get started with Frank →
Give Mobile the Review It Deserves
Review the build against the design at the sizes your visitors actually use.
