31–40 of 139 posts
I have to seriously disagree with the 1st point. Give me a usable website over one that "meets my expectations", dammit! As much as I like the desktop version of let's say www.theverge.com, I can honestly say it wouldn't work on a mobile at all. It would be too cluttered, and the links too small to tap. On a side note, is there a mobile version of Hacker News out there?
Wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. A rebuttal - 1. It Defeats User Expectation This only holds true if A: your user has never seen a mobile site before (and if they are on a phone thats true for about ~0.5s), or B: if your responsive design is poorly implemented. A well designed site will be intuitive. 2 - It Costs More and Takes Longer Let's assume that you have customers that will use your site on a non desk…
I'm going to take exception to your 2nd point. To start, regardless of whether the experiment pays off long-term, that does not negate the fact that it does require extra design and development time. There is much more code to handle, regardless of whether you use a framework or build it bespoke. Additionally, whether you design for mobile first, or last, there is more design time required. Period. Second, both the a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't that make you think that we should revisit the sidebar to find a more effective way to navigate rather than simply telling the user that you shouldn't have any options?
> Wouldn't that make you think that we should revisit the sidebar No. The sidebar works and is effective when there's significant horizontal space, such as on a desktop screen with ample horizontal space. It just does not work when horizontal space is a premium, as is the case on smartphones (which generally barely fit a standard typographic line length at readable size in portrait)
The author raises a good point about page load times not really being minimized and lack of thought around good responsive design. However, I'm unconvinced about the rest of the arguments. For example, he notes "The first rule in usability 101 is to give the end user what they expect." Maybe for the first year or two in the smartphone era it might have been acceptable to simply provide a shrunken zoomed out version o…
With mobile-first you are optimizing for mobile, so the only extra bandwidth would be that fraction of your CSS that addresses bigger screens, so I think that his page load times is a weak point just like the first one, it all comes down to badly designed sites being bad.
That said: If your mobile phone has so much trouble displaying a 960px width static centered website (the norm on the current web), so much so, that your mobile browser demands a different design, then I posit your design isn't broken, some mobile browsers are broken.
I expect that in the near future, when resolutions get upped and mobile browsing experiences advance, responsive design becomes more and more unnecessary. To me responsive design for mobile devices seems more of a band-aid for less capable devices. Less capable devices with post-stamp sized browsers, we will soon drop in the same pile as IE6 -- Because soon we can expect any browser on any device to be able to display a 960px width static centered design just fine, without responsive design. If responsive designs stays necessary, to me it would mean the failure of mobile hardware and software manufacturers.
Wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. A rebuttal - 1. It Defeats User Expectation This only holds true if A: your user has never seen a mobile site before (and if they are on a phone thats true for about ~0.5s), or B: if your responsive design is poorly implemented. A well designed site will be intuitive. 2 - It Costs More and Takes Longer Let's assume that you have customers that will use your site on a non desk…
So many people talk about responsive design taking longer and being not worth the effort.... That's true if you start with the desktop and try and work your way backwards to the small screen, which is how a lot of designers look at it, I think. If you take a progressive enhancement approach and work your way up from low-end mobile to full-featured desktop, the process is 100x easier and the end result is, in my exper…
That said, building anything more interactive than a blog layout with it is actually very hard. It is time consuming, there is tedious work to do to tweak for each individual mobile browser quirk, and it may not be the best thing for a startup to invest time in. "Mobile first" certainly sounds nice, but "desktop first" is probably a faster more efficient route to product-market fit.
So I'd just recommend caution in how strongly we parrot "responsive/adaptive all the things" as common wisdom without discussing the possible downsides. It isn't black and white.
Wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. wrong. A rebuttal - 1. It Defeats User Expectation This only holds true if A: your user has never seen a mobile site before (and if they are on a phone thats true for about ~0.5s), or B: if your responsive design is poorly implemented. A well designed site will be intuitive. 2 - It Costs More and Takes Longer Let's assume that you have customers that will use your site on a non desk…
I'm going to take exception to your 2nd point. To start, regardless of whether the experiment pays off long-term, that does not negate the fact that it does require extra design and development time. There is much more code to handle, regardless of whether you use a framework or build it bespoke. Additionally, whether you design for mobile first, or last, there is more design time required. Period. Second, both the a…
No one is saying that it takes extra time and money. Everything that is done in your life takes time and energy. But if you can do x amount of work and get y amount of gain, where x To your second point, please see my conclusion. I agree with you.