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Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

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Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#61

Post by nsxwolf »

I just hate not having a choice. So many sites now make it impossible to see the non-mobile version, unless you have a browser that lets you fake the User-Agent, and mobile Safari isn't one of those.

This is exceptionally irritating when the browser is more than capable of displaying the full site properly, and the mobile site doesn't have all the features of the regular site.

Continuing a bit off topic on my rant, another terrible UX is finding an article you want to read in a search, tapping the link, and finding out that article isn't available in the mobile site, and simultaneously not giving an option for the full site. Taking it even further, some sites force you to download the mobile app, and only then do you find out the article isn't available in that app! I'm going to stop now - I'm getting so mad just thinking about it.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#62

Post by notjustanymike »

lucisferre wrote: post #39

A surprising (or unsurprising perhaps) number of negative responses to this article. I do see why people are so generally defensive of responsive design, I mean it just seems like the right thing to do, it fits with what we wish the commonly accepted wisdom should be. 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 t…

I agree, responsive is challenging and always worth a conversation before starting. However, his arguments in this article have no place in any meaningful discussion. He essentially puts the blinders on and claims there's nothing wrong and mobile design is unnecessary.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#64

Post by calinet6 »

cleverjake wrote: post #8

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…

It seems the whole brunt of the article is, "Eh, it's good enough the way it is." It's just lazy and useless.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#65

Post by tzumby »

kellishaver wrote: post #49
lucisferre wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Untrue in my experience, but if you're experience has been positive that's great. I've done the mobile first approach and found that for anything with interactions that are more complex than a simple blog or other content driven service it does add significant time and effort and the quality of the desktop experience typically also suffers as most of the focus is on polishing the look and feel of the mobile browser e…

There are a lot of cases where responsive design just isn't a good fit, and something with complex user interactions (like a lot of web apps) is often one of them. Responsive design is great for things like content sites, galleries, informational sites... most forms of content publishing. Anything that requires the user to actually create and/or manage large amounts of data or has a lot of interactive media, however,…

You are absolutely right about the complex user interactions. In that case the responsive design could just be informational only (hiding all the complex features that would otherwise be very hard to use on a mobile screen).

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#66

Post by shawnc »

This feels like it's arguing for limitations, and i'm never a fan of that.

The argument that responsive design is not worth it, because some people do bad responsive design (or even most do bad responsive design) is pretty odd. To carry that same sort of argument out into anything in life would land you in serious life lessons.

Yes, responsive design takes more time (no matter how you slice it). And, yes, sometimes it's not needed. Those should just be obvious to any developer worth their salt. Like everything considered when developing a website - weigh it all, figure out what's best for the project and it's users. Most definitely - time/money will be a factor in those considerations sometimes.

All I can think is the writer of this article hasn't seen how powerful responsive design can be?

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#68

Post by anonymouz »

lovamova wrote: post #34
masklinn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

Sidebars don't add anything necessary to the user experience. It's just clutter. If there's enough horizontal space, I suggest using columns instead, they fit the purpose better.

As many people, I find a long text (like a blog post sometimes is) easiest to read if it is about ~80 characters wide. My laptop has a 16:9 display, and I usually have my browser in full-screen mode with tabs in a sidebar on the left. This leaves plenty of space for a website to put a sidebar and text side by side, so I don't really mind it on the desktop.

Obviously, if the sidebar does not add much (like on many blogs), I wouldn't mind if it goes away entirely.

edit: Columns seem to be problematic when there is no well-defined "end-of-page", as on paper.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#69

Post by mnicole »

lovamova wrote: post #60
mnicole wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sidebars don't add anything necessary to the user experience. It's just clutter. This is a really weird argument; sidebars are preferable to a lot of other patterns depending on the site and doesn't at all mean the content is less important than anything else on the page.

Apple hardly use any sidebars (web/iOS/OS X). Even in the new iTunes they removed the sidebars. I can go on with the examples.

Can't tell if you're trolling at this point or if we're both misunderstanding each other. http://store.apple.com/us, the iTunes store and the App Store all rely heavily on sidebar navigation. Vertical content containers save space in addition to giving the user an area of the page that is generally relevant to what they're on the site for (shopping carts, advanced search, related content/archives, account information) without needlessly cluttering the more important horizontal space.
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