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Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

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Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#71

Post by LaGrange »

anonymouz wrote: post #13

Personally, I do not want to see a sidebar, taking up a third of the screen, on my smartphone. I find the example that he considers fine quite unusable and would not read that on a smartphone.

Double-tap on the text. Like the article says. It really does work, quite often way better than attempts at responsive design. And then there's the reader functionality in my phone.

The issue isn't, I think, responsive design itself, it's that it's not so trivial to make it work better than device-based workarounds.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#73

Post by tharris0101 »

Didn't I read somewhere that Steve Jobs was against mobile versions of websites saying that the iPhone was designed to display the same website that you see on your computer?

I know that as a consumer, I get annoyed when a mobile version of a site comes up and the first thing I do is check for the "Desktop Site" link. I just don't trust that the developer has included everything in the mobile site that the desktop site includes.

A well designed site will look and act great on a desktop, iOS device and Android device without extra work.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#74

Post by myared »

His arguments are poor. These are the two most egregious.

(1) It Costs More and Takes Longer. Yes, designing something additional takes longer; however, if he compared the time required to add responsive code to the time it would take to setup mobile detect and an alternate theme, than this point may have some more sense even though I'd still side with responsive code.

(2) Non-Responsive Designs Usually Work. No. That's why we're having the discussion. If regular designs worked, there would not be a need.

This is a problem that a lot of companies struggle with. It's fine to criticize responsive design, but bring something to the table.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#75

Post by joshuahedlund »

The basic problem with this post is that it contains zero data about user engagement. One guy can project his own opinion about how he thinks his non-responsive site looks fine on mobile, so clearly everyone else will too, while I can project my own personal experience that I tend to find myself spending more time reading mobile-optimized blogs on my phone, so clearly everyone else will too.

It's been said a million times around these parts, but I guess I get to be the one to say it here: Get some data! Do some A/B testing! Check your bounces and pages per visits and time on site from mobile devices, then try a responsive design and see if they improve (technically, you should split and do both at the same time). What works for one site may not work for another. But projecting generalized statements with no data to back them up doesn't move anyone forward.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#76

Post by myared »

nsxwolf wrote: post #61

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, a…

Agreed, not having a choice is frustrating, and as you point out, having a capable mobile browser alleviates many of those issues.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#77

Post by heyitsnick »

uptown wrote: post #3

"I am a fan of responsive (or alternative) design in certain situations – for example, when dealing with a web application whose desktop design could not practically be contained within a mobile device’s screen." That's the whole idea.

My thoughts exactly. The article can seemingly be reduced to "Responsive design is not worth it (except when it is)"

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#78

Post by ilyay »

tzumby wrote: post #65
kellishaver wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

This is a terrible suggestion. The age of crippled, stripped down mobile sites is long gone, and smartphone users expect full functionality on their phones. If that functionality can be provided with a responsive design, that's great. If they have to use the regular website and do some zooming and panning, that's a nuisance, but one with which users are familiar. It's certainly better than not having the feature available at all, or having to hunt for a link to disable the mobile layout.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#79

Post by skrebbel »

matznerd wrote: post #56

Biggest proof that this article is wrong? I'm on my phone reading the blog post and the site doesn't scale for my screen width and it is so annoying to read because I have to keep scrolling left and right to see all of the text. I got so frustrated I didnt even continue reading the article and I left the site. That is what will happen with users when a site doesn't display properly for their device, it's a fact.

Good point, but of course installing a decent browser is the counter argument. Admittedly my 3 year old Nokia may not be very representative, but its Opera Mini version solves that problem beautifully. My hunch is that it uses heuristics to find the main text area (which nearly every site has), and adjusts the css of that block to $SCREEN_WIDTH. It's been able to do this ever since I started using it in 2009. Now, I've lived under a rock since then, but are you really saying that your mobile browser doesn't do something like that?

I believe it's such browsers that the author was referring to.

Still, admittedly, using heuristics to patch the css shouldn't really be a browser's task, so your point holds.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#80

Post by nhangen »

calinet6 wrote: post #64
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.

Actually, I think he's suggestion that we should let the hardware manufacturers and OS providers worry about scaling content to their screens/OS, rather than doing it all client side.
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