Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#81

Post by skrebbel » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 4:36 PM UTC

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.

Note that the author is a wordpress blogger. He may be referring to traditional web sites more than the average HN'er, to who the entire web consists of apps (and a few blogs over there in the corner). I believe that his point has a lot more merits when considering web sites than when considering web apps.

For example, my favourite online newspapers on my cellphone are those which don't default to some half-arsed mobile layout.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#82

Post by comex » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 4:44 PM UTC

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.

Yep, the inline images seem to have disabled my mobile browser's magic reflow thing. On the other hand, that suggests that the article should have narrower rows of text even on desktop (95 characters per line is on the high side of recommended widths for legibility; not unreasonable, but suboptimal), and usually I prefer to read desktop sites since zooming is actually a nice way to navigate around content - better than dealing with usually buggy and often limited mobile sites. In the example in the post, I would have much preferred to double tap once to read the text on Cats who Code than to have to scroll all the way down to find awkwardly laid out sidebar content.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#83

Post by AJ007 » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 4:54 PM UTC

kellishaver wrote: post #19

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…

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…

I decided to try converting some of my site designs to bootstrap recently, instead of having one of our developers do it. I haven't actually coded the HTML/CSS design on an entire page in 3 or 4 years now (not counting simple stuff) and this was light years easier than I ever remember. If responsive design is hard, your doing it wrong.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#84

Post by Dove » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:00 PM UTC

A lot of this article seems to be making the point, "My iPhone handles non-responsive websites well." Which is cool for your iPhone. My Kindle 2 is not as good at it.

There's progress to be made on both sides of the problem: websites adjusting to devices, and devices handling websites that don't adjust. That iPhone is good at the second half of that is cool and all, but I think it would be a big mistake to base your whole website's mobile strategy on just iPhone.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#85

Post by flexxaeon » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:01 PM UTC

I can only assume that this was written by a developer who does not really use their mobile device to browse the web much, if at all. In 2008 I was "developing" for mobile web, but not actually using mobile web, and would have agreed with all of the OP's points. As I started to actually become a user, the benefits of responsive design became quite obvious.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#86

Post by thesash » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:02 PM UTC

Data or it didn't happen. There is 0 data to back up any of these points. If you're basing your design decisions on generalizations in 2012, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#87

Post by jblesage » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:06 PM UTC

Ironically, that scrolling social media box on the side was covering some of the text while reading this on my galaxy s, leaving me wishing you had implemented some kind of responsive design.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#88

Post by wonderyak » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:09 PM UTC

davedx wrote: post #32

nhangen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Indeed. I consider myself fairly well informed compared to most of my peers, but the sheer choice of technologies for building modern web apps (responsiveness, other front-end UX considerations) is daunting. I'm trying to build up a list of modern web design/development links for myself, but I'm already lost. The parent comment about "modernizr" made me sigh with frustration: yet another tool/tech I don't know about…

I don't meant to be rude but if you are not familiar with Modernizr and you work with markup; you are probably nowhere near as well informed as you think you are.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#89

Post by bicknergseng » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

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…

I would argue 1 even in the case of users that have seen mobile sites before. Unless the desktop version of the site is completely unusable on a mobile device (which to me points to bad design anyway), I've hated mobile site experiences... the reality is that good mobile site design is the exception rather than the rule. Take eBay for example. The mobile site makes me feel like I'm on WAP and not a device with more power than the Space Shuttle.

On that note, I'm really curious what "continue to full site" clickthroughs are across the internet. I could be the only one thinking this way.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#90

Post by cleverjake » Tue, Sep 25, 2012, 5:30 PM UTC

bicknergseng wrote: post #89

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…

I would argue 1 even in the case of users that have seen mobile sites before. Unless the desktop version of the site is completely unusable on a mobile device (which to me points to bad design anyway), I've hated mobile site experiences... the reality is that good mobile site design is the exception rather than the rule. Take eBay for example. The mobile site makes me feel like I'm on WAP and not a device with more p…

That is mostly because eBay is a generally badly designed site. They have one of the most averse-to-change user bases on top of it, so bad decisions stick for a longtime.

Check out amazon, or google for wonderful mobile versions of sites.

I don't understand your question - are you saying how to full site click throughs work? Most of the time it sets a cookie or a query string that overrides the session 'isMobile' value. If you meant something else - please elaborate.