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Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

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Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#101

Post by randomdata »

OhArgh wrote: post #22
notjustanymike wrote: post #7

This article lost me the moment he quoted wikipedia to explain responsive design. This is not 8th grade, come up with your own definition if you're such an expert. The rest of article was downhill too. Claiming the full site looks fine on your iPhone is akin to saying "It works on my machine!". It's pretty much a waste of time from top to bottom.

Yea that annoyed me too. What if I can't afford and iPhone with Retina display?

Out of curiosity, what cell phone that meets the criteria can you afford? The iPhone 4 seems to go for about $200 used, or "free" if you want to tie it to a cell contract – since you are buying a cell phone, that seems like something you will need anyway. There doesn't seem to be a lot of margin for a lower-cost device there.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#102

Post by jclem »

TheFuture wrote: post #98

I too am having lots of doubts on responsive design. I've yet to see an example of a significantly popular and non-trivial website implement responsive in a convincing way. Anyone arguing that "they're just doing a bad responsive design" I think it missing the point. Responsive almost means it has to be bad in some way, because it is a compromise of design between 2 very different devices, not just in screen size but…

http://bostonglobe.com

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#103

Post by programminggeek »

It does cost more, it does take longer, but it is basically worth it if only because you are delivering a better user experience on every device. That is the point of responsive design.

Also, to that end, a good responsive design is not going to destroy your ability to navigate the page. It should make it easier.

The hard part of responsive design is dealing with pages that don't always have the same layout. It is a lot of manual tweaking and better tools and frameworks are needed to make responsive design faster, easier, cheaper. It's still largely a new technique.

But, after being knee deep in a responsive site redesign from the ground up, it's totally worth it for the end user.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#104

Post by wyck »

I actually agree with the juxt of what he is saying, though the article could have been better, maybe with a more in depth analysis of user experiences, examples and actual data.

If you have a modern mobile browser and if the site itself does not meet any special mobile criteria/demographic/call-to-action, let's be honest this is the vast majority, then the default experience actually trumps the responsive one.

ps. I say this having a mildly popular responsive framework on github, and I don't care because I often prefer non responsive BUT well build sites in the default view on mobile.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#105

Post by bicknergseng »

cleverjake wrote: post #90
bicknergseng wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' val…

No disagreements on eBay's terrible design. If you go to 5 different pages on their desktop site you'll get 5 fully different designs.

OK, let's take Amazon (I was going to complain about Google's image search for mobile but I just checked it and it addressed the issues I had with it... still no pinch to zoom, though). On the desktop site, I get a home page filled with images of products that I'm probably interested in based on my previous Amazon habits. On the mobile site, I mostly get text with a small image advertising the Kindle Fire. If I browse to books, I get ~5 list items on the screen at one time, vs the desktop version (on my mobile) that gives me a landing page of bestsellers and books tailored to my interests. There's a whole layer of functionality missing on the mobile version for the sake of formatting that I don't honestly need. The reason why the original iPhone's web browser was so amazing was that it made it comfortable and efficient to browse full desktop web pages on a small screen via the whole pinch to zoom action. On a text heavy page, if I double tap it reflows the whole page to fit text on my screen.

Now, I'm not totally against mobile sites. I've seen some truly wonderfully designed mobile sites like Google's main page and some from design centric companies who don't rely heavily on long lists or grids of items. But I would generally agree with the OP that dedicated mobile sites are largely unnecessary at best and a design nightmare most of the time that actually serves to degrade the expected user experience. Users want to pinch to zoom and drag and double tap.

No I'm asking about click through rates to full sites. As in, what percentage of users choose to stay on the mobile version and what percentage click through to the full desktop site? What percentage of users know how to change their user agent on their mobile browser to only get desktop sites (probably minuscule).

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#106

Post by mtnboy »

I wrote a fairly elaborate newsletter regarding the lessons I learned from responsive design. There are no absolutes when it comes to this. The decision varies from site to site.

If you believe that all websites should be responsive, then please read my newsletter. How my revenues went from $25k to $19k / month average when we redesigned and went responsive. How changing it back has now boosted the revenues even higher than before.

http://eepurl.com/przMX

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#107

Post by ceworthington »

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 totally agree with this.

When I shifted my design thinking to use this approach to building UX, I found not only were my sites/apps easier to bring to mobile but the desktop versions were usually better as well. Mobile first designs often lead to better designs on desktop, at least in my experience so far (with content-heavy apps).

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#108

Post by lmm »

lucisferre wrote: post #96
ilyay wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 avai…

I'm really tired of everyone talking in absolutes (also the overuse of the word terrible). The right answer is (almost) always "it depends". It depends how critical that functionality is to the core value the site provides. It depends how appropriate it is to a mobile platform experience. As a contrived example I'd probably be perfectly happy if I could only browse, read, and maybe vote on HN if the mobile experience…

>As a contrived example I'd probably be perfectly happy if I could only browse, read, and maybe vote on HN if the mobile experience of reading was significantly improved. I never want to write a comment from my phone, I hate typing on it. Not a great example since a textarea isn't complex and it's easy to add to a mobile layout, I just want to get across the point that not all interaction is appropriate or important on every platform.

But you didn't get across the point, because your example isn't true. I want to post on HN from my phone; heck, I've posted on HN from my kindle before. I wouldn't give that up for all the optimized mobile design in the world.

Grandparent is right, an absolute is appropriate here. Provide all the functionality of your desktop site, or I won't use your mobile site.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#109

Post by blago »

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…

My personal experience is that more often than not I end up searching for the "Desktop version" link. Especially on websites I'm familiar with. It would appear that "poorly implemented" is the norm. Bottom line: I suffer.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#110

Post by [deleted] »

mistercow wrote: post #95
skrebbel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mob…

>For example, my favourite online newspapers on my cellphone are those which don't default to some half-arsed mobile layout. Again, that's an argument against bad responsive design, not responsive design in general.

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