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Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

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Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#111

Post by maerek »

blauwbilgorgel wrote: post #53
splatcollision wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting that old, less capable devices are still widely used, all around the world, and will be for many years to come. Don't forget a basic principle of the web: Accessibility.

I won't: Accessibility is very important to me. Though I see a difference between access to design and access to content. I think it is fine to just serve up a reset-CSS for 2008 blackberry devices in a few years, like some now do for IE6 browsers. I don't think it is reasonable or necessary to expect designers to create responsive designs that translate to 2008 blackberry devices (or IE6 browsers) and also work on t…

You are making a very strong assumption that scaling a 960px fixed width site to a viewport on a device is an optimal solution. It's fantastic I can see the entire site on my device in landscape mode; it's a tragedy that I have to double tap on a text block to make it readable.

Designers should be working to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive interactions that get in the way of accessing content.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#112

Post by shawnjan8 »

LaGrange wrote: post #71
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.

But why require someone to double tap on the text? On a blog like this, the primary action of the user is to read the article. It's bad user experience to require an extra unnecessary step to do the primary action.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#113

Post by philjohn »

We used responsive design for the library discovery interface we produce, our UX chap did a nice presentation about the process (and why we chose a responsive web app, rather than a native app): http://www.slideshare.net/Shuckle/retrofitting-adaptive-desi... http://www.slideshare.net/Shuckle/web-app-and-responsive-des...

Well received by customers and end users. We started bottom up, rather than top down, so decided what was important and hid or removed the rest.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#114

Post by LaGrange »

shawnjan8 wrote: post #112
LaGrange wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why require someone to double tap on the text? On a blog like this, the primary action of the user is to read the article. It's bad user experience to require an extra unnecessary step to do the primary action.

Because you might have some more pressing issues to fix than that -- it's not a good experience, but, unless you did something horrible (which newspapers often do, unfortunately), it's not that bad either. It is economy of time and attention, especially as there's always a risk that your "better" version won't be good enough anyway, and people like me will use the text extraction features of the browser anyway.

Edit: I don't mean to say that it's necessarily a bad idea to go responsive -- it's just that it's not a clear, universal win.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#116

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

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…

>That's true if you start with the desktop and try and work your way backwards to the small screen

I resize my browser window to be less wide. If it looks too big, I add some CSS to fix that. I resize it to be even thinner. If it now looks too big again, I'll add some CSS to fix it. And then I'm done.

Granted, I'm a programmer, not a designer, but this is the way I do "responsive design".

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#117

Post by Xurinos »

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…

I agreed with your first post. I am also holding out for the thought that there are exceptions. Interestingly, this comment stood out to me: "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." But they have a huge userbase. Transactions are happening. This is where my confusion kicks in... People claim a site has bad design, but a ton of users actively use the service. I would venture to guess that a large percentage of those users are not tech-savvy.

So what is the measure by which we are able to claim that some site's design is "bad"? I provide the counter: large, active userbase and a lot of money moving through ebay. Perhaps not enough money goes there? Do we think someone could create a competitor to ebay with a "better" site design and steal ebay's crowd? What role does site design actually play here?

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#118

Post by lovamova »

mnicole wrote: post #69
lovamova wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 informatio…

Neither. It's just that different things needs different design approaches. An online store has nothing in common with a presentation site. Just like a real store needs shelves, an online store needs to group the information somehow. Sidebars aren't the only way to group information. I bet Apple will redesign its online store in the near future.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#119

Post by cleverjake »

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…

Extremely relevant - http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/09/mobile-friendly-sites-...

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#120

Post by nollidge »

skrebbel wrote: post #79
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'…

> of course installing a decent browser is the counter argument

That's not a counter-argument at all. That's a solution for the user, not for the developer.

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