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Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

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Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#121

Post by ChrisNorstrom »

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 exactly how I started, with the low-end mobile and worked my way up. Check out a little project I made using css media queries. http://www.TimeForZen.com (resize the window width to mimic tablet and smart phone widths)

It didn't defeat user expectation, it didn't cost more and take longer, it works better than a non responsive design would, it doesn't really save any bandwidth but it does make code maintenance easy, and it's NOT a compromise.

I can see some of his points when applied to more complicated non-blog sites with ads and sidebars. Rather than say "responsive design isn't worth it" he should have written it from the perspective of "responsive design isn't always enough".

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#124

Post by bicknergseng »

Xurinos wrote: post #117
cleverjake wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

I think you bring up some interesting points, but I just want to address the "Do we think someone could create a competitor to ebay with a "better" site design and steal ebay's crowd?" line.

eBay isn't successful because of design or lack of design. It's successful because it's where people go to sell or buy in an online auction format. Same thing for Craigslist.

Yet look at Apple, specifically the iPhone and iPod. The smartphone and mp3 player were not new innovations, but Apple's design and marketing built the world's richest company on them.

TL;DR: Design makes all the difference. Design makes none of the difference.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#125

Post by ShirtlessRod »

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.

Why do so many responses seem to be "well, that's just a bad example of it"? It reminds me of the similar "well, they're just not a true conservative/liberal".

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#126

Post by mikeleeorg »

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.

Is it just me, or is double-tapping on text still not usable enough? Every time I do that, my finger inadvertently slides horizontally instead of vertically, and I need to re-center the text to continue reading.

This is one of the main reasons I love readers like Instapaper.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#128

Post by CamperBob2 »

mnicole wrote: post #41
lovamova wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

This is a really weird argument

No, it's pretty much on target. Sidebars need to go away.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#129

Post by drivebyacct2 »

ShirtlessRod wrote: post #125
mistercow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Why do so many responses seem to be "well, that's just a bad example of it"? It reminds me of the similar "well, they're just not a true conservative/liberal".

So the converse is true instead? eMachines are PCs, thus all PCs suck?

Yeah, some responsive web designs suck. Some are good. Raging against all responsive web design is as silly as raging against all grouped and stereotyped things.

Re: Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It

#130

Post by mistercow »

ShirtlessRod wrote: post #125
mistercow wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Why do so many responses seem to be "well, that's just a bad example of it"? It reminds me of the similar "well, they're just not a true conservative/liberal".

Except that skrebbel said "some half-arsed mobile layout", which automatically narrows us down to the cases where responsive design is implemented poorly. It is ridiculous to argue against a design technique because sometimes the technique is executed badly, and that's the argument that skrebbel's comment put forward.

And no, it isn't in any way similar to "no true Scotsman". There is a pretty simple and clear definition of what responsive design is, and that goalpost does not move from example to example. There are cases of responsive design that interfere with the user. There are other cases where you would only notice that it's responsive if you actually compared the site on mobile vs. on the desktop. The latter is good design, while the former is bad design.

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