5 ms·

Responsive design is great, lots of people do it badly. C'est la vie. Most are making practical decisions regarding time and cost. I can look at my analytics an

by iamben 6y ago

Responsive design is great, lots of people do it badly. C'est la vie. Most are making practical decisions regarding time and cost. I can look at my analytics and see very few people actually looking at the site between "standard" mobile and "standard" desktop sizes. Then I can look at conversion rates and figure out what's worth spending time and money on. As for the author and his predicament, why doesn't he just zoom out? I'm pretty sure every desktop browser can do that. He can make his window smaller and have the full desktop experience. Sure the text will be a bit smaller, but you can't have your cake and eat it.

SilasX 6y ago
>As for the author and his predicament, why doesn't he just zoom out? I'm pretty sure every desktop browser can do that. Oh wow, I can't believe I never thought of doing that. (Not sarcasm.) I guess I'm just accustomed to responsive design being so poor that any client side change borks eveyrthing. I just tried that on Facebook, and it actually doesn't break the site, but moves it a little more toward the usability of the old design. Thanks! Edit: With that said, "just zoom out" doesn't work on mobile: once you get to a threshold, at least iOS interprets further zoomout as "I want to see all my tabs". Bleh.
- iamben 6y ago
  Haha, no worries! :-) On mobile (Chrome/Android at least) you can tick the "Use Desktop" box and it'll display the full desktop site. You obviously have to pinch zoom in to actually read stuff (for the most part).
  - SilasX 6y ago
    Yeah I move to desktop on a lot of sites, but then n some it doesn’t make a difference because of the ugly mobile first. What’s worse, there was some iOS update that made double tap to zoom very rarely work.
- eurasiantiger 6y ago
  Pinch zoom doesn’t work for that, but you can actually set the page zoom in the aA menu on the left of the address bar.
ipaddr 6y ago
Suggesting a zoom out with smaller text is doing response design "badly". Looking at your analytics buy matrix only tells you what is working now not what you should spent money on. If you fixed your desktop version your analytics looks a lot different next month.
- iamben 6y ago
  I didn't suggest that was "good responsive design" and literally started my comment with "lots of people do it badly". The zoom out was a suggestion to fix the authors particular problem with sites that aren't doing responsive as well as he'd like. As for analytics, yes, of course. But if my CVR is currently 4% on desktop, and 4% on mobile, and 2% on tablets, maybe I want to spend some money on my tablet design. But maybe tablet traffic is SO small in the bigger picture, that the money spent getting optimised for (and maintaining) tablet sizes is better spent elsewhere. I'm not arguing for shitty design. I'm just saying it happens, and I can understand (in some cases) why.
inetknght 6y ago
> I can look at my analytics and see very few people actually looking at the site between "standard" mobile and "standard" desktop sizes. You can look at your analytics and completely misinterpret what they mean. I have a 2560x1600 screen. I almost never have a window fully maximized. I have two screens at that resolution. I almost never have a window fully maximized. I also have several 1920x1080 screens attached. I almost never have a window full maximized. I have many windows open. Some are thin -- tens of pixels. Others are wide. Some are tall, others short. Mostly though, I get really annoyed when software decides that I can't have a window that size. Your analytics aren't a useful metric for determining what a user wants to do or see.
- iamben 6y ago
  "Your analytics aren't a useful metric for determining what a user wants to do or see." They're a pretty good starting point.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    Not really. Those metrics come at the cost of spying on your users. Just ask your users what they want. Or give them the option to change it themselves.
    - mdoms 6y ago
      You're getting off track here. If you ask the users what they want (and you have reliable sampling) you're going to get the same result - very few of them will be running 550px wide browser windows.
      - inetknght 6y ago
        > You're getting off track here. No I'm not. > If you ask the users what they want (and you have reliable sampling) you're going to get the same result - very few of them will be running 550px wide browser windows. That's a very huge assumption. I know many people who would have 550px browser windows if those browser windows weren't cluttered with all sorts of garbage that won't go away when the window is resized.

by iamben 6y ago

SilasX 6y ago

>As for the author and his predicament, why doesn't he just zoom out? I'm pretty sure every desktop browser can do that. Oh wow, I can't believe I never thought of doing that. (Not sarcasm.) I guess I'm just accustomed to responsive design being so poor that any client side change borks eveyrthing. I just tried that on Facebook, and it actually doesn't break the site, but moves it a little more toward the usability of the old design. Thanks! Edit: With that said, "just zoom out" doesn't work on mobile: once you get to a threshold, at least iOS interprets further zoomout as "I want to see all my tabs". Bleh.

iamben 6y ago
Haha, no worries! :-) On mobile (Chrome/Android at least) you can tick the "Use Desktop" box and it'll display the full desktop site. You obviously have to pinch zoom in to actually read stuff (for the most part).
- SilasX 6y ago
  Yeah I move to desktop on a lot of sites, but then n some it doesn’t make a difference because of the ugly mobile first. What’s worse, there was some iOS update that made double tap to zoom very rarely work.
eurasiantiger 6y ago
Pinch zoom doesn’t work for that, but you can actually set the page zoom in the aA menu on the left of the address bar.

ipaddr 6y ago

Suggesting a zoom out with smaller text is doing response design "badly". Looking at your analytics buy matrix only tells you what is working now not what you should spent money on. If you fixed your desktop version your analytics looks a lot different next month.

iamben 6y ago
I didn't suggest that was "good responsive design" and literally started my comment with "lots of people do it badly". The zoom out was a suggestion to fix the authors particular problem with sites that aren't doing responsive as well as he'd like. As for analytics, yes, of course. But if my CVR is currently 4% on desktop, and 4% on mobile, and 2% on tablets, maybe I want to spend some money on my tablet design. But maybe tablet traffic is SO small in the bigger picture, that the money spent getting optimised for (and maintaining) tablet sizes is better spent elsewhere. I'm not arguing for shitty design. I'm just saying it happens, and I can understand (in some cases) why.

inetknght 6y ago

> I can look at my analytics and see very few people actually looking at the site between "standard" mobile and "standard" desktop sizes. You can look at your analytics and completely misinterpret what they mean. I have a 2560x1600 screen. I almost never have a window fully maximized. I have two screens at that resolution. I almost never have a window fully maximized. I also have several 1920x1080 screens attached. I almost never have a window full maximized. I have many windows open. Some are thin -- tens of pixels. Others are wide. Some are tall, others short. Mostly though, I get really annoyed when software decides that I can't have a window that size. Your analytics aren't a useful metric for determining what a user wants to do or see.

iamben 6y ago
"Your analytics aren't a useful metric for determining what a user wants to do or see." They're a pretty good starting point.
- inetknght 6y ago
  Not really. Those metrics come at the cost of spying on your users. Just ask your users what they want. Or give them the option to change it themselves.
  - mdoms 6y ago
    You're getting off track here. If you ask the users what they want (and you have reliable sampling) you're going to get the same result - very few of them will be running 550px wide browser windows.
    - inetknght 6y ago
      > You're getting off track here. No I'm not. > If you ask the users what they want (and you have reliable sampling) you're going to get the same result - very few of them will be running 550px wide browser windows. That's a very huge assumption. I know many people who would have 550px browser windows if those browser windows weren't cluttered with all sorts of garbage that won't go away when the window is resized.