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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 befo

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 desktop device. If that is the case - you are making users use the wrong tool for the job. A site that takes advantage of the desktop experience will not work as well on mobile. Creating a tailored experience for them will absolutely increase conversion (if your site converts anyone to anything), and at the very least, reduce frustration and eye strain. I can't speak for everyone, but the month or two of part time work it took one of my jobs to add a mobile site was paid for by the increase in sales not too much long after. Not only that, but its now built in. When the kindle fire was released, we saw great numbers on that device. Why? because the responsive design was well done and fit that device's screen great. Saying that it 'costs more' is incredibly short sighted. 3.Non-Responsive Designs Usually Work 'working' doesn't mean it can't work better. all text websites work, too. But we use images because they enhance the experience. 4. There is Often No Load Time Benefit All this is saying is that a lot of sites are done badly. This has nothing to do with the style of responsive design in general. Tools like Modernizr allow you to optionally load a number of resources that would otherwise not load. 5. It’s a Compromise Of course? All design is compromise. The goal is to make the compromise in the favor of the customer. Responsive design is not a silver bullet, and not always a good idea, depending on the site - but this article is /really / weak.

lwhi 14y ago
Thank you for writing this so I didn't have to.
kellishaver 14y ago
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 experience, an overall cleaner and more stable code base that makes for better performance across all devices/platforms.
- lixon 14y ago
  i second that :)
- lucisferre 14y ago
  Untrue in my experience, but if you're experience has been positive that's great. I've done the mobile first approach and found that for anything with interactions that are more complex than a simple blog or other content driven service it does add significant time and effort and the quality of the desktop experience typically also suffers as most of the focus is on polishing the look and feel of the mobile browser experience in addition to addressing each and every browser quirk between Android and iOS. I'm a fan of responsive/adaptive designs but based on experience just dont' feel I can always recommend the "mobile first" approach to startups. Perhaps for more established businesses that can afford the extra design effort, it's fine. I still have a lot of reservations though.
  - kellishaver 14y ago
    There are a lot of cases where responsive design just isn't a good fit, and something with complex user interactions (like a lot of web apps) is often one of them. Responsive design is great for things like content sites, galleries, informational sites... most forms of content publishing. Anything that requires the user to actually create and/or manage large amounts of data or has a lot of interactive media, however, would probably benefit more from a dedicated mobile site and/or app.
    - tzumby 14y ago
      You are absolutely right about the complex user interactions. In that case the responsive design could just be informational only (hiding all the complex features that would otherwise be very hard to use on a mobile screen).
      - ilyay 14y ago
        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 available at all, or having to hunt for a link to disable the mobile layout.
dubcanada 14y ago
Yup, can't agree more. This article is a joke.
masklinn 14y ago
> 'working' doesn't mean it can't work better. And while modern phones have become rather good at zooming on the content (which does not mean the text gets big enough, far from it, I regularly encounter blogs I can't read without using readability other other equivalent tools, because the font is too small even zoomed in) scrolling is still rather fiddly, especially one-handed: it's not rare that the scrolling "starts wrong" and I end up decentered from the column I want to read, and now I have to fiddle with positioning and zooming to get back to reading.
nhangen 14y ago
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 author and OP have lumped 100% of all websites together, and generalized the argument. Sure, responsive may be worthwhile in some cases (as the post misses), but there are many cases where it isn't worthwhile. My argument for using responsive is that yes, it's worthwhile, if and when the return is there. As a freelancer, this means I must be getting paid for the extra work. As a company owner, this means that we must see value from the resource spend, which could be in the form of better UX, more eyeballs, or more profits.
- davedx 14y ago
  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 or have time to learn.
  - wonderyak 14y ago
    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.
- cleverjake 14y ago
  And I, to yours. No one is saying that it takes extra time and money. Everything that is done in your life takes time and energy. But if you can do x amount of work and get y amount of gain, where x < y, I don't see the fact that x exists as a negative. To your second point, please see my conclusion. I agree with you.
- tokenizer 14y ago
calinet6 14y ago
It seems the whole brunt of the article is, "Eh, it's good enough the way it is." It's just lazy and useless.
- nhangen 14y ago
  Actually, I think he's suggestion that we should let the hardware manufacturers and OS providers worry about scaling content to their screens/OS, rather than doing it all client side.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    The hardware/OS-providers will almost always do a far worse job though, because they simply don't have enough information. Just using smaller pixels or hardware scaling/filtering to linearly scale down a "big browser" site typically results in an unreadable page at typical mobile screen-sizes. Useful size-adaptability is all about knowing what's important and what's not, and what constraints need to be maintained for usability. The site author knows these things very well, but the hardware / OS / browser do not.
cleverjake 14y ago
Extremely relevant - http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/09/mobile-friendly-sites-turn-visitors.html http://analytics.blogspot.com/2012/09/mobile-friendly-sites-...
bicknergseng 14y ago
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.
- cleverjake 14y ago
  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.
  - nico 14y ago
    If by google sites you mean google.com and the search results, I would agree, but anything else is usually a disaster, including pretty much all of google apps. As the article says, the good sites are not the rule, but the exception. And I think the question in the above comment was simply about wondering how many people, out of all mobile visitors to a website, click on the desktop version link (what percentage of users prefer the desktop version on their mobile devices).
  - bicknergseng 14y ago
    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).
blago 14y ago
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.

lwhi 14y ago

Thank you for writing this so I didn't have to.

kellishaver 14y ago

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 experience, an overall cleaner and more stable code base that makes for better performance across all devices/platforms.

lixon 14y ago
i second that :)
lucisferre 14y ago
Untrue in my experience, but if you're experience has been positive that's great. I've done the mobile first approach and found that for anything with interactions that are more complex than a simple blog or other content driven service it does add significant time and effort and the quality of the desktop experience typically also suffers as most of the focus is on polishing the look and feel of the mobile browser experience in addition to addressing each and every browser quirk between Android and iOS. I'm a fan of responsive/adaptive designs but based on experience just dont' feel I can always recommend the "mobile first" approach to startups. Perhaps for more established businesses that can afford the extra design effort, it's fine. I still have a lot of reservations though.
- kellishaver 14y ago
  There are a lot of cases where responsive design just isn't a good fit, and something with complex user interactions (like a lot of web apps) is often one of them. Responsive design is great for things like content sites, galleries, informational sites... most forms of content publishing. Anything that requires the user to actually create and/or manage large amounts of data or has a lot of interactive media, however, would probably benefit more from a dedicated mobile site and/or app.
  - tzumby 14y ago
    You are absolutely right about the complex user interactions. In that case the responsive design could just be informational only (hiding all the complex features that would otherwise be very hard to use on a mobile screen).
    - ilyay 14y ago
      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 available at all, or having to hunt for a link to disable the mobile layout.

dubcanada 14y ago

Yup, can't agree more. This article is a joke.

masklinn 14y ago

> 'working' doesn't mean it can't work better. And while modern phones have become rather good at zooming on the content (which does not mean the text gets big enough, far from it, I regularly encounter blogs I can't read without using readability other other equivalent tools, because the font is too small even zoomed in) scrolling is still rather fiddly, especially one-handed: it's not rare that the scrolling "starts wrong" and I end up decentered from the column I want to read, and now I have to fiddle with positioning and zooming to get back to reading.

nhangen 14y ago

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 author and OP have lumped 100% of all websites together, and generalized the argument. Sure, responsive may be worthwhile in some cases (as the post misses), but there are many cases where it isn't worthwhile. My argument for using responsive is that yes, it's worthwhile, if and when the return is there. As a freelancer, this means I must be getting paid for the extra work. As a company owner, this means that we must see value from the resource spend, which could be in the form of better UX, more eyeballs, or more profits.

davedx 14y ago
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 or have time to learn.
- wonderyak 14y ago
  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.
cleverjake 14y ago
And I, to yours. No one is saying that it takes extra time and money. Everything that is done in your life takes time and energy. But if you can do x amount of work and get y amount of gain, where x < y, I don't see the fact that x exists as a negative. To your second point, please see my conclusion. I agree with you.
tokenizer 14y ago

calinet6 14y ago

It seems the whole brunt of the article is, "Eh, it's good enough the way it is." It's just lazy and useless.

nhangen 14y ago
Actually, I think he's suggestion that we should let the hardware manufacturers and OS providers worry about scaling content to their screens/OS, rather than doing it all client side.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  The hardware/OS-providers will almost always do a far worse job though, because they simply don't have enough information. Just using smaller pixels or hardware scaling/filtering to linearly scale down a "big browser" site typically results in an unreadable page at typical mobile screen-sizes. Useful size-adaptability is all about knowing what's important and what's not, and what constraints need to be maintained for usability. The site author knows these things very well, but the hardware / OS / browser do not.

cleverjake 14y ago

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

bicknergseng 14y ago

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.

cleverjake 14y ago
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.
- nico 14y ago
  If by google sites you mean google.com and the search results, I would agree, but anything else is usually a disaster, including pretty much all of google apps. As the article says, the good sites are not the rule, but the exception. And I think the question in the above comment was simply about wondering how many people, out of all mobile visitors to a website, click on the desktop version link (what percentage of users prefer the desktop version on their mobile devices).
- bicknergseng 14y ago
  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).

blago 14y ago

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.