Why Responsive Design Is Not Worth It
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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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This is why responsive design is hard, because doing it well means far more than just changing the layout, size and visibility of elements. It is a different interaction paradigm and generally will need to be treated as such to maintain a quality experience.
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.
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".
I've built responsive sites in Bootstrap, Foundation and "without a net" and I wouldn't presume to tell anyone what's hard or not about responsive design or even if I'm doing it right or wrong. Look if out-of-the-box Bootstrap is good enough for your needs (and more importantly your user's) awesome. That's called an anecdote.
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).
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".
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.
Because I'd like to say that managing two projects, be it two code bases that both have to be created and configured, takes just as long if not longer, than simply building the edge cases needed for an intuitive responsive site.
But there's points for both methods in my books. I just think not accounting for mobile either way is ridiculous (unless a client is unwilling to pay for it).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
I believe it's such browsers that the author was referring to.
Still, admittedly, using heuristics to patch the css shouldn't really be a browser's task, so your point holds.
That's not a counter-argument at all. That's a solution for the user, not for the developer.
That's the whole idea.
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.
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.
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.
This is exceptionally irritating when the browser is more than capable of displaying the full site properly, and the mobile site doesn't have all the features of the regular site.
Continuing a bit off topic on my rant, another terrible UX is finding an article you want to read in a search, tapping the link, and finding out that article isn't available in the mobile site, and simultaneously not giving an option for the full site. Taking it even further, some sites force you to download the mobile app, and only then do you find out the article isn't available in that app! I'm going to stop now - I'm getting so mad just thinking about it.
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.
This is one of the main reasons I love readers like Instapaper.
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.
No.
The sidebar works and is effective when there's significant horizontal space, such as on a desktop screen with ample horizontal space. It just does not work when horizontal space is a premium, as is the case on smartphones (which generally barely fit a standard typographic line length at readable size in portrait)
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.
No, it's pretty much on target. Sidebars need to go away.
Obviously, if the sidebar does not add much (like on many blogs), I wouldn't mind if it goes away entirely.
edit: Columns seem to be problematic when there is no well-defined "end-of-page", as on paper.
I know that as a consumer, I get annoyed when a mobile version of a site comes up and the first thing I do is check for the "Desktop Site" link. I just don't trust that the developer has included everything in the mobile site that the desktop site includes.
A well designed site will look and act great on a desktop, iOS device and Android device without extra work.
That said, building anything more interactive than a blog layout with it is actually very hard. It is time consuming, there is tedious work to do to tweak for each individual mobile browser quirk, and it may not be the best thing for a startup to invest time in. "Mobile first" certainly sounds nice, but "desktop first" is probably a faster more efficient route to product-market fit.
So I'd just recommend caution in how strongly we parrot "responsive/adaptive all the things" as common wisdom without discussing the possible downsides. It isn't black and white.
That said: If your mobile phone has so much trouble displaying a 960px width static centered website (the norm on the current web), so much so, that your mobile browser demands a different design, then I posit your design isn't broken, some mobile browsers are broken.
I expect that in the near future, when resolutions get upped and mobile browsing experiences advance, responsive design becomes more and more unnecessary. To me responsive design for mobile devices seems more of a band-aid for less capable devices. Less capable devices with post-stamp sized browsers, we will soon drop in the same pile as IE6 -- Because soon we can expect any browser on any device to be able to display a 960px width static centered design just fine, without responsive design. If responsive designs stays necessary, to me it would mean the failure of mobile hardware and software manufacturers.
Don't forget a basic principle of the web: Accessibility.
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 the future devices of our choice.
Designers should be working to eliminate unnecessary and repetitive interactions that get in the way of accessing content.
My phone has high-resolution screen, but it's pretty small too, and it can easily display stuff that's a complete pain to actually read because the font size is so small.
His examples of "just fine" non-responsive designs in small windows are, well, pretty horrible.
I dunno if this guy is ego-driven ("I will never allow my beautiful site design to be besmirched just to suit its users!") or just lazy, but one thing is clear: he doesn't care very much about his users...
It's been said a million times around these parts, but I guess I get to be the one to say it here: Get some data! Do some A/B testing! Check your bounces and pages per visits and time on site from mobile devices, then try a responsive design and see if they improve (technically, you should split and do both at the same time). What works for one site may not work for another. But projecting generalized statements with no data to back them up doesn't move anyone forward.
1) Test on as many devices as possible, even if you are using a tested framework. Your design is going to be different that what the framework author(s) have done.
2) Be agile and responsive to your users. Just because your responsive design is amazing doesn't mean that the user experience will match.
3) Catalog your "must have" features, such as search and navigation. Make sure that these "must haves" are present and accessible across all your designs. Loosing navigation on mobile means dead ends for your users.
4) Related to #3, keep your experience consistent across your devices. Perhaps mobile users do need a different site, but don't loose the core purpose of the site. Mobile shopping carts need to function as similar as possible to their non-mobile versions.
5) Responsive !== Mobile (sometimes). Just because the design scales with browser size doesn't mean it's ready for mobile.
6) Use a framework whenever possible. I don't care how smart you are, it's smarter to use a tested framework at least once. Even if this means that you eventually build your own, it will give you an idea of the conventions to follow.
7) Frameworks are awesome, but none are launch ready out of the box.
8) Find your dimension breakpoints, and what they'll do to your design. Don't go too crazy though, you don't need to design for every conceivable screen dimension.
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.
"It Defeats User Expectation"
So let's keep everything exactly the same?
Responsive design to me is progress, eventually we'll either come up with good practices for working with it or maybe something else will take it's place. The way we access the internet is in constant flux and the 960 magazine layout has many pit falls in terms of usability outside of desktop sized screens.
I always wonder how long it will take for tablets and phones to be so ubiquitous that this debate will become moot and you target mobile from the get-go?
The argument that responsive design is not worth it, because some people do bad responsive design (or even most do bad responsive design) is pretty odd. To carry that same sort of argument out into anything in life would land you in serious life lessons.
Yes, responsive design takes more time (no matter how you slice it). And, yes, sometimes it's not needed. Those should just be obvious to any developer worth their salt. Like everything considered when developing a website - weigh it all, figure out what's best for the project and it's users. Most definitely - time/money will be a factor in those considerations sometimes.
All I can think is the writer of this article hasn't seen how powerful responsive design can be?
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 in use cases.
The "right" approach, is the same thing we've been taught for 50 years, separating code from presentation. Building a robust API for your backend data makes the front-end presentation much easier and cheaper, so you can afford to make front-ends tailored for whatever you need.
Give me a usable website over one that "meets my expectations", dammit! As much as I like the desktop version of let's say www.theverge.com, I can honestly say it wouldn't work on a mobile at all. It would be too cluttered, and the links too small to tap.
On a side note, is there a mobile version of Hacker News out there?
On each point...
1. Where's the proof? Where's the research? The usability studies? The group surveys? There is NO evidence presented to support this point. It's just opinion and conjecture. Moving on.
2. Any actual numbers on ROI or expected ROI? Nope. Moving on again.
3. Again, any usability studies to back this up? No. Next!
4. Research? Numbers? Proof? Nope. And on to the last...
5. It's not a subjective decision when designers use things like evidence (something you obviously know nothing about) based on usability research and studies.
I have no problem with people speaking out against something (though the comment that there is a lack of arguments against responsive is a joke - there's probably just as many articles against as their are for due to link bait like this), but when you do argue against something, you need to present proof that shows you're right.
For example, he notes "The first rule in usability 101 is to give the end user what they expect." Maybe for the first year or two in the smartphone era it might have been acceptable to simply provide a shrunken zoomed out version of the site. The onus would have been on the user to navigate appropriately. Which... is a lot of work. My (swiftly getting older) eyes appreciate the larger fonts and readability that in theory a responsive design provides. I now expect to be able to read am article in portrait mode with a decent font size without having to zoom in and out. Maybe I'm alone but I would not be surprised if more users expect this now.
The author has likely not experienced the wonders of setting images as DIV backgrounds, then setting @media screen and (max-width: 320px) { #ID {display: none; } }
Or even going that (oh so tedious) extra step of sniffing browser signature at the server-side, and negating higher bandwidth assets.
Effort. Try it sometime. ;)
I'm not suggesting pagespeed isn't important, that's something completely different and impacted by variety of factors.
1. It Defeats User Expectation — This is not a fault of responsive design, but rather the designer. We need more, skilled responsive designers. A responsive site should act and feel like a regular mobile site.
2. It Costs More and Takes Longer — A mobile site usually requires two separate code bases. With a responsive site, you can maintain both the desktop and mobile experiences from the same place. Also, a good responsive designer is cheaper than a desktop and mobile designer. If it's costing more, you're doing it wrong.
3. Non-Responsive Designs Usually Work — This isn't specifically targeted at responsive design, but rather all mobile websites. By your logic, any mobile site is subpar. While I think you should always include a link to the desktop version (which can be easily achieved by switching out the stylesheet), I don't think desktop sites are superior. A desktop view might be appealing to a small percentage of power users, but the majority of users will appreciate a tailored experience. Just don't hide functionality. You should be able to accomplish the same tasks on mobile that can be achieved on the desktop.
4. There is Often No Load Time Benefit — You're doing it wrong. A good responsive design will have a much lighter weight than a desktop version. There is no reason a responsive site can't function in the same manner and achieve the same performance as a mobile website.
5. It’s a Compromise — Again, this is a power user issue. Always offer the option to view the desktop version.
It is silly to argue against mobile design. Screen real-estate is more valuable on a mobile device and our designs should reflect that. If your argument is responsive design doesn't offer performance benefits, than you probably need to reconsider your workflow and RWD structure.
"Responsive" is a trendy buzzword thing for what solid digital designers have been doing ever since Netscape 0.9b tossed alignment into the image tag (among other things)... paying attention to how a design looks on multiple screens. We just have more screens and means by which to optimize for those screens now.
And I'm really not sold on "mobile first" either -- feels like another short-lived trendy buzzword thing. Scaling a mobile design concept up to the desktop is shorting your 1024w and up users. Designers who care think about all screens at a design's inception... then plan the CSS accordingly.
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.
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.
It is going to get a LOT easier when I'm done with the next revision of Edit Room... Designing to multiple custom breakpoints is amazing... [1]
Going responsive and flexible does involve a leap of faith, and articles like this one are from folks who have not yet taken it.
[Edit Room is fast, flexible design prototyping and css animation.](http://www.edit-room.com)
(1) It Costs More and Takes Longer. Yes, designing something additional takes longer; however, if he compared the time required to add responsive code to the time it would take to setup mobile detect and an alternate theme, than this point may have some more sense even though I'd still side with responsive code.
(2) Non-Responsive Designs Usually Work. No. That's why we're having the discussion. If regular designs worked, there would not be a need.
This is a problem that a lot of companies struggle with. It's fine to criticize responsive design, but bring something to the table.
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.
There have been many a time that I've searched desperately for the "desktop version" of the site because I need to do something that the mobile version doesn't allow me to.
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.
There's progress to be made on both sides of the problem: websites adjusting to devices, and devices handling websites that don't adjust. That iPhone is good at the second half of that is cool and all, but I think it would be a big mistake to base your whole website's mobile strategy on just iPhone.
I understand the point of view that responsive isn't the answer to everything, but saying that dekstop versions of sites 'work' couldn't be more wrong in terms of just about everything.
I do not like it when it adds/removes information from the page.
Most importantly, I'm not sure it is safe to say users expect an IDENTICAL experience (experience being the most important word) on their mobile as they got from their desktop.
Responsive design isn't designed from the ground up specifically for mobile. In a mobile first world, that makes the difference.