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Comment by bicknergseng | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I totally agree. It's happened to me many many times that some functionality is missing on the mobile website, and they usually make it impossible to get to it (eg. LinkedIn (and many other sites, including a lot of Google-made things) even though it has an option to go to the desktop site, it will automatically send you to the mobile site on some parts of the site, completely defeating the option of going to the desktop site).

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.

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).

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).

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?

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.

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