Tell HN: Why I think responsive design sucks | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Why I think responsive design sucks

7 pointssixQuarks14 comments

Most sites jumping on the responsive design wagon are doing it wrong, in my opinion. When I'm browsing sites on my iphone or ipad, I would much rather be browsing on sites optimized for 1080px.

I HATE having to scroll down a long page that's optimized for 400 pixels and everything has been snapped vertically on top of each other. The iphone and other smart phones can easily show 1080px. I'd rather zoom if I want to see things bigger.

I think responsive design should have a minimum width of around 1,000 pixels. Does anyone agree?

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I think responsive layouts for a phone screen is fine, and generally better for browsing, although it would be nice to have a button to disable it.

However responsive designs for tablets are pointless. My iPad provides a great experience for browsing full size websites. But even more, I use my browser on my screen with a width of 1078px wide. I use Divvy to manage my window locations and sizes, and on my 1440px wide screen this gives me a space on the left for Twitter or whatever other social network client I want.

Unfortunately, in the last few months I've noticed a few sites that I use regularly now have far too much padding at the sides and show less content, all because it's supposedly a tablet. The recent rise in this is mostly due to Bootstrap, which is convinced my browser is a tablet. In the past I have found the width to be perfect for displaying almost every site I encountered.

I think you're missing the point of responsive design. Zooming on a smart phone is not a good user experience, its much better that content is displayed in a way that suits the device better

He is a user and he defines what is a good user experience.

I'm a user, and I disagree with him. He certainly doesn't define it for me!

So instead of scrolling down, you'd rather pinch and zoom?

When one looks for some information, he never knows when he should stop scrolling. He may even well scroll too fast, and miss the portion he was looking for. However, when he can zoom out, he gets a glance at the page structure, can read section titles that are still legible, and directly zoom to his spot.

Exactly! Thanks for saying what I was thinking.

yes, because I can usually read the text fine, even if the site is not optimized for mobile.

Isn't optimized for mobile phone much better than a responsive website on mobile? It would seem that unnecessary things are downloaded in a responsive site that may in fact be hidden. Whereas a mobile optimized site is loading less JS, CSS and graphics/artwork/template files.

Yeah in my experience "going responsive" is only one step. I did this for http://rugbydump.com (partly still in progress).

There's a lot of `if (IS_MOBILE)` around the place, to not download a large amount of extra stuff on mobiles.

That's good. I think people look at responsive sites as that's all they need to do and for the most part I haven't come across many discussions about taking it further.

I largely agree. Sites that are 'optimized for mobile' are usually worse. I really hate trying to consult Wikipedia on my phone, for example, and that isn't even a particularly new or high-resolution device.

I like how Tumblr implements it with mobile first and then a click to view normal site.

yeah, but c'mon. Think of most web users - they are not very savvy. People tend to stick to defaults.

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