

Responsive design doesn't deliver what users want on mobile - mcseain
http://www.mcshane.co/17/responsive-design-doesnt-deliver-what-users-want-on-mobile

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bhauer
I don't necessarily disagree with the argument being made here, but I
unconsciously wanted the title sentence to end with "desktop." Response
design's greatest weakness, from my perspective, is how it poisons the desktop
experience with mobile taint.

I have ranted about "Bootstrappy" responsive designs and the now excessive
margins, padding, over-sized fonts, chunky blocks of color, and the associated
plummeting of information density. I don't want to pick on Braintree, but this
was the page that got my recent rant kicked off:

[https://www.braintreepayments.com/developers](https://www.braintreepayments.com/developers)

This responsive layout conveys very little information. It simply wants me to
choose my target and platform. And yet, it doesn't fit at default zoom in a
fully-maximized browser window on my 30" desktop LCD. The page looks a little
more like a conventional desktop site at about 65-75% zoom.

To me, the upside of responsive design is in decreasing overall work by
allowing a design to be shared across multiple contexts. However, the downside
risk is a consolidation of those contexts. You point out that you lose the
incentive to leverage the mobile context (e.g., location awareness). I am
arguing that you also lose the incentive to do proper UX in the desktop
context, all too easily treating my mouse-enabled desktop as if it were a
massive mobile phone, resulting in a design that looks vacant.

~~~
mcseain
Yep, can definitely see the problem going the other way. I suppose the
underlying point is that there is no one way to master these formats. You can
try, as there are benefits for various reasons, but to do things right for the
user you need to properly consider each format separately. "Mobile first" is
generally a terrible strategy in my mind as it polarizes the problem.

