

Clients Don’t Care About Responsive Web Design - speckyboy
http://speckyboy.com/2013/08/07/why-clients-dont-care-about-responsive-web-design/

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coldtea
Responsive design is crap. I (as a user) would rather have ONE fucking site
that looks the same in all devices.

"Responsive design" of the kind with moving divs around for different sizes
instantly give me LESS on a mobile, and changes the experience from when I
browse on my laptop. Suddenly I have to hunt for things that were all there on
the laptop version of the website.

It's ironic that we got "responsive design" in an era when even mobile/tablet
devices finally have the capability to show a full width page and/or employ
tap-to-zoom to make navigation a breeze.

~~~
hugofirth
You can't seriously believe that "Tap-n-Zoom" provides a better browsing
experience from a ~4" screen than that provided be a well designed responsive
site ... can you?

I present the HN front page as a prime example. Every time I load it from my
phone I groan at the prospect of dragging a small viewport all around the
content area in order to read the full titles/comments of submissions. A
responsive design with a simple list interface would easily solve this
problem.

Furthermore - from what I remember of UX modules at University the whole point
of good responsive design is that it presents the same content to the user as
they would expect from a desktop interface. You can't cite an example of
someone not following a practice as a reason to not to follow that practice.

At the end of the day - this article was about designing websites for small
businesses who are looking for customers. These people are not involved with
the content you present to them straight away and are, by definition,
"browsing". As such you can expect anything less than a seamless, "quick"
experience to harm their eyeball conversion rates.

TL;DR - Nope.

~~~
coldtea
> _You can 't seriously believe that "Tap-n-Zoom" provides a better browsing
> experience from a ~4" screen than that provided be a well designed
> responsive site ... can you?_

I very much can. I want the full monty on my mobile phone (and tablet), not
what some designer deemed the more important parts with which to "respond" to
my screen size.

> _I present the HN front page as a prime example. Every time I load it from
> my phone I groan at the prospect of dragging a small viewport all around the
> content area in order to read the full titles /comments of submissions. A
> responsive design with a simple list interface would easily solve this
> problem._

A custom list interface? That's even worse in the general case than the usual
responsive "musical chairs" div game. That's what RSS clients and decicated
native apps are for. If I want to visit Hacker News, I want to see Hacker
News. And Hacker News as is, is 100% great for mobile navigation -- it's
merely a signle column list of links already.

> _Furthermore - from what I remember of UX modules at University the whole
> point of good responsive design is that it presents the same content to the
> user as they would expect from a desktop interface. You can 't cite an
> example of someone not following a practice as a reason to not to follow
> that practice._

I've never seen a "responsive design" providing "the same content" and surely
not in the same manner to the desktop interface. All actual use and all the
examples in design sites I've seen, are all about moving content around,
hiding blocks for smaller screens, etc.

