

Tell HN:  Why I think responsive design sucks - sixQuarks

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

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dsyph3r
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

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

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

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

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groue
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.

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sixQuarks
Exactly! Thanks for saying what I was thinking.

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centdev
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.

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decadentcactus
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.

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centdev
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.

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anigbrowl
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.

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

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

