Responsive design has totally ruined desktop web experience (rant)

The question of an app vs a website is - do users actually know you have an app? Will they bother to even download it? Unless it’s a major brand, I will not even think of downloading an app. I probably don’t even know they have one.

A regular ecommerce website should be able to function without an app. The dominant corporate ones like Amazon, sure I can understand that. They can market that.

It does depend, I agree, but generally, for most people and their websites, they should at least have a fully RWD website for mobile. Even if they do have an app version.

for what it’s worth i don’t like ‘apps’ i hate going on my GFs Ipad and having Ebay and Amazon pestering me to download their ‘app’. Seriously leave me alone i just want to use the browser i have to look at your stuff, your app does not make it easier as i now have to get used to your app when i am on an Ipad and you are taking up space on my HDD!

It is really annoying. I agree. Especially when the browser version works fine.

Couldn’t agree more with the original post. I think the main issue is the push to mobile first. I work desktop first and then concentrate on making the site responsive.

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With what?

Probably not a huge difference. But the RWD has the advantage (if done right) of being flexible enough to work well on any device regardless of screen res. It is not bound by the rules of ‘This is for desktop (large), this is for tablet (medium) and this is for phones (small)’. In reality screens on all 3 vary hugely. There are big phones, small laptops.
Yes, you could RD your individual templates to cope with this fact, but why bother when RWD can do it all without numerous templates.

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Preventing users from making any page work for them in the way they need it to will always make my blood boil/cause the gnashing of teeth/make me rant somewhere on teh interwebs/etc, Erik : P

100% agreed

In fact it was the necessary prevention of user zoom that stopped me from using HammerJS, which otherwise looked really, really nice for touchy-swipey events when you’re otherwise writing vanilla JS and don’t want to write all the swipey tappy stuff by hand (ug). But the developer couldn’t remain exact in where users were touching once zoom was invoked, so he had to disallow it.

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The whole idea that we must make assumptions can and does burn users. But unless we have more intrusive ways of detecting each client request, that’s where we’re at.

Ha ha ha, no. As the battery life etc improved, everything remained crappy due to developers throwing more and more garbage into each page. Page sizes only increase.

There’s a fact that gets thrown around here fairly regularly: there’ll be some pain point on the highways here and someone will say: “we need to add another lane!”. So they do. And then it becomes a pain point again: adding another lane increased the traffic on that road. It’s the constant no-win, the never catching up with the Joneses, the struggle against email spam.

And you don’t live in my country (I assume?), where so long as you’re in a big city, you can have pretty decent internets. 5km outside Den Haag? A hair better than dial-up, joy.

Internets speeds in trains… suck. Suck suck suck. And I can’t tell you I’m in a train, going into a tunnel, or sitting in the middle of a cow pasture because the NS (train company) had Yet Another Breakdown. This is what mobile is about: we are moving, and we are internetting. At the same time. And walking and chewing gum. And that means we are not sitting at a desktop PC with blazingly fast fibre optics/fat pipes. And our screens are still little bigger than mouse turds. Wait, no they’ve gotten worse: some crazed folks out there actually want to look at a screen the size of a watch. zomg. does not compute. But okay, how’s your website working on that thing?

That I must ctrl++ ALL THE THINGS is a fact of my life, and some day when your youth leaves you you’ll get to enjoy my world and do it too. Not that I’m old, I’m too awesome to be old, but still.

Ask your friends’ moms/dads how to make the browser text bigger. I haven’t met yet a non-techie person who knows the secret magical trick to make shizzle readable. Yes yes, users ought to be responsiblee for their interwebs usage and know-how, and they shouldn’t drive around asking “what’s the little flag in the water glowing mean again?”, but we are talking about humans here, keep in mind.

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Or, maybe more importantly, that how users need to interact with different media dictates that even the content may need to be entirely different for the context. That we must admit that, at least sometimes, context will dictate use will dictate “what” and “how”. Reponsive design will be a not-as-good option in those cases, but then likely we’d expect responsive design to be used in cases where the optimised-for-some-context wouldn’t ever be a Thing anyway, due to cost or time or whatever.

Turns out new research is just coming out that shows - using data - that responsive sites do not convert as well on the desktop compared with regular desktop sites.

Basically, the industry jumped the gun on this trend and site after site is going downhill, or having to roll back changes as users drop off.

None of my actual clients want responsive sites - with one notable exception being a person from a dev background who sells on ebay and amazon and already gave up on the actual website for sales - and no wonder as it is a code bloated wordpress responsive site.

I figure this really comes down to programmers’ unconscious agendas to create job security.

Personally, I have not a lot of reason to be on my phone when I can be on a desktop, but yes, I kind of feel like the Internet is seriously screwed with this trend.

Let’s face it - it is much more time consuming to program a great responsive design that is everything to all devices. And more time = more money for custom programming. Yet people are too cheap to pay for it (smbs anyway) so they use crappy, code bloated templates instead. Since Google’s latest and greatest update, browsing site on a cell phone is setting oneself up to be tortured - just no point as nearly every so-called mobile friendly site is bloated.

Also, seems like ‘Don’t Make Me Think’ is a title most people in the business these days have never heard of. Today for the first time I struggled to figure out how to get a google map code link - as it was under some ridiculous icon.

It actually takes 1/2 the time or less to build a mobile site + regular site - and the tablets do well with either version. And generally - that is what my CLIENTS want. If you don’t want to do two or three sites, you can also use CSS to switch out the versions automatically based on screen size (though for some obscure reason this practice is supposed ‘bad’).

You can also use CSS to allow the actual user to do the toggling.

So during the past few years, I’ve found some great solutions that do not invoive ‘templated responsive frameworks.’ The problem now is with Google and basically they are institutionally forcing this disaster. Reminds of the whole link building debacle - which was just a big huge time waste. Frankly, I’ve done effective SEO for years and never once resorted to link building which is more like SEO for suits who cannot design, write or program.

I truly hope people wake up to this disaster and correct course.

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Ah, now I get that whole BBC thing about “cutting the mouse turd”.

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Yes, I’ve heard of that, I think they call it Responsive Design or something…

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It’s not the same. The dis is on responsive technology frameworks. Sites have been ‘responsive’ since the “100%” width option. I am not talking about sites that slide around when I refer to ‘other’ CSS options.

So what are you talking about? Examples?

I think we’d all like to hear what these options you’re touting are. I think everyone would like to hear other perspectives, as they may be tools to add to their repertoire.

I can’t speak for those, I’ve never bothered with frameworks, just home-cooked css.

A site that does not convert well on the desktop, is by definition, not responsive. That would be mobilecentric, those are two different things.

What is this sorcery you speak of.

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The thing I am finding is that we are lucky if our sites translate simply in RWD…in other words, just changing the shapes and sizes. But that often doesn’t work because a friendly usable design for the desktop, such as a thought-out screen layout, quickly becomes a pain when it goes vertical and the user has to scroll! So now priorities come into play…the old “what goes above the fold” question, except now the “fold” is almost continuous. To do it right, you (the dev) have to prioritize elements, rethink navigation and layout. That often does mean two separate designs, regardless of whether they are executed by a single stylesheet or not. Time, money, etc. Naw, just stack all the columns and let 'em scroll away all day…it will be interesting to see what clients are really willing to pay for optimization.

I’m not sure people mind scrolling all that much. I sure don’t. As long as there’s not a lot of unnecessary fluff on the page, especially. If there is, then that’s a reason to rethink all forms of the site.

There’s web site design and there’s web application UI design. Responsive frameworks, in my experience, work poorly for application design as things stack and move according to screen size which can be frustrating for someone trying to perform some function with an application. It is much better suited for marketing or information purposes, where scanning information is done in a linear way, and a sensible stacking logic of text and images makes sense.

That said, the huge text, huge button, flat icon, all-center aligned experience is getting tiresome, yes.
Full screen videos or images - wow, what a design concept (sarcasm).

I absolutely agree with this, and so does an artist friend of mine that I sometimes collaborate with.

A Website is a businesses face on the Web, and it is, for all intents and purposes, an advertisement, much like a print ad, only more. It is designed to generate business. Therefore, the same principles apply to making a Website as with creating an ad, including rules of copy writing.

I’m hoping this trend to make everything small screen friendly is going to be short lived. It seems very inflexible, and doesn’t allow for a decent presentation.