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Comment by kellishaver | Hacker News Reader

So many people talk about responsive design taking longer and being not worth the effort.... That's true if you start with the desktop and try and work your way backwards to the small screen, which is how a lot of designers look at it, I think.

If you take a progressive enhancement approach and work your way up from low-end mobile to full-featured desktop, the process is 100x easier and the end result is, in my experience, an overall cleaner and more stable code base that makes for better performance across all devices/platforms.

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Untrue in my experience, but if you're experience has been positive that's great. I've done the mobile first approach and found that for anything with interactions that are more complex than a simple blog or other content driven service it does add significant time and effort and the quality of the desktop experience typically also suffers as most of the focus is on polishing the look and feel of the mobile browser experience in addition to addressing each and every browser quirk between Android and iOS.

I'm a fan of responsive/adaptive designs but based on experience just dont' feel I can always recommend the "mobile first" approach to startups. Perhaps for more established businesses that can afford the extra design effort, it's fine. I still have a lot of reservations though.

There are a lot of cases where responsive design just isn't a good fit, and something with complex user interactions (like a lot of web apps) is often one of them. Responsive design is great for things like content sites, galleries, informational sites... most forms of content publishing. Anything that requires the user to actually create and/or manage large amounts of data or has a lot of interactive media, however, would probably benefit more from a dedicated mobile site and/or app.

You are absolutely right about the complex user interactions. In that case the responsive design could just be informational only (hiding all the complex features that would otherwise be very hard to use on a mobile screen).

This is a terrible suggestion. The age of crippled, stripped down mobile sites is long gone, and smartphone users expect full functionality on their phones. If that functionality can be provided with a responsive design, that's great. If they have to use the regular website and do some zooming and panning, that's a nuisance, but one with which users are familiar. It's certainly better than not having the feature available at all, or having to hunt for a link to disable the mobile layout.

I'm really tired of everyone talking in absolutes (also the overuse of the word terrible). The right answer is (almost) always "it depends".

It depends how critical that functionality is to the core value the site provides. It depends how appropriate it is to a mobile platform experience.

As a contrived example I'd probably be perfectly happy if I could only browse, read, and maybe vote on HN if the mobile experience of reading was significantly improved. I never want to write a comment from my phone, I hate typing on it. Not a great example since a textarea isn't complex and it's easy to add to a mobile layout, I just want to get across the point that not all interaction is appropriate or important on every platform.

This is why responsive design is hard, because doing it well means far more than just changing the layout, size and visibility of elements. It is a different interaction paradigm and generally will need to be treated as such to maintain a quality experience.

>As a contrived example I'd probably be perfectly happy if I could only browse, read, and maybe vote on HN if the mobile experience of reading was significantly improved. I never want to write a comment from my phone, I hate typing on it. Not a great example since a textarea isn't complex and it's easy to add to a mobile layout, I just want to get across the point that not all interaction is appropriate or important on every platform.

But you didn't get across the point, because your example isn't true. I want to post on HN from my phone; heck, I've posted on HN from my kindle before. I wouldn't give that up for all the optimized mobile design in the world.

Grandparent is right, an absolute is appropriate here. Provide all the functionality of your desktop site, or I won't use your mobile site.

That's exactly how I started, with the low-end mobile and worked my way up. Check out a little project I made using css media queries. http://www.TimeForZen.com (resize the window width to mimic tablet and smart phone widths)

It didn't defeat user expectation, it didn't cost more and take longer, it works better than a non responsive design would, it doesn't really save any bandwidth but it does make code maintenance easy, and it's NOT a compromise.

I can see some of his points when applied to more complicated non-blog sites with ads and sidebars. Rather than say "responsive design isn't worth it" he should have written it from the perspective of "responsive design isn't always enough".

When I tap-zoom the text in your "about" page on my (retina, iOS 6) iPad, the text box moves off the screen to the left, and when I scroll down on the same page, the top of the text box moves down with the viewport. Sadly, I have come to "expect" these sorts of strange behaviors on responsive sites...

I decided to try converting some of my site designs to bootstrap recently, instead of having one of our developers do it. I haven't actually coded the HTML/CSS design on an entire page in 3 or 4 years now (not counting simple stuff) and this was light years easier than I ever remember. If responsive design is hard, your doing it wrong.

You built one very basic bootstrap site and despite not having done HTML/CSS in 3/4 years you've now got the expertise to tell everyone else they are doing responsive design wrong?

I've built responsive sites in Bootstrap, Foundation and "without a net" and I wouldn't presume to tell anyone what's hard or not about responsive design or even if I'm doing it right or wrong. Look if out-of-the-box Bootstrap is good enough for your needs (and more importantly your user's) awesome. That's called an anecdote.

I totally agree with this.

When I shifted my design thinking to use this approach to building UX, I found not only were my sites/apps easier to bring to mobile but the desktop versions were usually better as well. Mobile first designs often lead to better designs on desktop, at least in my experience so far (with content-heavy apps).

>That's true if you start with the desktop and try and work your way backwards to the small screen

I resize my browser window to be less wide. If it looks too big, I add some CSS to fix that. I resize it to be even thinner. If it now looks too big again, I'll add some CSS to fix it. And then I'm done.

Granted, I'm a programmer, not a designer, but this is the way I do "responsive design".

i second that :)

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