Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by robomartin | Hacker News Reader

When thinking about these two options, responsive vs. not, I try to pull myself away from the developer or designer roles. If wearing either of those two hats one might be tempted to become an evangelist for responsive design because, among other things, it's an interesting challenge. Intellectually stimulating challenges do drive decisions sometimes.

What I do is put on a business hat and think in terms of actual benefits. An, in my not-so-humble opinion, responsive design doesn't really mean greater revenue. Here "responsive design" means a site where elements squeeze, move, re-align, collapse, etc. as you grab the sizing handle on your browser window and shrink or expand the browser canvas.

Why do I think this way?

    www.ebay.com
    www.craigslist.com
    www.nytimes.com
    www.latimes.com
    www.ticketmaster.com
    etc.

Of course, there are plenty of examples for responsive design. Amazon uses a mild form of it and it works well.

IF responsive design were critical to keeping or increasing interaction or revenue all major sites would be using it today. I think it might be safe to say that the vast majority of the top 500 sites use fixed designs.

This doesn't mean that you can't have one or two alternative CSS layouts for mobile viewing. That might be the smartest approach: one fixed design for desktop and one fixed design for small screens.

With this, if you have the traffic, you can A/B test and slowly optimize each fixed design to improve conversions. With responsive design you might have to optimize over a dozen layouts, which is a huge job.

Again, in the end, I think that considering the options from a business perspective can cut through the crud and cause one to focus on what really matters if you don't have a hobby site.

I would argue that just because those fixed-width sites you mention aren't currently responsive doesn't mean that they never will be, or aren't currently in the process or being developed. It is certainly no trivial task to develop a responsive version of a site like eBay.

Even though RWD is a relatively new concept for a lot of people, I think we are past the "It's a fad!" phase (despite the small amount of middlebrow dismissal/stubbornness that is still evident), and I think it's encouraging that there are a lot of major companies embracing the approach. I made a quick list off the top of my head below.

  http://www.time.com
  http://bostonglobe.com
  http://www.vogue.co.uk
  http://www.starbucks.com
  http://microsoft.com
  http://disney.com/?intoverride=true
  http://www.about.com
  http://www.sony.com

There are always at least two sides to every story.

I guess the point I am arguing is that I don't think responsive design makes you any more money than fixed design. If it did organizations such as eBay would have certainly made the move by now.

At some level --at least for me-- if it isn't going to generate more revenue it isn't worth the extra effort.

Clearly I don't have any data to back-up my claim so we'll have to leave it as conjecture at this point. I can't say either way. Just a hunch from observing what's going on with top-level sites both as a developer and a user.

I equate this to the whole 3D movie/3D TV fad. Yes, this is probably a bad analogy. The point is that 3D has always been a fad. It comes back every N years and everyone proclaims that "this is what it will take off". Film producers get all hot-and-bothered and jump on the 3D bandwagon and forget why people go to see movies: The story. A 1940's black and white movie with a great story will always do better than a new film with a bad story, no matter how much tech, 3D and special effects you throw at it.

I guess what I am saying is that content is far, far more significant than design gimmicks. Customers don't come to your site to be in awe of your engineering or design chops. Craigslist proved that point long ago. No, they come to your site for the value they may be able to derive from it. Good relevant content and great value are at the top of the list. Ease of use and security may be second. Beyond that, everything else is optional and, in my book, can only be justified if you can show that it can improve conversions relative to other approaches.

As I said before, one of the reasons I currently tend to reject the idea of responsive design is that it can create a situation where site optimization becomes a geometric problem. Now you have a dozen layouts per page to optimize vs maybe two. I've seen some really amazing optimization reports where things as simple as the position and size of elements have made a huge difference. I am not sure how you'd even begin to approach that with responsive design when you've introduced so many additional variables in to what --in the cased of fixed design-- was so simple.

Did you actually vist sites from this list? microsoft.com, sony.com, about.com feature Responsive Home Page. Every link goes to a fixed width page. This kind of defeats the purpose of the RWD. When I am on the phone I probably want something more interesting than a home page.

I would say though that responsive design is less of an issue for these sites as they are popular enough that people are willing to use them through an app. The app has a mobile optimized design and can offer functions that a responsive website cannot offer.

For less popular sites and sites with different usage patterns, people might not be willing to install an app and app development might be too expensive. In these cases, responsive design is an option to provide a smooth mobile experience without too much extra work.

Of course, this doesn’t change the point that you should evaluate the need for responsive design without bias, but comparing your site with popular websites might not give you the full answer.

If I had to state my tendency to have an objection to responsive design in one sentence it would be this:

Responsive design will not bring you one additional customer when compared to fixed design.

The geometric problem of A/B testing a responsive site makes it a loosing proposition in my book. If you applied half that effort to A/B testing a fixed layout site you run chance of improving conversions dramatically over time. The same optimization problem is at least N times harder with fluid design and, more than likely N2.

In short, from a financial perspective, not worth it.

> Responsive design will not bring you one additional customer when compared to fixed design.

This is simply untrue. Even exposure is a form of commerce, and if you can't sell your content, you're out of luck. If there are no other external reasons for the user to be there, she will close the tab and move on to more legible things.

I always end-up pointing at Craigslist. Yes, I agree, really nice design is a pleasure to use. No argument there whatsoever. But, there's a limit.

People don't visit websites to be in awe of the design. They visit to get something out of them. Craigslist has more than proven that what most of us would consider absolute-shit design works just fine if what you are selling is what visitors want. You won't find me dead doing a CL-type site, but it does have the power to ground you when thinking of grandiose animations and all manner of neat-but-pointless design flights-of-fancy.

We can agree to disagree. For me, first is content or product, second is usable fixed design that converts well (through A/B testing) and a distant last is investing time, money and efforts into responsive design. I just don't see how it can possibly improve profitability.

It often takes more resources to build and maintain separate, fully-functional mobile and desktop sites--which is what a lot of the companies you list do. A well-done responsive design takes care of the desktop, mobile, and everything in between with only one codebase to manage.

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