We know that responsive is good… but is it THAT good? This is a rather interesting article:
“While responsive design makes it easy for sites to port a desktop design to mobile (or vice-versa) it doesn’t address the reality that visitors often have different expectations depending on whether they’re visiting on desktop or mobile. A mobile experience that’s also a desktop experience is essentially neither.”
####Do a “mobile (cell) user” have to see and read the exact same content than the desktop user?
While I answered this with “YES” in the past, I’m a bit more critical these days. Doing an entire research of a webpage via cell seems to me a bit overdosed these days. And being honest: The bigger part of research seems to happen in FB or Twitter (or similar).
####So there are still more valid ways to go?
I am convinced of this - and ever was!!! A redirect to a specific “cell-page” is perhaps THE way - making it to a clever excerpt of the bigger desktop brother. Kind of App experience webpage - who knows.
####And responsive?
Urgently required. It’s the simple way to ensure, that content stays visible (without any kind of side-scolling, pitching, zooming … whatsoever) for all other devices. Nobody said that this is a yet perfect solution. It requires further stuff, mainly “resources related”.
####So what?
It’s easy to figure out the downsides of a pretty new concept - but authors often enough forget the answers and solutions to particular problems.
Are we strong enough (technically spoken) to name and discuss them?
It’s worth considering that the drive for making sites totally responsive – one site fits all – comes more from the authoring side than the reading side. As long as a site works appropriately when they’re using it most people really don’t care if they get the same page code when they visit using a different kind of device. The drive is for back-end efficiency. While this makes production more efficient and helps avoid mistakes, what this CAN lead to is sites that are slower to use and push at the edges of device memory constraints.
There’s a lot made of Facebook’s responsive site work, but if you visit the site using a smartphone you’re automatically taken to the m.facebook.com site. The same goes for Wikipedia.
I don’t recall if I posted this on FWT last year (I did on Twitter), but it’s worth mentioning again. This video featuring Karen McGrane addresses a very similar topic to what Thomas refers to.
Yep - Karen’s talk is awesome and I have it for longer now in mind. I’m pretty convinced, that there is much in which will be the future way how web will work.
Let’s assume the following situation:
Keith thinks about sharing his great 3D panorama stuff. Rather than sending each “interested” person the file(s) over and over again, he seeks for a kind of platform - a storing and streaming service. There he puts three different file formats: Big, Medium and Small. All he sends out now is an authorizing key to the file in view. In the webpage - and within the corresponding DIV we place a
<required once authkey1230555 srcset="keith/file-small.mov 320w, keith/file-medium.mov 768w, keith/file-big.mov 1200w">
and done. One file-set serves the entire world. The same could happen with text and images as well.
But to make this work well, a highly adaptive and elastic framework is required, cause all your stuff persists of many different patterns, parts and snippets - and a script telling the browser when to load what resource, something like Picturefill Unfortunately this doesn’t really work well for me (this is just because it seems I’m too dumb for it).
WebDesign was ever “author” dominated - this is nothing new. A users feedback is usually not really available (bounce rate??). And I agree - a user perhaps never asked for “responsive” design specifically. But it’s an excellent start.
And let’s be honest:
Redirect action persists for longer now, but how many Freeway users ever considered making a second or third new layout ready for redirect? 2.8% would be my maximum guess - cause it’s a lot of work (and pro FW-user spoken: “mostly no budget” - just to avoid terms like laziness and overload).