As Chris Butler alludes to, I’m not sure that the final solution has landed as yet – every solution has its drawbacks, but responsive seems like the best compromise for now.

This post from Jakob Nielsen caused a storm – http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-vs-full-sites.html. Any views very welcome.

really nice article!
I also like responsive webdesign. When surfing the web on my iPhone, I really get annoyed of pinch to zoom … It’s a really bad web experience for me.

Did you find any surveys that prove pinch to zoom to be such a bad usability for surfing the web? I think I am not the only one having bad experiences with it on my iPhone (web! It feels awesome in Google Maps especially on the iPad).

But responsive design also has its drawbacks. The most relevant for me: Surfing the web on different devices – with different designs – feels strange. If you are using more than two devices (maybe desktop, iPad and iPhone), visiting websites can be unfamiliar as some texts / elements are hidden in one design, but not in the others. It just confuses me sometimes!

It’s very interesting from a content perspective. This challenges us to think again about how people are reading our content.

This short article from CX Partners is worth a read: http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/cxblog/reading-and-responsive-design/. Giles Colborne says:

“It’s worth bearing in mind that you’d only fit about 25% as many words on a 5 inch screen as you can on a 10 inch screen. Extrapolating those figures, as the screen size falls from tablet to iPhone the amount of content people read could fall as low as 12% moving from desktop to phone. That says something about how far into your content the critical stuff should come if you’re creating content for the web.”

Stating your message clearly upfront and keeping things concise become more important than ever.

Just some thoughts…

The best responsive sites on the web right now (e.g. bostonglobe.com) are those that have reduced their design to a level of minimalism that many designers aren’t likely to be that excited about. But they’ve done this out of necessity, because in order to possibly manage all the variables that would need to adjust around the dimensions of the user’s viewport, you’ve got to reduce the visual details. In other words, the simpler the design, the easier it is to adjust it for a variety of contexts. If you’re into minimalism, this won’t be that painful. But if you’re interested in creating mood with the visual design of your site, this is going to be a challenge. Yoke’s site is a good example of this — where the header illustration creates a lot of mood, even though the layout itself is pretty basic.

Responsive design, despite all the evangelism around it right now, is itself just a response to today’s technological factors — specifically, the many devices we use to access the web, and the lack of consistency among them. But today’s situation isn’t really sustainable. Either the variety of devices will change (this is already happening — 50% of the smartphone market is dominated by Apple alone, and only Apple and Samsung made money last quarter on devices), the screens themselves will become more homogeneous (rumor has it that iPhone 5 will have a larger screen like most of the Android phones) or the techniques will change. I think it’s going to be a little of all.

One other point. Jakob Nielsen came out against responsive and pointed out that design tends to do better when it can focus on the specific user factors unique to user context. In other words, designing for every context means very little design. This was very controversial and all the responsive proponents were irate. But, I think Nielsen is basically right. What he describes about generalizing design is what we’re seeing today, and it’s a matter of time before user frustration catches up with developers’ and designers’ desires to follow a one-size-fits-all process.

So, all of that is to say that you might go ahead and re-do your site now with responsive techniques, but that will probably require taking a more minimal aesthetic approach and being prepared to do this again in a few years. We’re taking this approach too, and consequently, our upcoming redesign is going to be pretty austere. We’re also experimenting with responsive design for our clients, but frankly, we don’t have a solidified process around this and are working to carve one out. The challenge is not tripling the work (and the budget), or on the other end of the spectrum, underestimating the work and delivering something inadequate. This stuff is all still very much in process.

- Chris