Had an interesting (if you’re interested) discussion at work about responsive layouts yesterday. It’s all the rage – although it still seems like another one of those buzz words that people rave about, where the idea has been around for yonks, but as soon as somebody gives it a ‘name’ it becomes fashionable to talk about…
Now I like the fact that designers are now thinking about design in 2 1/2 dimensions, in that they’re designs should be fluid and great website design should look great in all resolutions and ratios.
However my thought is that responsive layouts using media queries are not the solution for a mobile version of a desktop targetted website, in that the markup still contains the same content as the desktop version, it simply hides it from the mobile browser. That means it still has to load the same markup and potentially load the same media (images etc) – on a mobile network this could be very significant!
Another point of view was whether with mobile browsers becoming so sophisticated that most smart phones can display desktop targetted websites exactly like their desktop counterparts.
My view is that in a mobile situation the normal website is too bloated to be useful. Too many bytes to download and use quickly. To me the whole point of a useful mobile device is to be able to get to information quickly – and the context is different – I have different requirements and I want different things. Shouldn’t we consider those usability issues when building a website that should also work on mobile devices?
Usability guru Jacob Nielson appears to agree and his thoughts are here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/mobile-usability.html
