This may seem like an odd question. However, more and more I am seeing web appli

Question

This may seem like an odd question. However, more and more I am seeing web applications that are built on the "mobile first" / "responsive design" principle that are about as responsive as a wasp in winter.

Mobile isn't a "trend" but it's being treated like that. It's "trendy" and "eye-catching" for digital agencies to be "mobile first", but for most that only means one or more of the below:

@media queries

Jquery mobile

Twitter bootstrap

I've recently seen a site which was billed as "mobile first" which only used @media to differentiate between devices. It was a .NET webforms application that heavily relied upon view state and the download size for just the homepage (pre postbacks) was over 1mb! Responsive? Not on my crappy Samsung in the middle of a field.

I know that this just sounds like a rant, but I'd really just like to know what peoples opinions are on how to tackle device differentiation?

Personally, I show / hide markup (ie sections of a page / includes) based on device to ensure, not only the layout and functionality are optimized, but the download total too. Am I a dinosaur?? Am I wasting my time??

Explanation / Answer

I think that "responsive" is just a buzzword being thrown around at the moment. I was in a meeting the other week where people who really didn't have much of an idea about web design were talking about parallax scrolling and responsive design.

With that said, Responsive design is very important when someone is not designing a specific mobile interface. There is nothing worse than coming across a site that is not mobile optimised or removes the majority of features.

In terms of tackling devices, I generally have my designer make all websites touch friendly - you can't not these days. This means making all elements finger friendly. Two designs will be produced, generally one with a width of 1024px, and one for mobiles that uses percentages to support varying screen resolutions. With that said, we do do some responsive stuff but it's just another tool to getting the job done; it doesn't work well for some types of sites.

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