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Responsive design is crap. I (as a user) would rather have ONE fucking site that looks the same in all devices.
"Responsive design" of the kind with moving divs around for different sizes instantly give me LESS on a mobile, and changes the experience from when I browse on my laptop. Suddenly I have to hunt for things that were all there on the laptop version of the website.
It's ironic that we got "responsive design" in an era when even mobile/tablet devices finally have the capability to show a full width page and/or employ tap-to-zoom to make navigation a breeze.
...but let me give you a real world example:
- You're out on the street and want to find the local Target
- You do a google search which takes you to the Target website
- Now you're looking at a page that lists 25+ stores on a giant laundry list
- You zoom in and now have the scroll through tons of text which all looks alike while people hustle by you on a busy sidewalk
- You now find the listing but it's on a long line of text which you have to swipe to see the entire address
This is a case where having a single page that you don't have zoom in on would make a major difference to the user.
You can't seriously believe that "Tap-n-Zoom" provides a better browsing experience from a ~4" screen than that provided be a well designed responsive site ... can you?
I present the HN front page as a prime example. Every time I load it from my phone I groan at the prospect of dragging a small viewport all around the content area in order to read the full titles/comments of submissions. A responsive design with a simple list interface would easily solve this problem.
Furthermore - from what I remember of UX modules at University the whole point of good responsive design is that it presents the same content to the user as they would expect from a desktop interface. You can't cite an example of someone not following a practice as a reason to not to follow that practice.
At the end of the day - this article was about designing websites for small businesses who are looking for customers. These people are not involved with the content you present to them straight away and are, by definition, "browsing". As such you can expect anything less than a seamless, "quick" experience to harm their eyeball conversion rates.
TL;DR - Nope.
I very much can. I want the full monty on my mobile phone (and tablet), not what some designer deemed the more important parts with which to "respond" to my screen size.
A custom list interface? That's even worse in the general case than the usual responsive "musical chairs" div game. That's what RSS clients and decicated native apps are for. If I want to visit Hacker News, I want to see Hacker News. And Hacker News as is, is 100% great for mobile navigation -- it's merely a signle column list of links already.
I've never seen a "responsive design" providing "the same content" and surely not in the same manner to the desktop interface. All actual use and all the examples in design sites I've seen, are all about moving content around, hiding blocks for smaller screens, etc.