mcneely, those are also good points. In the sports site - a news site, basically, where before you could scan about, oh, maybe 30 to 40 items on one desktop screen, now forces you to scroll endlessly to access only a fraction of what they showed before. How this can be considered 'friendly' to anything is beyond me frankly.
Somewhere in the back of my head, there's this nagging that says all of this will eventually affect more than just mobile ...
Somewhere in the front of my head is the nagging suspicion that last week's weird traffic drops may be related to this somehow, in ways as of yet unclear. We can at this point find no causes for it.
It's also of course worth noting that oine of the vast gaping holes in mobile 'design' is the lack of real navigation. Just as with per screen content shrinking, you likewise lose the ability to have usable menuing systems, which to my mind points towards the only way you access mobile content really on a site is either through clunky blocks that are clickable OR search, either site or google. All mobile oriented sites I've seen suffer from this, from hulu to netflix to almost anything else that removed real navigation menus. This is of course a HUGE usability fail, because it means as the end user, you have to know what you are looking for in order to find or see it. It's very unfortunate that usability has been tossed out the window in the quest to service inferior platforms in this way in my opinion, when really what is going to happen longer term is that the inferiority will get so irksome that, as you already see, the interfaces will expand in size, the tools used to browse will get more advanced than a clumsy large finger tip, and this will all look in the future exactly like what it is, a stupid short term misguided web fad, which we will then in that future hopefully put in its web fad box, unless it sticks, which means the internet stops being a powerful tool and becomes just another dumbed down access point to commercial interests. Which is possible, no doubt about that. But trends seem to be pointing away from it, keyboard addons for tablets come to mind as an admission of the inferiority of touch keyboards.
But in the meantime we are left with google promoting seriously bad technology when clean simple solutions that work well for most mobile users are the clear path forward in my opinion, but these will not make the random decisions of the google system happy. Usually there is some faint sense to google's thinking but I think we also have to admit to ourselves that every large computer corporation hits a point where something goes wrong in the internal culture and it begins to stagnate and stop evolving, there are certain signs to me that this could be such a moment in google, but it's hard to know, it could just be a mistake they are making, they've made them before, hard to know.
From what I'm seeing, while google is sort of jumping on the heavy badly coded responsive bandwagon, equally to blame are those legions of horrible wordpress cookie cutter sites loaded to the brim with drop in jquery modules, totally non upgradeable due to absurdly complex templating systems designed to try to make wordpress, a fine blogging platform, into a very bad cms. Then ontop of that mess, they drop on these pre made 'responsive' packages.
I know when I've watched companies go this route, without any intention on my part, merely because they made it hard to access data, clumsy, and clunky, my 'stickiness' plummets, and I often have stopped reading or using the sites, I know I stopped using hulu for example shortly after they switched to their terrible mobile first responsive layout.
I remember people used to be good at mobile, but it was clearly too hard for script kiddies tasked with implementing a site's 'mobile' strategy, so now we are burdened with a responsive 'technology' that actually has grown out of date before it really even became mature (because of the expansion of pixel density in mobile screens).
Dugger, you have it, that's what they do, I think a lot of 'apps' are really just a bookmark to a mobile-ized site interface, I know that's what our app, should we make one, will be. You in fact really only can 'look stuff up' because it takes too long to try to browse though a crippled navigation system, if there is even one left to look at, depends on the design. Even if a top highest level navigation fits onto the screen, that will just land you on more clunky endlessly scrolling pages, so it's pretty clear most mobile users probably do in fact just look stuff up, whether its google traffic, probably a top destination, or a quick restaurant review. So what you are in the end giving a mobile user is basically just one page, if that.
Why any site then takes that fact and reality and destroys the desktop experience is beyond me, I have to also suspect we're looking at the same fads we've always seen here on WebmasterWorld, junior web designers/devs fall into the fad (you know how it works, tables are bad, so put tabular data into a complicated ul/li set which is totally wrong technically but fits the fad). I see this stuff in my own work all the time, stupid use of code to fit a narrow grasp of what is good or right, a grasp that usually in fact is wrong and bad.
I mention tabular data being presented not in tables because it's such a typical example of young clueless web designers following fads they don't even understand, and it's something I see all the time in my own work, I have to deal with that nonsense, though of course we don't do anything that stupid ourselves, but it always makes me think, and realize just how technically bad web designers as a group are, particularly the ones who do the plug and play wordpress modular sites.
unless 'repsonsive design' gets access to actual screen display inches/cm, it's a dead end in my opinion, now if it could access the more accurate information, it could actually be very interesting.
I haven't followed WebmasterWorld css forums for ages, but I'm sure if how they used to be is how they are now, WebmasterWorld has been directly responsible for the responsive fad spreading out to clueless web designers, along with other key sites, but that's just how css goes I think, too complicated for most users but great for fads, and now it's even more complicated, but the device technology left it behind before it really even started I think, which is kind of funny if you think about it.
Google mobile algo to be bigger than Panda / Penguin as deadline looms
