I don’t think so. One of the original benefits of responsive design was to maintain continuity across desktop and mobile views. What a user saw and experienced on the desktop would be the same on their phone. This has been the cause of many issues that we’re now facing with responsive websites. Content on a desktop may not be relevant for a mobile user, or it could very well slow down the mobile experience.
When should content change on mobile?
Let’s say you sell event tickets on your website. On the desktop view you have a large image rotator at the top and below that are your event listings. This content could work well on a large screen to present relative information and a more engaging visual experience to users. Though, on a phone that image rotator will slow down the page load and push important event listings farther down. Keeping content for mobile users as relevant and accessible as possible will improve their experience and actions.
What will we learn from this process?
I believe as we work more with responsive websites, and build them with a mobile first approach, we’ll begin to understand what type of content our users need the most on smaller screens. This will help speed up page loading by removing unnecessary features and improve mobile usage. There’s a lot of static on the web, but with every responsive site we’re cutting back on static and optimizing for mobile.
What have you done to optimize your responsive sites?
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