James Muspratt
Apr 12
There Is No Mobile Use Case
Nice article by Josh Clark on .Net Magazine on the problem with building separate “desktop” and “mobile” websites.
First, a growing number of people are using mobile as the only way they access the web. A pair of studies late last year from Pew and from On Device Research showed that over 25 per cent of people in the US who browse the web on smartphones almost never use any other platform. That’s north of 11 per cent of adults in the US, or about 25 million people, who only see the web on small screens. There’s a digital-divide issue here. People who can afford only one screen or internet connection are choosing the phone. If you want to reach them at all, you have to reach them on mobile. We can’t settle for serving such a huge audience a stripped-down experience or force them to swim through a desktop layout in a small screen.
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We’ve all had the experience of going to a website on our phones and getting bumped to the mobile version. It looks great except, wait a minute, they’ve removed the exact feature or piece of content that I’m looking for.
This is the problem responsive design is trying to solve. Read the whole thing.
