📱 Responsive Design Is being mobile friendly top on your list when designing?

[Henrywrites]

A lot of webmasters designers are saying that a website being mobile friendly should top the list for most of the designs for most websites. Do you consider making the websites to be mobile friendly top on your list in 2023?

 

[Jason]

Internet Traffic from Mobile Devices (Nov 2023)

Updated stats about mobile internet usage, including devices, platforms and more.

explodingtopics.com

No doubt it is incredibly important. In fact, the stats are mesmerizing. Just look at the link!

 

[Arantor]

Depends on the use case. The site I am building right now is… unlikely to be used much on mobile so will only get a fairly token mobile effort.

 

[Empire]

Yeah, most people would use there phones or tablets more so then any other platforms

 

[Calamity]

I feel like most websites need to be mobile friendly. Even a few sites I use for work have mobile apps so I can do things on the go with ease.

 

[Jason]

No doubt people are mostly on mobile I think, but I strongly prefer a PC. In fact, I'm only on mobile so much cause my desktop crashed last year and without a car now it's difficult to get to a library (to use the computer there).

 

[Cory]

Thankfully, there is a mobile mode that you go directly to when viewing a forum from a mobile device for the forum software I use. Though I'll be honest, I tend to forget all about checking the mobile device before releasing the theme, so I'm just used to coding themes desktop-first since that's what I'm on when I'm coding the theme. My fellow theme designer made me a list of mobile issues on our themes sometime ago and I never did get around to fixing them, it may be time to revisit the idea of fixing them.

 

[joelr]

@Arantor is the most correct, which is that it depends on the context of your audience. If your audience or content is dense (eg. scientific or industrial research, long form writing, schematics), you should target desktop. But if your topic is a lifestyle / everyday niche, the majority of users and search engines overwhelmingly prioritize mobile.

I'm not sure this is a question that needs to be asked as much anymore, given that most communities offer a responsive design anyways.

 

[Al]

I never used to give it much thought. I tend to do most of my browsing and other online activities on desktop / laptop so I historically ignored mobile. But recently I’ve been keeping an eye on metrics.



This is from my https://eatsleepgamerepeat.net blog. Interesting that half the viewers are using mobile. It shows the prevalence of mobile users these days. I anticipate that more people have mobile devices than desktops computers. Baring this is mind I’ve started to consider how things look on mobile.

This was recently discussed here:

Cafe Forum Names

Just a suggestion. When I was a newbie/lurker, I had a hard time understanding what each forum was about. It required me to use a PC so I could read the descriptions on the forum index page. On Mobile, you cannot see these descriptions on the index page. So might I suggest adding a parenthetical...

starwars.cafe

@Dismal_Bliss raised a really good point and I’ve made changes to make mobile view a little better as a result.

It’s interesting because I don’t think any forum software developer pays enough attention to the user experience on mobile. Given that most people use their phones now for content consumption, it’s odd to see how unoptimised mobile view is.

 

[Cedric]

It’s interesting because I don’t think any forum software developer pays enough attention to the user experience on mobile. Given that most people use their phones now for content consumption, it’s odd to see how unoptimised mobile view is.

I agree. They don't. But it's hard to strike the balance too. Forums aren't designed for mobile only, they will always be prioritized for desktops.

 

[Al]

So maybe the first person who develops a mobile-centric forum solution is onto a winner. @The Architect?

 

[Arantor]

So maybe the first person who develops a mobile-centric forum solution is onto a winner. @The Architect?

One could argue that the next generation half-step (Flarum especially but also Discourse and NodeBB) gave it a go and weren’t *wildly* successful. (Successful in their targeted niches perhaps but not displacing the establishment like they hoped.)

The problem is that while mobile is convenient for consumption, and convenient if your medium is audio or video, it continues to suck for writing much beyond a paragraph or two.

I’ve had an iPad for years as my daily driver for a lot of things and even that isn’t *great* to write on, though as you can see I am perfectly happy writing this on my iPad. (I’ve written literal entire novels over on my successive iPads, but I’d never pretend it’s anything other than more portable than my laptop.)

I think there is even scope for doing something wild like a) accepting voice responses in a forum and then b) funnelling that to a transcription AI. But that’s someone else’s problem to solve if they’re up for it, the tech is there and it’s all doable with current browser tech.

 

[Empire]

I think it all depends on the site. Not all sites are able to be done in. Bootstrap row/columns sort of way Sometimes you want the mobile to be very simple and the desktop to be much more complex (think Twitter or Facebook) You can tell they completely change the layout at different breakpoints rather than stack.

 

[Dismal_Bliss]

Much of mobile responsiveness comes down to use DIV instead of TABLE in your layouts. Invision does a great job out of the box. Although, I would much prefer an app, either from Invision officially or I would have one developed just for me.

 

[Reverie]

I do think they need to be mobile friendly as I think half of us at the very least check on our communities on the go, and we participate on the forums on the go. I have noticed forum usage on the phone is a lot better now a days than it used to be and for that I'm at least grateful for!

 

[Cory]

Much of mobile responsiveness comes down to use DIV instead of TABLE in your layouts.

Do people still use tables in 2023?

 

[Cedric]

Do people still use tables in 2023?

Of course. What else are we eating on? We’re no savages!

Sorry, bad joke. Couldn’t resist it.

 

[Arantor]

Do people still use tables in 2023?

Yes, for tabular content. The headache came around 2009 or so when people started getting puritanical about ”you shouldn’t use tables” even for content intended to be presented and consumed in a table.

 

[Cory]

Of course. What else are we eating on? We’re no savages!

Sorry, bad joke. Couldn’t resist it.

Best corny joke of the year award, my friend.

Yes, for tabular content. The headache came around 2009 or so when people started getting puritanical about ”you shouldn’t use tables” even for content intended to be presented and consumed in a table.

I'm probably an idiot for asking this, but what constitutes "tabular content"?

 

[Arantor]

Tabular content is anything that makes sense to be in a table, because it has a semantic meaning.

For example the latest posts widget here at the top of the page is tabular content: it is arranged with several headings, and several rows of content where each row is one logical item (a thread) with the relevant attributes for that item displayed under each heading.

Basically, it’s the semantic concept actually applied because tags do actually mean things, not just how people abuse them.

If the content you’re presenting is “a list of things where you have rows and headings and one could cross-reference a column heading and a row item to look something up… it’s a table.”