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.
>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 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.
>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.
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.
>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.
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.