Thus application design has suffered greatly from lackluster responsive and mobile-first approaches. Instead of optimizing designs to each platform and usage paradigm, now designs tend to be one size fits all. Material design is a good example of this. There is a big trend among designers to redesign websites to fit into the Material Design framework, not realizing that Material Design was specifically intended to be optimized for phone and tablet usage. In this way it would be just as foolish to redesign everything on OS X to look like iOS with giant buttons and iOS-like hierarchies. Instead, these designers miss the advantages and competencies that each unique platform offers and instead provide users a reductive approach to design.

The vast adoption of the hamburger menu in web as well as in native mobile and desktop application design is proof of the misguided thinking that responsive thinking promotes. Instead of finding the ideal solution for each platform, the designer intent on implementing boring solutions can just apply the hamburger menu to each platform and call it a day.

Avant garde design agency Code and Theory appears to stress that:

Websites should do more than respond to devices. Web experiences should respond to multiple contexts so that they’re meaningful to every reader, in every moment, on every device.

Unfortunately, the only elements that responsive design has defined context for have been content: text, audio, video and images. Interfaces themselves have been visually and functionally decontextualized en masse.