By Hiroki Takeuchi — Feb 2013 — 2 min read

We've just redesigned our home pages, and moved from a responsive design to an unresponsive one. Given the trend towards a responsive web, we thought we'd share why.

Why we ditched responsive design

When we designed our old home pages we followed the trend towards responsive design. The result looked great on desktops and went some way towards being device agnostic.

I don't think anyone would argue that it isn't a good thing to provide a mobile friendly interface for your web applications. However, we had focused on fitting content to a flexible grid without really assessing the requirements of our site.

When we came to redesign our site again, we decided to think through the case for responsive design. There were three factors which tipped the balance against responsive design:

We were pitching to the wrong audience - it turns out that not many people shop around for Direct Debit on their mobiles. When we analysed our traffic, we found that only 2% of visits were from mobile devices.

It was much slower to implement - responsive designs took almost twice as long to design and implement compared to fixed-width designs. This was valuable time we could have spent improving other areas of the product.

It constrained our designs - we didn't have the resource to implement entirely different designs for desktop and mobile. This restricted us to simpler designs that could work for both formats. In some cases, this even led to compromised designs which weren't great for either format.

What did we do instead?

For our new design, we decided to stick to a fixed grid of 980px. This gave us a canvas that comfortably rendered on almost all desktops as well as on tablets.

Using a fixed grid roughly doubled the speed of the design and development process. It also gave us more flexibility to implement designs which wouldn't have worked at smaller sizes.

Not only did we save a lot of time by avoiding responsive design, we were also able to provide a better experience to 98% of our visitors.

When should you be responsive?

Sometimes the extra effort for responsive design is well worth the investment. We believe there are two criteria that determine this:

The proportion of mobile use - obviously, if a significant proportion of your traffic is mobile, you should design for that audience.

The purpose of the visit - will providing a better user experience for mobile users significantly impact your desired outcome?

For example, we believe it is really important to have a fully responsive design for our checkout pages. Even small changes in checkout page conversion can make a big difference to our customers. Whilst only ~3% of visitors to our checkout pages are on a mobile, having an appropriate design can significantly impact their conversion. So it's worth investing in, even for a small proportion of our visitor base.

Mobile visitors often have a very different set of objectives for visiting your site. In those cases, merely squashing content to fit on a smaller screen isn't particularly helpful. Instead, it is important to consider how different contexts change the content that users want.

Responsive design is definitely a useful tool to consider, but it's also important to be clear on the case for it before embarking on any new projects.