Last Monday I had the chance to interview Clint and Dave from ThinkCRE8IVE regarding responsive design and its future. Dave also laid down the basics in a blog post late last month.
Talks and searches for mobile design has been around for years. Responsive design is a somewhat close kin although the search habits for both type of phrases couldn’t be more different.
Using Google Insights as a gauge, I decided to check out search trends and habits for some phrases. Here are the two main searches:
And…
The numbers in both examples are relative, but it’s interesting to see the differences. Mobile design type of searches have been fairly constant since 2004 with a spike in 2011. Has mobile in general been fairly popular since 2004?
Response type of searches have been nearly non-existent to really surge in 2011. I admittedly haven’t heard of these type of searches until HMTL5 and CSS3 became hot topics in the design world around 2010-ish.
I’ve always considered mobile search a kin to local search with m.dot sites, and response a kin to usability on different-sized devices. Looking at the examples above, I’m still going with that.
With that said, what are your thoughts? Mobile m.dot sites have been around for awhile. Should people continue with this or abandon them to design by response?
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