In the article, Dr. Nielsen has this to say about Responsive Design:<p>> JN: Because I was writing about user experience, not implementation<p>This is <i>exactly</i> why so many people took issue with Dr. Nielsen's statements: he did speak about implementation.<p>Some examples, straight from the alert box:<p>1. "Build a separate mobile-optimized site"<p>The fact that the mobile-optimized site needs to be separate is clearly about implementation. If the argument was made that there needs to be a separate experience for mobile users, I think nobody would have disagreed, but this is not what it says: it says there need to be two completely distinct sites.<p>2. "If mobile users arrive at your full site's URL, auto-redirect them to your mobile site"<p>Again, redirection is an implementation detail. Why does the URL for the mobile-optimized site need to be different from the regular site? Why not serve different content to different users at the same URL? Why not do this using CSS or JavaScript? How is having a separate URL beneficial for the user experience? This is not mentioned.<p>As it turns out, there <i>are</i> usability issues in having separate URLs for mobile and regular sites. For example, if I email or bookmark a link from my phone and later open it on a desktop computer, I get the wrong site. That's not to say that there is no place for separate mobile sites (especially when the mobile use case is clearly different from the desktop use case), but this an entirely different story.<p>There is plenty of wisdom in Nielsen's words, but the Mobile Site vs. Full Site is a moot point. The argument should have been "create a separate mobile-optimized experience" instead.
It's funny - he is asked why he doesn't talk about responsive design, and his answer is that he's not analysing <i>implementation</i>. But his specific recommendations are to design a separate website for each device! If that's not an implementation recommendation, I don't know what is.
Before listening to anything Jakob Nielsen says about usability, go look at his website: <a href="http://www.useit.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.useit.com/</a>. Can you honestly tell me that the man is a usability expert who has a website designed like that?<p>EDIT: I've read some of his books and agree with what he says most of the time--I definitely don't write off everything he says. I should have worded my post differently.<p>About useit.com, it's hard to be completely terrible since there is not a functionality. I would argue that the organization of the links is a little odd, lack of dates on news items is not ideal, and the search bar buried at the very top right of a page that scales 100% is a little hard to notice (design & usability intertwined).