HACKER Q&A
📣 throwawayadvsec

Should a SaaS interface be responsive?


Hi,

I'm building an MVP for an idea I've got(a tool to automate some parts of marketing)

I've almost finished the main part of the UI, but now that I think about it there is likely no way I can make the experience pleasant on a phone.

On one side I'm sure no sane person would want to use a tool like this on a tiny phone screen, on the other hand, I'm not sure what to think when I look at mobile vs desktop users stats in general.

Of course I can make the landing page responsive, but making the actual tools responsive doesn't make sense or even seems actually feasible to me.

Do you think it can ever make sense to build a SaaS without thinking about responsiveness in 2023?

Thanks

  👤 verdverm Accepted Answer ✓
Many B2B, desktop first, application will not have the same feature set or layouts for mobile. There are things that can be easier on mobile too. Gonna depend on what your product does and how your users use it.

That being said...

(1) there is plenty of prior art out there on this, so you can sample to see what people are doing.

(2) Responsive is not just for desktop vs mobile, it's about many different screen sizes and breakpoints. You'll want to see how your app looks in 1080p as well as smaller screens, even larger too these days. Responsiveness is easy these days, but you don't have to optimize it all the way down for mobile.

(3) let your users or analytics decide when it is appropriate. A mobile app will likely be very different UX from your desktop. Think of it as a companion more than an alternative. What can the user do more effectively in each interface?

👤 codingdave
It depends on what the tool does. For B2C apps, you probably need a mobile-friendly UI. For B2B apps, probably not. The successful SaaS apps I've done ended up landing on a middle-ground strategy where there was a limited mobile-friendly UI for your basic consumer, but advanced features and content editing needed a larger resolution.

Also phones are getting higher resolutions over time - you might find that you don't need tiny breakpoints to make the UI work on mobile.

👤 mikece
If it's important -- either for typical use or as a differentiating feature -- to use this on a phone I would go with a mobile-first UI that can scale up to desktop rather than a desktop UI that somehow needs to compress itself down to fit in a mobile UI. I would check out the work Ionic has done with the mobile-first/PWA approach.