What's wrong with Blogger's responsive themes?

A CATALOG OF DISCONTENTS ¶ 

So why do the Responsive blog themes, introduce by Google in 2017, continue to give me pause nine years later? ¶ 

Don't get me wrong: the fact that these are responsive means they provide a superior user experience on mobile. That is huge. ¶ 

Most web traffic today comes from phones, and a responsive theme makes your work easier to read, find, and navigate from there. ¶ 

Nonetheless, there are tradeoffs.

Let's catalog them.

Tabular navigation

In place of true tabs on the Pages widget at the top of blogs, the new themes float bare links.

These are functionally the same as the tabs—click them and they will take you to a new place—but lack the visual clarity of the links arranged like tabs in a notebook.

The new-style links take up the same space as the old.

Arguably not a huge deal, but it demonstrates a kind of hipster design aesthetic that prizes faddish cool over user experience.

Quick edits

The quick-edit tools let you open a published post for editing directly from the blog page. This is incredibly useful and the quick-edits still available for older themes.

I admit that I have gotten acclimated to this clever toolbar workaround from Sam Nordberg at 10원 Tips. Still, Google could have retained quick edits in the Responsive themes.

Snippits

On the dynamic pages that list multiple posts, like the home page, each post is stripped of formatting and paragraphing.

The responsive themes present this as a snippet, a solid unlovely chunk of text. Photos are cropped square.

   A snippet from the Notable theme

This compact size allows more posts to be displayed on a phone.

I have previously described ways you can manage your snippet's appearance (and control the break) while retaining the economical size.

There are more-elaborate workarounds online that will restore formatting to the snippet, or even replace the snippet with old-style presentation. (I'm doing that on this blog at the moment, is it a good idea?)

Older/newer navigation

It's useful to be able to navigate to the most recent previous content.

Where the older themes provided this in an intuitive way, the responsive themes only allow readers to turn the page forward.

If you want to see the previous posts, you have to wrestle with the Archive widget. About that:

Archive widget

The original Archive widget included some really clever touches that I miss.

Smart archive presentation with older themes

The image shows part of the Archive widget as it would appear in an old theme when reading a post from March of 2014. Note how

• The year 2014 is open, showing all the months when there were posts
• The month of March is open, showing the titles of all the posts in that month
• The other years are listed but closed.

If you jumped to a post in July 2020, the archive would adjust by showing a similar view for 2020, with July 2020 post titles.

You could interact by clicking the little flippy triangles to locate other posts.

All of that thoughtful design has been replaced by the most recent year (not the year of the active post) open to show the months.

"Show more" unfurls the months for every year, making it more laborious to navigate.

Don't make me click!

I am not criticizing the design decision to retract the whole display inside a clickable link:

Considering how cluttered a sidebar can get, that might be an improvement in any theme (though I wish it were at my option).

But it seems to me that when you do click and view the archive, you should get the same nuanced behavior that the older version provides.

Other widgets

It's not as bad, or obvious, but the Labels widget, and maybe others, suffers from similar design choices.

All in all

Mobile-friendly design trumps all of these defects for most of us. I still encourage you to weigh this option.

I nonetheless wish for more thoughtful design, and more options that are built-in natively without resorting to hacks and workarounds.

"Thumbs down" photo courtesy of Vitaly Gariev.