[HN Gopher] The negative impact of mobile-first web design on de...
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The negative impact of mobile-first web design on desktop
Author : skadamat
Score : 592 points
Date : 2023-10-26 14:06 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nngroup.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nngroup.com)
| cyberax wrote:
| Yes! I hate websites that put useful content in a thin column in
| the center.
|
| What's worse, formerly normal websites start degrading.
| Typically, when a new manager is hired and decides to "reimagine"
| the product with the "mobile-first" vision. The recent Patreon is
| a good example.
|
| And of course, in some cases normal websites go away entirely,
| and are replaced with crapps: Venmo, Amazon Alexa, Chamberlain,
| etc.
| kodisha wrote:
| Omg yes!
|
| It has finally been told! I was crying and talking about making
| the return of information rich websites, but people were just
| following trends blindly :(
| strobe wrote:
| view point in article mostly from an user perspective, but if
| same stuff would be reviewed from companies perspectives most
| of that negatives has positive effects for marketing/sales
| needs which probably a reason why is so widespread.
|
| It's like: our visitor can't just see our half page table with
| tech spec to know everything, he should go trough 20 images on
| 2 long pages and during that we will show him all our
| 'important' messages that he won't be interested otherwise.
| awinter-py wrote:
| PREACH
|
| opposite way in: 2013 article about high density on the japanese
| web being (in part) a legacy of their pre smartphone era
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Someone told me that Japanese websites tend to look outdated
| because all of the tooling and code is itself in Japanese, and
| since that stuff hasn't been updated in a while, the final
| products are a bit stuck.
| kunwon1 wrote:
| Many websites will completely alter their UI based on resizing
| your window. Sometimes I want to set a browser to take up half of
| a monitor so that I can put something else next to it. This often
| fails on modern websites because the UI becomes unusable after
| the window is resized
| tiltowait wrote:
| This is the "responsive" part of "responsive design". When done
| well, it's great, but you're right that many websites are way
| too aggressive about it, as if they only really tested two size
| classes.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I'm mostly appalled at how many desktop users just maximize
| everything.
|
| I even had juniors maximizing terminals.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Why is this appalling?
| FractalHQ wrote:
| I think it's fine until someone sends me a screenshot of
| my website in fullscreen on a giant 4K monitor.
| frou_dh wrote:
| Because the point of huge monitors in the WIMP paradigm
| is to display multiple windows simultaneously.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| ^multitasking
|
| _" We suffered for years waiting to get true
| multitasking and this newb doesn't even use it!"_ ;-)
| digging wrote:
| I assume you're not referring to Weakly Interacting
| Massive Particles as a theory of dark matter - what does
| WIMP mean here?
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing)
|
| The design developed at Xerox Parc.
| arp242 wrote:
| I wrote my own window manager that's mostly centred around
| maximized windows and terminals (it's like a wiling WM but
| without the tiling, where most things are always
| maximized).
|
| Guess I must be a junior then.
|
| Stop judging other people's personal preferences. It's
| their computer and whatever works for them is a good
| solution.
| aacid wrote:
| I do maximize terminal when I have to do something more
| complex and I have multiple zellij (I used tmux before)
| panes opened.
|
| For me it is much better than multiple terminal windows...
|
| Some websites are better maximized too, like maps for
| example.
| auchtopus wrote:
| would you rather them use half the screen for their
| terminal and the other half for subway surfers?
| hajile wrote:
| I have to maximize my terminal so I can slice it into a
| bunch of tmux and vim windows and make a pseudo-tiled
| window manager.
| westernpopular wrote:
| Bemoaning people maximizing terminals - what a weird hill
| to die on.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I'm gonna complain about HN though; while it may not have been
| intended to be mobile first, it kinda is, leading to overly wide
| text in comments if using a full screen browser. This is the same
| issue that the previous iteration of Wikipedia's design had.
| ryandrake wrote:
| As a user, when I set my browser to be full screen, I expect
| the content to take up the full screen. I bought a nice big 27"
| monitor, and I want to use it. How dare some UX designer 2,000
| miles away from me simply _decide_ that I should only be able
| to see content on a 5 " wide strip down the middle!
|
| The browser should be the User's Agent, not the Web Developer's
| Agent. If I want to do something with my browser layout that a
| designer finds appalling, that should not be his concern.
|
| If the web developer and designer really think that text should
| appear in tiny 5" columns no matter how wide my browser is,
| fine, then flow your design to display multiple side-by-side
| columns like a newspaper. Don't just fill my screen with
| whitespace.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I think multiple side-by-side columns would be great.
| Actually, do you know of any sites that actually re-flow text
| like that? It'd love to see it.
|
| I don't really want text to reflow to be, like 23, inches
| wide or whatever. Books with 23 inch wide pages are quite
| rare, because, I think, that is too much horizontal space,
| scanning that far with you eyes can become a drag. Of course,
| if a page just uses the whole width uninterrupted for text I
| can just give it half the screen, so that is fine. But I'm
| curious, do you actually like the look of a page like that?
| Or is this just on principle--respect user choice and all
| that (if so, good principle!)
|
| In general web devs seem to think way too much about the
| layout of pages, if they would just do the simple thing users
| could resize the window to their liking.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think I might have seen the "column-ization" method once
| and was impressed by it.
|
| HN's handling of different browser widths is... pretty
| weird, at least on my Desktop Safari browser. Looks like
| from browser widths of 1920px and greater, HN maintains
| fixed size whitespace borders and scales the content width.
| Nice. When you shrink the window past 1600px, it holds the
| content size fixed and shrinks the borders. I guess the
| intent is to smoothly transition into a mobile design
| without the borders. Past 1516px, it removes the borders
| altogether, and seems to transition into this "mobile"
| design. Between there and around 610px, it seems to shrink
| the content width by discrete fixed amounts every 200px or
| so, to "keep up" with the browser width. Finally, below
| 610px or so, the site goes back to the non-mobile design,
| laying out as if the browser was 1600px wide (and actually
| truncating the right hand side of the text)--totally
| broken.
|
| All that complexity--for a text only site! When they could
| just make the text 100% of the browser width and let me as
| the user decide what is comfortable to view. It's still
| much, much better than sites that just limit the content
| width to 600 pixels and fill everything else with
| whitespace!
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Multi-column layouts only work if there's no vertical
| scrolling, or at least if the layout reflows so that there's
| no need to keep scrolling down & up & down to read each page
| of content.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Pagination is much better than stupid scrolling, that's why
| we switched from scrolling to pages a thousand years ago.
| cal85 wrote:
| You suggest that a site owner should design the page how you
| want it, not how they want it. But neither is the case. Their
| task is to design it in a way that is acceptable for many
| different people. For most users, maximising the browser
| window does not mean they want text paragraphs to become very
| wide, it just means they want to block out distractions. And
| most readers benefit from plenty of whitespace and a
| conventional line width of 50-70 characters. It's not that
| the designer is appalled by your preferences, it's just that
| you aren't the only person who matters.
|
| You say the browser "should" be your agent - but it is. You
| can use 'reader' mode or any number of browser extensions to
| tailor things for your own tastes, or even copy and paste the
| article text somewhere else to read it however you want. What
| you cannot reasonably expect is for every site to be ideal
| for your personal tastes out of the box.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I guess I just expect the web site to at least not
| deliberately make itself terrible such that users have to
| resort to big hammers like extensions, "Disable Styles",
| "Disable JavaScript" and "Reader Mode".
|
| Web sites are fast, flexible, responsive, readable,
| scrollable, _accessible_ , and respectful of user
| preferences... by default, from the moment you add text
| between <body> tags. Then web developers add code and CSS
| to make them worse. Sometimes they make it better, but very
| often it's worse.
| cal85 wrote:
| It sounds like you prefer that 'academic' style that
| rests heavily on browser defaults. I personally like that
| style too, it's not an uncommon preference for HN users.
| But you must realise it's very niche? Most users of most
| websites find that kind of design difficult to read and
| use, so it's rare to see it outside of
| academic/engineering circles. All you're doing here is
| asserting your own niche preference, and making out that
| it's what the majority of people want. It isn't. That's
| why designers design things the way they do, not (in
| general) because they are incompetent or malicious. And
| that's why it's great that you have the option of using
| extensions/reader-mode/copy-pasting/whatever, so you can
| effectively redesign anything just for you with a small
| amount of effort. If you expect everything to _already_
| be designed for your own unconventional preferences, at
| the expense of most other users, then that is
| unreasonable.
| lopis wrote:
| Very wide paragraphs is just bad accessibility. It's harder
| to read and there are studies on this. You can always just
| disable the page styles if you hate it.
| danShumway wrote:
| > As a user, when I set my browser to be full screen, I
| expect the content to take up the full screen. I bought a
| nice big 27" monitor, and I want to use it. How dare some UX
| designer 2,000 miles away from me simply decide that I should
| only be able to see content on a 5" wide strip down the
| middle!
|
| I've seen this argument come up before multiple times on HN,
| and it's wild to me. Having sensible CSS defaults is not a
| designer dictating that you are only able to see content one
| way. You might prefer to read text in a giant line spread
| across a giant monitor, and that's fine, but it's not a
| _freedom_ thing. It 's not denying your browser's role as a
| user agent that sites have CSS files.
|
| Every single website (HN included) makes CSS decisions for
| the user. What colors should be used, what is the default
| contrast. Every single line of CSS on a website is a designer
| decision by a designer 2000 miles away from you about how
| they think that content should be presented. And if you don't
| like that, turn off CSS in your web browser. Assuming you're
| using Firefox (which you should be using), it's trivial to
| do.
|
| Of course, browsers should allow overriding CSS, and (imo)
| they should make it easier to do so and more accessible to
| non-technical users. And yes, part of making a website that
| respects the browser as a user agent is shipping HTML that
| can be viewed unstyled and that is easy to override styles
| for. Ironically, HN does a horrible job of this -- the HTML
| is not semantic, the use of tables is so egregious that even
| stripping the CSS out doesn't really remove all of the
| styling. The site is really messy if you want to override
| anything. So that HN uses a design that happens to more
| closely align with what you want does not make the site more
| respectful of your browser as a user agent. It just means
| that you and the designer(s) happen to like the same design.
|
| And in comparison, putting `max-width: 45em` on a text column
| is not even remotely user hostile, it is a very simple CSS
| property to override -- especially for designs that use
| single columns because you can change that CSS property
| without even worrying about reflow. `max-width` is a default
| that statistically works better for the majority of users
| even on large monitors (I use a 32 inch 4K monitor and max-
| widths make text on that monitor easier to read). But of
| course, some people are different, and that's fine. Go yell
| at the browser makers to allow easier CSS overrides, or turn
| off CSS entirely, or install an extension that lets you add
| CSS to given pages or spend a weekend building an extension
| that strips max-width out of stylesheets for every website
| you visit, or customize Firefox's userContent.css file. There
| are options here. And if you had made an argument about those
| options, I'd be 100% on board. CSS for websites should be
| treated as a default setting instead of as a requirement and
| browsers should support CSS overrides more easily out-of-the-
| box.
|
| But the idea that designers are denying user agency by not
| making a proactive design decision to present by default the
| specific format you want to read -- it's just ludicrous.
| You're not asking for user freedom, you're asking for
| designers to target your preferences instead of other
| people's. Those two things are not the same.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I fully agree that browsers should take a more active role
| in enabling the user to easily set his/her preferences,
| without them having to re-develop the CSS for each site
| they visit.
|
| Browsers allow you to disable styles altogether, but as you
| note, most sites are horribly broken in that mode. Even
| Google's home page, which should be dead simple, is
| horribly broken with CSS disabled. I think if browsers had
| spines and enabled users to be more opinionated about
| styles, web developers would respond by ensuring their
| sites worked better without them.
| danShumway wrote:
| That I completely agree with -- I've had a hot-take a
| couple of times in the past and I still hold to it, that
| regardless of what HTML was intended to be or not be
| originally, today it's at its best when it's treated as a
| user-facing rendering target, and a lot of the criticisms
| about HTML's ability to handle things like giant virtual
| lists are missing the point that you shouldn't have giant
| lists in your UX in the first place, you shouldn't have a
| DOM tree that lists out 20,000 options in a `ul` if
| you're treating HTML like it's a user-facing interface
| rather than an authorship format for the developer alone.
|
| I'm still honestly a firm believer in the design
| technique of designing the HTML of a website before I
| start working on the CSS, and I know that a lot of people
| call that naive or say that it doesn't work... but I'm
| not saying that you can't revise the HTML later to fit a
| design, just that first I want to know what the content
| is and I want to treat the HTML as a primary rendering
| target, not an authoring language. I think there are a
| lot of benefits to that (one being that in addition to
| being more user-controllable and flexible, it also makes
| it much easier to do responsive design if you approach
| web design through that lens because page layouts become
| views of a unified block of content rather than
| completely separate isolated designs).
|
| But I don't think including the CSS is where that process
| falls apart or that it's disrespecting the user or
| denying agency. It's like how if someone hands me a image
| of a block of text, my problem is not that the contrast
| in the image is too light or that it's the wrong color;
| my problem is that they handed me an image of a text
| document. If someone hands me a website that is so
| intrinsically tied to CSS that it's impossible for me to
| easily adjust column widths, that coupling is the problem
| more than the column widths.
|
| Firefox does have some some great options around CSS
| control for partial or small adjustments but in typical
| Firefox fashion its best features are all hidden like
| Mozilla is embarrassed of them. I didn't bring up
| userContent.css to be dismissive; genuinely you should
| take a look at it if you've never used it before. I make
| heavy use of it for websites, everything from building
| grayscale modes when I want a website to be less
| distracting, to swapping layouts around. But it's a valid
| criticism that it's not user-facing and you need to go
| into advanced settings to even enable it. Browsers could
| do more.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > overly wide text
|
| That is completely subjective though, and the user has the
| option to not use a full screen browser to view the comments. I
| personally prefer it.
| agos wrote:
| not completely: line length for readability has been subject
| of interest for centuries
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You have the option to make the window more narrow, this is not
| a fault of the designers.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Disagree; I don't want to have to resize the window each time
| I switch browser tabs. Sites should work independent of the
| amount of real-estate my browser is taking up.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Then pray for adjustable margins to come to the web browser
| like in Wordpad three decades ago. That would actually be
| quite nice.
| arboles wrote:
| news.ycombinator.com###hnmain:style(max-width:100ch)
|
| Paste this line to uBlock Origin My filters
| euazOn wrote:
| Thanks. You have ever so slightly improved my life. I
| should've done this earlier.
| aimor wrote:
| Well, I tried setting `resize = "both"` on everything, but it
| was a bit of a letdown. It would be a neat experiment to have
| every element of every webpage be interactable (let's say
| resizable by dragging edges, and modify colors from the right-
| click menu) with edits persisting between visits.
| Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('*')).forEach(el =>
| {el.style.resize='both'})
| usrbinbash wrote:
| The problem isn't "mobile first" design.
|
| The problem is "mobile _only_ " design.
|
| PCs and Laptops exist. They have wide, high resolution screens
| and precision pointing devices. All relevant technologies support
| changing the rendering based on the display available to the
| browser. It's not that hard.
|
| The problem starts when designers ignore these facts, and instead
| pop giant buttons, zero navbars, hamburger menus, and thin
| columns with low information density into the Webbrowser running
| on my PC with a 4k screen and a 120$ laser mouse.
|
| https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#sprawl
| ryandrake wrote:
| Our UX's are turning into the Hospital Computer scene from
| Idiocracy[1].
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXzJR7K0wK0
| bobsmith432 wrote:
| As time goes on that movie becomes more and more of a
| documentary.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| > It's not that hard.
|
| It actually is very hard to design a responsive UX that can
| handle anything from the smallest smartphone up to ultrawide
| monitors.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > It actually is very hard
|
| Only when folks try to get fancy. K.I.S.S(illy).
| postalrat wrote:
| Name a few example sites that kept it simple
| SilasX wrote:
| Hacker News, old Reddit. Both work fine on both mobile
| and desktop. (Reddit started breaking features like
| double tap to zoom though.)
|
| Yes, on a large screen you might have to increase the
| size. But a mediocre design you can recover from is
| better then being stuck with some meth addled designer's
| unusable one.
| kitkat_new wrote:
| Hacker News YX could be way better though
| imachine1980_ wrote:
| Old Reddit doesn't work well on mobile devices at all.
| While it can scale the user interface, it's designed with
| a mouse in mind, making everything appear too small. I
| like using Old Reddit on desktop, but it's not user-
| friendly on mobile. For example, on HN (Hacker News),
| it's simpler; there are no images or different-sized
| icons. Even here sometimes struggle to tap the right
| links or flags, and I have to manually go to the settings
| to undo it. I'd prefer this over a poorly optimized
| mobile UI. However, optimizing the mobile web page would
| solve these problems.
| SilasX wrote:
| Rotate your device to landscape and it's fine. I guess
| part of the problem is sites training everyone not to do
| that. (Quora's expert designers will happily throw
| content into the void of the iPhone's notch on landscape,
| inventing a problem that didn't exist in older designs,
| despite them having been created before the notch ever
| came out.)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| old reddit never figured out how to deal with deeply
| nested threads without ending up
|
| l
|
| i
|
| k
|
| e
|
| t
|
| h
|
| i
|
| s
| esafak wrote:
| Maybe that is a feature: stop when you get to that point.
| SilasX wrote:
| Or just load a comment closer to that one.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > Hacker News
|
| The links are too close together on a small phone screen
| and I cannot tap them accurately half the time. This
| might mean the difference between upvoting/downvoting
| something, or flagging something instead of clicking on
| the context option, when I don't mean to.
|
| HN is pretty great when it comes to desktop, though -
| simple design, no dark patterns, except for maybe the
| comments with lower score becoming unreadable, which is
| bad from an accessibility point of view and an odd design
| choice otherwise.
|
| > old Reddit
|
| Again - by far the best site when compared with the new
| version, which has bad performance on both desktop
| Firefox and mobile Firefox; in addition to lots of dark
| patterns, sometimes refusing you the ability to view a
| page if you don't sign in, in addition to nagging you to
| download their app.
|
| It's still bad, though - too zoomed out, can't read
| anything without zooming in a lot with a phone and when
| you do, you need to scroll horizontally, which makes
| reading paragraphs of text a pain. Curiously, they do/did
| have a version that actually looked okay on phones
| (i.reddit.com, or something like that), but it doesn't
| seem to open anymore and redirects to the main site
| instead.
|
| I think that once you go below ~400px of screen width,
| designing a decent UI becomes difficult regardless of
| what you do. It's so much easier to mess around with the
| meta viewport tag and offer a slightly zoomed out
| version, but even then you still have the challenge of
| making something usable across multiple platforms, input
| methods and so on.
| SilasX wrote:
| I said that they're fine -- which they are -- not that
| they do every feature the best possible way. In any case
| where the initial rendering is bad, it's trivially
| fixable with your existing browser affordances.
|
| On HN, yes, the arrows are small. And you can trivially
| zoom in whenever you need them to be bigger and more
| easily select one over the others. This is worlds ahead
| of mobile-first designs that lock you into one specific
| view that you can't modify.
|
| As I said in the other comment: "mediocre design you can
| recover from" is much more pleasant than meth-addled
| design you're stuck with -- which about sums up HN/old
| reddit vs typical mobile first.
|
| >It's still bad, though - too zoomed out, can't read
| anything without zooming in a lot with a phone and when
| you do,
|
| Huh? New reddit doesn't do that any better, which can fit
| only a tiny amount of readable text on the screen as
| well.
| harrydehal wrote:
| In terms of keeping it simple, but having a responsive
| design that covers mobile/tablet/desktop -- do these
| count?
|
| https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system
|
| https://designsystem.digital.gov
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| I don't think so. It's strictly more work than designing a
| good UI for a single device which is hard enough, and
| usually more work than designing multiple UIs for different
| devices no matter.
|
| A smartphone, iPad, and ultrawide monitor demand
| fundamentally different UX considerations. Generalizing
| across all of them, and in one codebase, demands a certain
| expertise or else everyone would be doing it.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > demands a certain expertise
|
| I don't think it's a question of expertise; it's a
| question of effort (and cost). So it's a management
| issue; are we going to put the effort in to support
| desktops, or are we going to settle for a crap website?
| Because a website that doesn't support desktop _is_ a
| crap website.
| omarfarooq wrote:
| Expertise properly applied would reduce effort and cost.
| butlike wrote:
| I always read that as "keep it simpple; stupid" as in: dont
| try and make the code too smart. Keep it simple and stupid
| and leave it readable. I never took it as a value judgement
| agaist the programmer's intellect.
| Nycto wrote:
| Users on mobile can't make their screens that big, and the
| average users on desktops don't expect a webpage to work when
| they resize their browsers that small. Trying to make both
| work with the same design can have a negative impact on your
| customers, from both a usability perspective and by
| increasing page weight.
|
| Instead, my advice is to create individual designs for each,
| share when it makes sense, but actively diverge when it's
| good for your customers. There doesn't need to be a single
| version of a page.
|
| Your mileage may vary.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| There are certainly trade-offs to consider which is one of
| the reasons UX design demands so much expertise no matter
| how many HNers dismiss it as some trivial practice (that
| they, conveniently, never want to do).
|
| Maintaining N versions of your application has costs that
| aren't necessarily great for your customers either. In my
| experience it usually cashes out into one version (either
| mobile or desktop) getting all the support and features
| while they slowly drip down into the other versions.
| Meanwhile a responsive design can have the upside of
| forcing support and feature rollout for all devices
| simultaneously.
|
| None of this is easy.
| andrewprock wrote:
| You're more than correct.
|
| In practice, working in small and medium organizations, I
| have met very few UX designers. Instead I have met plenty
| of graphical designers that know almost nothing about UX
| design. I've been at places where I - as a backend
| developer - know more about practical UX design than
| anyone on the design team.
|
| I think the reason why we have "bad mobile first design
| with awful desktop UX" is because very few of the people
| designing these experiences are UX designers.
|
| I was surprised the article didn't highlight the horror
| show that is Vector22 at Wikipedia, a design so
| colossally bad that after three years of suck costs the
| only path to saving face was to make it the default theme
| for all users: "Mission Accomplished!"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector_2022
| pmontra wrote:
| I read that page, then browsed Wikipedia a little on
| desktop. It's a site that I use very often and I didn't
| notice anything weird. I could have sworn that it has
| been the theme of Wikipedia for at least 10 years.
|
| I also checked if I had created some rules for that site
| in Stylus and uBlock Origin, nothing. For once I'm lucky
| that a change didn't destroy one of my workflows. One
| could say that if I didn't notice the transition they
| could have spared themselves all the work, or one could
| argue that they performed a perfect job.
|
| Anyway, I get directly to the page I need from Google. I
| found several threads on Reddit complaining about the
| change and this one https://www.reddit.com/r/wikipedia/co
| mments/10g2cir/im_prett... I see a different usage
| pattern "all I had to do was open the site and use the
| search bar. And then from there it was easy to get to the
| main page, current events, etc." The home page, current
| events? I'm sure I never heard about current events
| before now and about the home page, I know that there is
| one but the search bar of my browser is closer to
| Wikipedia's internal pages.
| andrewprock wrote:
| Without going into details about Vector22, it's certainly
| better today than it was at launch. It still has a very
| poor floating ToC UX.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Agreed. I had the pleasure to work with talented
| specialist UX designers early in my careers, and their
| designs were really fantastic. They also worked really
| closely with the developers, both to understand the
| medium they were designing for and as a first line of
| feedback before things got to real users/clients.
|
| Unfortunately some of the designers I've worked with more
| recently were primarily graphic designers without a UX
| background, and actually became an impediment to good
| design because they were given authority over it despite
| not really know what they were doing.
|
| I think it's probably an unfortunate consequence of there
| being more demand for UX designers then there are good UX
| designers, and simultaneously being a lack of jobs
| available for graphic designers. And a lot of hiring
| companies not really understanding what makes a good UX
| designer.
| rerdavies wrote:
| Not getting it. They increased readability, by limiting
| maximum line length! That is a colossally good thing.
| Surely, that's like a graphic design 101 kind of
| decision. (It's a design rule that significantly predates
| "UX").
|
| The issue at hand is that overly long lines reduce
| reading speed and comprehension of the content[1]. The
| optimum length for a digital line of text is somewhere
| between 66 characters per line and 100 characters per
| line. I personally use the 100cpl rule. For reference,
| this HN page has ~185 characters per line on my 1920x1080
| display at default scaling.
|
| I do actually remember un-minimizing my browser in order
| to improve the rate at which I could read the text of ur-
| Wiki pages.
|
| And then they provided an escape for old men shaking
| their fists at the sky. Given a choice, I would, without
| hesitation, choose the new design.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length#:~:text=cha
| racters...
| robertoandred wrote:
| How is Vector2022 bad? Text columns that are 100 words
| wide is bad desktop UX.
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| People tend to dismiss UX 'experts' because frequently
| they end up being the ones who destroy perfectly good
| interfaces based on trends or similar. The principled
| ones who adopt a scientific approach are much rarer.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The ones who adopt a scientific approach are by far the
| worst. Design is ultimately all about how things ought to
| be, an act of judgement, meanwhile science is wholly
| unsuitable for such questions, since it only tells us
| what is, which following Hume, cannot on its own lead to
| conclusions about what ought to be.
|
| You get a sort of garbage-in-garbage-out effect if you
| apply science to a field like design, where it only
| serves to amplify your own convictions, as what is being
| fed into the scientific process as unquestioned
| assumptions inevitably fall out of it as conclusions.
|
| At best you get KPI driven design, which is a vehicle for
| enshittification, not for building great design.
| itishappy wrote:
| Can you relate that to specifics from the article? To my
| (admittedly non-designer) eyes it appears to be a great
| example of how science can be used to improve design, and
| I happen to agree with the findings presented, so I'm
| curious where you see this breaking down.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The tacit assumption being made in the article is that
| good design shouldn't frustrate the users.
|
| I don't disagree with this, but it's none the less an
| assumption that went into the study, and likewise a
| conclusion that fell out of it.
| jfim wrote:
| > The ones who adopt a scientific approach are by far the
| worst
|
| I strongly disagree.
|
| Design without considering all of the HCI research that
| has been done is what you call "garbage-in-garbage-out."
| We already know how humans perceive information, what
| makes things salient or invisible, and so on, yet the
| current design trends completely disregard that with flat
| UIs and trendy designs that have poor usability.
|
| > At best you get KPI driven design, which is a vehicle
| for enshittification, not for building great design.
|
| No, you just get trendy design, not usable design.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| I'm not following. Science gives us good guidance on what
| works well or will let us achieve our goals, all the
| time. It's basically the whole point of doing it at all.
|
| I took the poster as meaning UX that considers the
| results of, and perhaps even performs, actual user
| testing & observation, to decide what works and what
| doesn't. Like operating system vendors used to. I'll
| grant that "scientific" UX that's just incompetent (99%
| of the time) application of "telemetry" and A/B testing
| is awful. But that--and the other bad kind that's just
| trend-following, personal preference, and whatever will
| get the best reaction in a design presentation meeting
| full of non-experts--aren't what I understood as being
| advocated.
|
| The good kind performs & pays attention to science.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| What science doesn't give good guidance is how to select
| those goals in a vacuum. The goals at best end up being a
| version of someone's personal opinion, since there that's
| the only form of opinion we have access to.
|
| Any opinions you get out of the scientific method were
| put in there by the person designing the experiment.
| znpy wrote:
| > People tend to dismiss UX 'experts' because frequently
| they end up being the ones who destroy perfectly good
| interfaces based on trends or similar.
|
| yep. i guess that reddit hired one of those.
|
| old.reddit.com is awesome and stood the test of time, the
| new reddit is awful and slow (and i hate it).
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| There's two things here.
|
| One, not all Reddit users prefer old.reddit (I do).
|
| Two, Reddit aren't designing for users, they're designing
| for advertiser's to push adverts at users.
|
| Wrt the second point, this means designers aren't
| designing to the brief you would give them. Like when
| engineers design obsolescence into a product (it's
| purposefully inferior for the end user).
|
| Any idiot can see it's bad user experience to keep
| forcing a user to a design they don't like, but it's not
| for UX reasons that they do it. The trick is keeping UX
| good enough.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Wrt the second point, this means designers aren 't
| designing to the brief you would give them._
|
| To extend that: note that the very companies that spend
| most money on UI, that hire the experts and pay them
| well, that set the trends for entire field of UX - are
| all companies whose primary business is _user abuse_ -
| advertising, high engagement, etc. That 's what they pay
| the UI/UX experts to optimize for, and that's what ends
| up leaking into the wider field - leading astray people
| who are trying to build things beneficial to their
| users/customers.
| et-al wrote:
| A great recent example is the Slack redesign that didn't
| improve any user flows and lowers the information
| density. And that activity badge with sticky
| notifications. (Shift + ESC is your friend here.)
| withinboredom wrote:
| You can't even exit a search. And god forbid you click a
| notification while doing a search and have to click
| "back" 500 times to get to a useable interface.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| I don't think it is an issue of "scientific" versus
| "unscientific"
|
| It's really an issue that many UX designers don't know
| how browser rendering works, so they design static pages
| as if they were printing in a magazine.
|
| Pixel perfect mocks are terrible for designing responsive
| UIs. Trying to build pixel perfect pages in a browser is
| impossible. Somehow these designers get through school
| with zero understanding that designing for web is
| different from designing for print.
| toyg wrote:
| It's 2023, I don't think that's really the case any more.
| If anything, designing for print is now the part of the
| discipline that has to suffer through "web-isms".
|
| The reality is just that designers gonna design - and
| designing is often an unscientific craft, pursuing
| aesthetic values before practical considerations. Google
| and Apple designers are well-paid and experienced web-
| heads, and still they led us into a land of well-padded
| desperation.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| It's 2023 and I am still explaining how responsive design
| works to new design grads that my company just hired so
| there's definitely some failure somewhere.
| __xor_eax_eax wrote:
| Huge engineering cost though. If most of your customers are
| on mobile, makes sense to optimize for mobile, and hope its
| "good enough" on desktop.
|
| At the end of the day its all an ROI problem (as are most
| things)
| bluGill wrote:
| The cost need not be huge. Most of the costs should be
| content, and just the theme is different. However even
| ignoring that, two themes can be hard if you do them
| independently. However often only a few changes to one
| theme are needed to become acceptable, and that is good
| enough. This in turns means you can limit costs: spend 1
| week on making a good desktop theme will already make a
| big difference as you get the worst offenders fixed.
| threatofrain wrote:
| From an SSR perspective this seems rather hard. How do you
| correctly identify the user's device at serve time?
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| People say SSR like it's a new concept, but this was how
| it worked for a long time.
|
| Guess based on user agent (or other fingerprinting metric
| of choice), redirect to guessed site, provide user the
| option to override when the page appears, remember the
| choice in cookie (or local storage).
|
| Though personally I think you can do a lot with
| responsive CSS if you try hard enough - that is my
| preferred option.
| progval wrote:
| > redirect to guessed site
|
| I always wondered about that. What's the point of
| redirecting instead of serving a different template on
| the same URL?
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Devices should be truthful in the type of content they
| request. If your phone somehow tells my website that it's
| a tablet or a laptop then you should reconsider the
| intelligence of who has developed your software
| bluGill wrote:
| My phone often does tell remote sites it is a desktop
| because as bad as the desktop experience is, often that
| is the only way to get at something. (I don't want an app
| for my doctors office - I check it after my yearly
| physical and the rest of the time it takes up space I
| could use for another picture)
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Does it do that automatically or does it have an option?
| hn_acker wrote:
| > Devices should be truthful in the type of content they
| request.
|
| I think that websites should assume that devices are
| being truthful. I should be able to request the desktop
| view on my phone or request the mobile view on my
| computer. The former I can do sometimes, the latter I can
| only do with developer tools (and usually doesn't work
| because the website detects that I'm on desktop!).
| Browsers could add a header to switch to the mode in
| which the website dynamically readjusts based on actual
| device parameters like window size, but by default I need
| the view to be what I requested regardless of my window
| size and device type.
|
| You know how Wikipedia has no table of contents on
| mobile? I made my browser request the desktop site by
| default so that I could see the table of contents and
| don't have to tap to open the article sections.
| (Unfortunately, Wikipedia changed its desktop view UI by
| moving the table of contents into a hamburger button. On
| mobile the desktop view forces me to tap the hamburger
| button to view a blocking popout of the table of
| contents, while on desktop the contents are automatically
| opened in a sidebar.) If Wikipedia had forced a dynamic
| design on me to restrict me to the mobile view on mobile,
| then I would've wasted time opening article sections to
| decide whether I wanted to open them in the first place.
| croes wrote:
| If you can't, give me at least a choice
| spookthesunset wrote:
| One problem with two separate designs is deciding when to
| show one vs. the other. This gets especially tricky when
| people share links. Wikipedia, for example, has two
| different URL's: one for mobile and one for desktop. How
| often do you get links to the mobile version instead of the
| other?
|
| And if you keep the URL the same but serve different output
| depending on the browser, then you get inconsistent
| behaviour between two different devices.
|
| Nailing the UX for mobile and desktop is actually pretty
| damn hard.
| butlike wrote:
| You can request the desktop site on mobile, though
| fsflover wrote:
| > Users on mobile can't make their screens that big
|
| I can connect my Librem 5 phone to a screen/keyboard and I
| get a full desktop.
| olyjohn wrote:
| It's not mobile when it's connected to a screen /
| keyboard is it?
| fsflover wrote:
| It's never mobile: It runs a desktop GNU/Linux. Dedicated
| apps are convergent, i.e., automatically change depending
| on the screen size: https://puri.sm/posts/converging-on-
| convergence-pureos-is-co...
| kylebenzle wrote:
| I split my laptop screen vertical with usually a browser on
| either side. Occasionally a web page will render itself as
| if on mobile because it thinks I'm on a narrower screen.
|
| I agree with comment above that it is very hard to make one
| website responsive to multiple screen sizes.
| robertoandred wrote:
| Except you are on a narrower screen. Sounds like correct
| functionality to me.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| I think you're trying to make a very nuanced point, and I
| tend to agree that there are different needs for different
| viewport sizes. But I think it's important to note the
| difference between the design and the technology to build
| it. The technology should, IMO, as much as possible,
| seamlessly switch between the various layouts when it makes
| sense from a viewport size perspective. Definitely don't
| want, IMO, to deliver completely different sites based on
| device type/site from a technological point of view, we've
| tried that before and it isn't a good idea.
|
| I also think one of the things good designers do is to take
| this into account, and make pages that are built up of
| components that work at various sizes, not just scaled up
| from mobile. In addition, a good designer will setup the
| page design such that it can scale up and down nicely from
| one viewport size to another.
|
| So, while I don't 100% agree that you need "individual"
| designs for each, I do think you need a designer that takes
| the different viewport sizes into account and provides the
| appropriate adjustments for each. And developers that are
| skilled at then building those pages.
| gedy wrote:
| It's very hard for many designers and others to get their
| head around it, sure.
|
| But I think a lot of the challenge is using pixel perfect
| static mockups drawn in some design tool.
|
| It would be faster to have a napkin sketch and work with UI
| dev and figure out the cascading and wrapping at design time.
| solardev wrote:
| Figma has responsive design and reflow tools built in these
| days.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Not really. No media queries, no percent widths or non-
| pixel units, no margins (everything is padding or gap),
| no viewport units, etc.
|
| I'm a CSS person who works in Figma every day and Figma
| absolutely sucks for responsive design and handoff to
| devs.
|
| I wish I could just design in Framer or Webflow but those
| tools while being Figma-like are entirely catered to
| content websites and not to product design.
|
| Design tools should render with HTML and CSS, not make
| the mistake Figma made in creating their own rendering
| engine they have to painstakingly recreate CSS from
| scratch with.
| vorticalbox wrote:
| https://dev.to/swyx/100-bytes-of-css-to-look-great-
| everywher...
| enriquto wrote:
| > It actually is very hard to design a responsive UX that can
| handle anything from the smallest smartphone up to ultrawide
| monitors.
|
| A motherfucking website made with plain html, no css and no
| javascript is responsive and works _everywhere_. Any problems
| found when you go beyond this are entirely self-inflicted.
| dangus wrote:
| And that website does nothing. It's just text, and it has
| one image that's too small on a mobile view.
|
| Now try to do the same thing with a complex app like your
| bank's website, which needs to handle every type of account
| including credit cards, checking accounts, and investment
| accounts, rewards, and a travel/shopping portal.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > And that website does nothing. It's just text, and it
| has one image
|
| Which is pretty much what 99% of websites need to be able
| to display. That includes many sub-sections of web
| applications.
|
| > Now try to do the same thing with a complex app like
| your bank's website
|
| Fun story, my bank has a website that works great on both
| my phone and my PC. On the one I can navigate it fully
| with one thumb, on the other it is information-dense and
| respects that I have a high precision pointing device
| available. They also offer different Apps for Phone and
| Desktop.
| dangus wrote:
| 9 of the top 20 most visited websites primarily deal in
| video and multimedia. I disagree that "99%" of websites
| "just need text."
| 0xEFF wrote:
| A bank is a bad example. The only thing we use bank
| websites for is to check our transactions and transfer
| money.
|
| My business checking account has started offering partner
| promotions from the transfer screen and I'm tempted to
| switch to another bank because of it. Their developers
| and designers were tasked with delivering that component.
| At the same time they took away their mobile app and
| mobile check deposit because it was not secured properly.
|
| Most bank websites and apps are examples of teams and
| organizations focusing on the wrong thing in my opinion.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| Banks are basically the ideal "this is just text, tables,
| and forms" website that html 4 was perfect for.
| elondaits wrote:
| A text column the whole width of your screen is readable on
| phones and tablets (portrait) but unreadable on notebooks
| and desktops. So columns are necessary... Also firm design
| usually is better if labels and fields are inlined. That's
| just the beginning... you can't avoid design decisions even
| if you want to favor functionality and content over form.
| solardev wrote:
| Really? On every team I've worked since the media query and
| bootstrap days, it's been normal to have a mobile, tablet,
| and desktop version at least. Tiny phone and ultrawide were
| bonuses, but having at least the basic three meant a somewhat
| usable experience for everyone.
|
| These days it's even easier with MUI and similar UI libs that
| have responsive components built-in. Tailwind also makes it
| very easy to build your own.
| civilitty wrote:
| It's going to get even easier once container queries are
| widely deployed (if they're not already).
|
| We'll be able to design components to scale to their parent
| instead of screen size, making them much more generic.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| Technically, that's correct (which means it's the best kind
| of correct).
|
| But... I'd add that doing that well isn't easy. I
| frequently find cases where the mobile version simply
| removes features the desktop version has. And tablet
| version are very very rare. They tend to be either just the
| desktop or mobile version. Rarely is someone designing
| _for_ tablet.
|
| And that makes sense. Designing 3 different sites to all be
| the same feature-wise isn't trivial. Then you throw mobile
| apps on top of it, and suddenly it becomes much harder.
|
| Can it be done? Sure. But I wouldn't say it's trivial to do
| it well.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> It actually is very hard to design a responsive UX that
| can handle anything from the smallest smartphone up to
| ultrawide monitors.
|
| Sure I'll agree it's hard, but don't web designers do their
| work on desktop machines? It seems like even if they are
| primarily targeting mobile, they must see the results on
| desktop right? There have to be some known strategies for
| dealing with it, and they must be aware of the problems.
| Right?
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| Even if we go with the "is not that hard" narrative, is for
| sure damn laborious. Also let's not pretend that all the
| intermediate sizes aren't also a requirement as the dynamic
| adaptation from one to another medium being zero effort in
| order to "just work".
| irrational wrote:
| Is it? CSS Grid and flexbox exist. What I do is design at the
| smallest screen size first (mobile first), then increase the
| screen size until it looks bad/breaks, then I set a
| breakpoint and use CSS to adjust things as needed. Rinse and
| repeat as many times as needed until it looks good at all
| screen sizes. It really is not difficult if you know what you
| are doing.
| speak_plainly wrote:
| If you're designing a website to work on the smallest
| smartphone to ultra wide monitors you need to work on a more
| serious quality management strategy.
| javajosh wrote:
| _> It actually is very hard to design a responsive UX that
| can handle anything from the smallest smartphone up to
| ultrawide monitors._
|
| Maybe the real solution is to treat a wide monitor as
| multiple mobile screens side-by-side. That is you give your
| user N-views into your app with no other coupling between
| them, almost like browser tabs. It sounds silly but I could
| think of worse solutions. Note: N would be equal to
| floor(laptop-width/mobile-width).
| omarfarooq wrote:
| TweetDeck is an example of this.
| croes wrote:
| At least make one mobile and one desktop view.
|
| It's strange that I have to scroll horizontally to view
| source code and at the same time 2/3 of my screen is empty.
| butlike wrote:
| Are you suggesting returning to the time when every site
| had "m." as a subdomain? Like m.facebook.com?
| croes wrote:
| No need for a subdomain. Just design one for mobile and
| one for desktop.
|
| Could be purely CSS, could be JS or SSR
| fsflover wrote:
| A tiny company called Purism did it, so it can't be that
| hard: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328085
| robbyking wrote:
| I'm sorry, if Wix and SquareSpace can figure it out for their
| templates, a site with dedicated UX designers should be able
| to figure it out, too. The smartphone is 15 years old,
| designers know what to expect.
| vitaflo wrote:
| The problem isn't UX Designers figuring it out, it's
| managers not wanting to spend time designing different
| breakpoints because they want the site delivered ASAP.
|
| A lot of bad UX decisions come from bad management, not
| necessarily bad designers.
| leptons wrote:
| It isn't that hard if you know anything about modern CSS.
| Sure, for some people that hate writing front-end code, it's
| going to be a real pain. But for anyone that focuses on
| front-end, it really shouldn't be difficult at all.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I would disagree with "very" hard.
|
| We don't have to touch _every_ class of device with our B2B
| product, but we do have to support desktop /tablet/etc. We
| decided to make a tradeoff in terms of aesthetics and keep
| the overall design as simple as possible. When you don't plan
| to test the dimensions between iPhone and iPad or concern
| yourself with foldable/esoteric devices, you should probably
| not get too elaborate with your design language.
|
| Our app has 1 simple breakpoint @ 960px. Below this, we
| assume we are on smartphone and run with one column layouts.
| Above, we display the full width view. We combine the media
| query with CSS grid layouts to swap between modes. The
| specific number was chosen to allow full-size presentation in
| side-by-side window arrangement on a 1080p desktop (our most
| typical power user scenario).
|
| Again, we are B2B and only have to tolerate US audiences. So,
| we have the ability to get away with far more than developers
| who have to polish B2C experiences with international
| audiences.
|
| If I had to do B2C web properties and ideally support as many
| devices as possible, I would be more amenable to that
| adjective. Otherwise, I would say it is a normal amount of
| "hard".
| quest88 wrote:
| How do you solve non-layout issues while keeping the site
| fast? Maybe you want your site to functionally behave
| differently, but don't want to implement client-side
| rendering.
| bob1029 wrote:
| Perhaps you could provide an example of a non-layout
| issue?
| Scarblac wrote:
| But does the desktop version get more functionality?
| bob1029 wrote:
| Same effective functionality between touch-enabled and
| desktop devices. The main differences are in certain
| edges. For example, on devices with integrated cameras we
| present extra options for acquiring photos whereas on the
| desktop w/out camera, you get a file/browse option
| instead. 90%+ of the javascript in our app is used to
| normalize device-specific I/O quirks. The rest is to do
| things like disable form elements when the form is
| submitted.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| And costly in dev and support.
|
| Not to mention the market for this target is shrinking so
| much compared to mobile it's easy to understand how the
| choice is made.
| thunderbong wrote:
| I'm sure the people who complain aren't the ones with the
| smallest smartphones or the ones with ultrawide monitors with
| a maximised window.
|
| Just as an example - Look at Google Drive in a regular laptop
| / desktop browser. All the relevant and frequently used
| actions are behind menus and icons.
| uoaei wrote:
| The entire point is you don't have to design one UX for both
| kinds of devices. The screen resolution is an OK proxy but
| there's buttons in every mobile browser for requesting the
| desktop site so obviously there's more reliable ways to tell
| the webserver which kind of device is requesting the site.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm#sprawl
|
| And this site quite fittingly has one narrow and centered
| column with huge left and right gaps.
|
| Otherwise I think the majority of windows laptops now have
| touch screens, so while they still have a pointer based input
| most of the time, touch friendly design is an advantage for the
| majority of the users.
|
| It would be nice to have specific dedicated designs for all
| cases, but I am sympathetic with how much of a challenge that
| is.
| softfalcon wrote:
| Not trying to detract from your point, and maybe I'm "out of
| touch" but I don't see hardly anyone but a rare few folks
| actually using touch screen laptops.
|
| I see many people with laptops, but other than one person I
| know who exclusively buys Microsoft Surface laptops, the
| average laptop user I know is just typing and clicking away
| like normal.
|
| How many folks actively go looking for touch in their laptop?
| I keep hearing about it on YouTube reviews, but even in
| families with kids, the kids don't even use the touch
| features even if the laptop supposedly has it.
|
| I'm just amazed how much "touch on laptop" comes up and I
| quite literally never see it in reality.
| Roark66 wrote:
| Well.. I've been using touch on my laptops since the start.
| My current laptop is a mini asus "tablet pc" with
| detachable keyboard. When I'm just web browsing I detach
| the keyboard and use touch. But even on normal laptops I
| got from work I'd prefer touch for many things like
| scrolling over the built in touchpad.
|
| Especially when I'm using the laptop as a portable device
| on my lap, in a plane or on a bus.
|
| I have to admit I don't use touchscreens that much when I
| can put a laptop on top of a desk. But when I'm sitting at
| a desk I much prefer a desktop pc.
| ako wrote:
| I mostly use an iPad when i don't need a keyboard,
| especially when sitting on a couch (typing this on my
| iPad).
|
| I noticed that as soon as I pair the iPad with a
| Bluetooth keyboard, and an external display, I'll also
| use my mouse to navigate.
|
| So, even for a touch first device like an iPad, when
| using a keyboard, touch is not the best way to navigate.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I have actively gone looking for a way to disable the
| touchscreen on my laptop, because I _explicitly never_
| intend to use it - who wants to look at smudgy
| fingerprints? It only gets activated by accident and I 'd
| rather not have it at all.
| SuperCuber wrote:
| In uni, a couple students had those tablet/laptop reverse
| foldable devices as a fancy notepad, used with a stylus.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| Started uni recently. My friends have those. They don't
| have or use a mouse. All they use is touchpad and the
| touchscreen. Well, to be honest, a lot of them don't have
| a touchscreen yet still don't use a mouse.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I saw it a bunch with family members. They're not using
| touch as a primary interface, but more as an alternative to
| click a button in the middle of the screen or select stuff
| on the laptop screen wen their mouse is on their external
| display. I'd suspect there's many "occasional touch" users,
| in particular on laptops where the trackpad is not great.
|
| But yes, people going full hog on touch usually have
| Surface pro or Yoga like devices in the first place and
| won't be an average user. And people used to point fingers
| at their screens tend to hate it now that it actually
| reacts.
| layer8 wrote:
| Most Windows laptops definitely do _not_ have touch screens,
| and most(?) users also tend to use a desktop monitor most of
| the time (the only ergonomic choice).
| usrbinbash wrote:
| > Otherwise I think the majority of windows laptops now have
| touch screens
|
| a) I would be really interested in the reasoning behind that
| opinion
|
| b) Even if a laptops screen is touch-capable, it still has a
| precision pointing device
|
| c) PCs exist, and so do docking stations.
| yaky wrote:
| The opposite to your 4K screen situation is also true - many
| modern sites have so much whitespace that I have to zoom out to
| 80% to use them comfortably on my old laptop with 1366x768px
| display.
| esafak wrote:
| Have you tried setting your browser agent to mobile?
| dheera wrote:
| > The problem starts when designers ignore these facts, and
| instead pop giant buttons, zero navbars, hamburger menus, and
| thin columns with low information density into the Webbrowser
| running on my PC with a 4k screen and a 120$ laser mouse.
|
| And using phones as a 2FA device. A giant, relatively immobile
| device is a much better 2FA device than something that is
| easily stolen.
| layer8 wrote:
| > 4k screen
|
| Another problem is designers working only on 4K/5K screens and
| not taking into account how little of their design fits on a
| FHD screen that a major part of the desktop population still
| uses.
| danShumway wrote:
| Yep, I see this in both directions. People are still of the
| mindset that "desktop" means a single resolution and aspect
| ratio that everyone uses. That wasn't really the case in the
| past, but it's really not the case today.
|
| - On Linux, the assumption is that everyone has a 1920x1080
| monitor, so if you get a high resolution 13-inch device like
| a Surface suddenly half of the apps are unusable because
| everything is scaled so tiny, and the apps literally just do
| not know how to handle the aspect ratio.
|
| - On Web and in popular design studios, the assumption is
| that everyone has a full 4K mac and so everything becomes
| larger and spread apart; you load them up on a normal monitor
| and everything becomes cluttered and the interface of the app
| starts taking up more room than the content you're looking
| at.
|
| Test your apps on multiple resolutions y'all, and for the
| love of everything that is holy if you're designing a desktop
| app, please add button density and font size controls to your
| settings. Some weirdos like me even use multiple monitors of
| different resolutions and pixel densities hooked up to the
| same computer at the same time, so being able to adjust on
| the fly or handle fractional scaling is kind of a big deal
| for apps that I use. Standard resolutions are a myth.
| marssaxman wrote:
| Caring so much about screen resolution has always seemed
| strange to me when not everyone maximizes their browser
| window, anyway. My browser windows are generally close to
| square.
| danShumway wrote:
| I think that differing device resolutions and aspect
| ratios in some ways forced designers to think about
| things that were always worth thinking about but were
| easier to ignore. I use a tiled window manager, I care
| about whether your desktop site is responsive even at
| minimal widths because I tile windows. I also have a
| touchscreen monitor hooked up to my desktop and I like to
| be able to use it. And sometimes I also full-screen
| windows on a 32-inch screen and use a mouse-and-keyboard.
| If a desktop site accommodates me in all of those
| scenarios, it'll probably be fine on a phone as well.
|
| But it was so easy in the past to just ignore that and
| treat PCs like they were uniform devices used in a
| uniform way, and phones meant that you suddenly _had_ to
| care about what a website looked like in a single-column
| view, you couldn 't just tell your users to maximize the
| browser window. Unfortunately, rather than taking away
| the lesson that design should adjust to nonstandard
| situations, layouts, and input-modes that can not be
| fully predicted or tested for in advance -- instead
| developers took away the lesson "okay, now there are two
| standard devices we have to support: mobile and desktop."
|
| The distinction isn't real, there is no hard line between
| a desktop and a mobile site. There are mobile tablets
| that are big enough that they should be served a desktop
| layout, there are desktops with touchscreen displays,
| there are monitors that are 3/4 ratios. And there never
| was a standard and computers were always like that, but
| it's an understated truth that every developer and every
| designer would secretly love to develop exclusively for
| consoles with integrated screens and one input method,
| and developers often kind of behind-the-scenes somewhat
| resent the fact that general computing is an open
| ecosystem with diverse devices. So designers often just
| treat computers like they have two completely discrete
| interfaces, or at worst decide that because they're not
| targeting one of them that they now have permission to
| target exactly one resolution and size again.
|
| Sometimes that takes the form of designing "mobile only"
| like the top-level comment talks about and calling
| desktops a dead platform. Sometimes it means designing
| desktop only and getting mad that somebody flipped their
| monitor vertically instead of horizontally and now wants
| the ability to move a side-drawer to the bottom of the
| screen.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The problem is "mobile only" design.
|
| Agree.
|
| Actually, I think what happens is that the team adopts a
| "mobile-first" policy, which is reasonable, since most visitors
| wil be mobile. But they don't follow through with the "desktop-
| after" corollary, and they don't engage with the "progressive
| enhancement" philosophy, because that gets even more costly
| than simply having two websites.
|
| I find phones impossible to use as web browsers. My eyesight is
| too poor, and my thumbs are too fat. I use phones for making
| phone-calls and for trading SMS messages; if I need a website,
| I use my laptop. But that's just me.
|
| I think the real problem is that mobile phones make awful
| platforms for browsing websites. Native checkboxes and native
| select-boxes are often unusable, so developers use "frameworks"
| <spit> that replace them with Javascript monstrosities. Because
| that all depends on plugins and code, each website ends up with
| it's own idiosyncratic UX.
|
| I think the correct solution is for phone makers to deliver
| platforms that can render HTML so it's useable. Then the only
| problem for devs is create responsive layouts, which isn't that
| hard.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Designers usually not the problem here. Most are well aware
| that rendering should change between different types of devices
| and displays, they use these website and devices too!
|
| The problem usually is the resources and time available to
| implement such designs. Most of the time the devs simply don't
| have the time, desire, or even ability to implement more
| advanced responsive design, so designers will design what will
| actually get made.
| leptons wrote:
| It takes maybe 2 hours for someone experienced to turn a
| desktop layout into a mobile responsive layout for all screen
| sizes using media queries. Longer than that usually means
| less experience.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Sure for a content-site template, blog, or something else
| fairly basic. This is not at all the case for things like
| art-directed super-custom designed sites like magazines,
| fashion brands, museums, etc, OR highly complex interactive
| SAAS web apps like the ones I work on. These have lots of
| unique considerations like complex animations, layered
| menus and controls, optimizing for change from mouse to
| touch interactions, handling the higher rate of people who
| use zoomed text on mobile devices, adapting to device safe
| areas in portrait and landscape, etc.
|
| I am a designer and HTML/CSS coder so I am aware of the
| challenges from both directions.
| peckrob wrote:
| About 6 years ago, the company [0] that owns most of the local
| newspapers in my state did a "mobile first" redesign of their
| website ... which actually was a "mobile ONLY" redesign.
|
| It was so, so bad it was almost totally unusable on anything
| larger than a tablet. It made it virtually impossible to read
| articles on a desktop because everything was so spread out, the
| font sizes were all messed up, navigation was hidden in a tiny
| little hamburger at the far upper right of the screen, and a
| bunch of other problems. But what was wild was how _easy_ it
| was to fix them. I ended up writing a small (maybe 100 line)
| CSS user style that fixed almost all of the problems.
|
| They did eventually "fix" the site so that it wasn't as bad on
| desktop.
|
| [0] https://www.al.com/
| dorfsmay wrote:
| And no way to adjust the sound volume.
|
| In a nutshell everything Instagram does!
| butlike wrote:
| We should bring back below-the-fold auto-playing music on
| sites.
| makingstuffs wrote:
| 100% this. The amount of times I get given a mobile wireframe
| then subsequently brushed aside when I enquire about desktop is
| unreal.
|
| Our work flow often ends up: get design > ask for desktop >
| told to 'use best judgement' > uses best judgement > get a load
| of amends as best judgement wasn't what the client has in mind
| > repeat.
|
| Don't even get me started on the mythical black hole that is
| the tablet screen. It's like designers have forgotten that they
| exist and people use them at times.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > PCs and Laptops exist
|
| But it's a slowly dying market segment. We might be at a point
| where it's more likely a household as a Chromebook than a PC.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| These days we're actually lucky to get any desktop experience
| at all. Look at e.g. Instagram Threads. The response to
| "desktop is hard" and "most users use mobile" is often now
| "only weirdos use desktop, don't even bother".
| leptons wrote:
| I start with desktop layouts, create that, then make it
| responsive for mobile devices of all sizes. I'm often only
| given a desktop design for a page, and I'm fine with that.
|
| "Mobile first" is not the right way to approach the problem. I
| dislike desktop layouts that were obviously "mobile first" and
| only look like a wider version of a mobile layout. It's just
| the wrong way to do things.
|
| It's very easy to use media queries to make all the content of
| a desktop design fit into a mobile layout. I really don't
| understand the disconnect about this. I manage to get full
| functionality in both desktop and mobile devices of all sizes,
| but others cry "mobile first!" like if you don't do it that
| way, then you're doing it wrong? It's nonsense. "Mobile first"
| almost always leads to sub-par desktop experiences, and that's
| a shame.
|
| My favorite challenge is a design meant to be printed on a
| single page. The page also has to load on desktop and mobile
| browsers. With the printed page, the content absolutely cannot
| overflow even though it's dynamic content and could have text
| of any length, or list items of any length (scaling is used to
| a point, but often some items must be omitted from the layout).
| So in this case, it's absolutely "print first", not "mobile
| first". And yet I manage to make a perfectly good mobile
| responsive layout and a desktop layout out of a "print first"
| page.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| The reasoning behind mobile-first was exactly what you say is
| "easy" and I disagree - it is not always "easy" to shrink
| contents of complex desktop layouts into a mobile one. Mobile
| first helps figure out the simplest possible version of a
| design. And whether building mobile first or desktop first
| isn't really a design choice, that's a development choice,
| and either way of building a site (as long IMO as you don't
| mix/match) is equally valid) and the same goal can be
| accomplished from a technical perspective.
|
| I agree though, that doesn't mean we need dumbed down desktop
| layouts or scaled up mobile versions, it just means we need
| to consider both and design accordingly. Mobile first is fine
| as the starting point, there are a lot of valid points to
| that design paradigm. But that is just the "first" part, then
| there are the rest of the parts to account for all viewport
| sizes.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| hahah, if you think the 4k screen and $120 laser mouse user is
| what designers are aiming for, you're dreaming. And that won't
| change.
|
| Mobile is king, second to 13-15 inch laptops.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Hamburgers and Hieroglyphs! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!
|
| I get why they are used on mobile. If you only have room for
| content, it makes sense to tuck actions away into a hamburger
| menu except for a small number that you assign to tiny little
| hieroglyphs. Fine. However, if you have space, this is a terrible
| way to use it. At best it adds steps, at worst it invites
| experimentation and disaster to figure out what the heiroglyphs
| do (which wouldn't be so bad if undo worked but we've apparently
| decided undo is fine to break too). Like the Apple HIGs used to
| say, on Desktop you should want to get the most common actions
| out of menus and onto labeled buttons so that users can answer
| "what can I do?" without playing hide and seek. Undo should be
| baked in from the very start (it's hard to retrofit) to reduce
| the consequences of experimentation.
|
| Unfortunately mobile design has taken over so completely that
| even on apps which will be used almost entirely on desktop, even
| on apps with an internal advocate for Desktop design, UI
| designers go for the hamburgers and heiroglyphs and broken undo
| because it's standard these days. Sigh.
|
| Oh, and modals are back with a vengeance, but I need to stop here
| or my blood pressure is going to get unhealthy.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| I don't think there's any excuse for hieroglyphs. Even a low-
| end 5 year old phone like the moto e4 has a 1280x720 display;
| there's plenty of pixels available to label the icons.
| Hieroglyphs are a "we hate our users and want them to know it"
| first design.
|
| Hamburger menus could also frequently be done away with when
| you look at how many options they have. Like Gmail's app has
| them when it could fit the icons across the screen as a bar.
| And it's hard to argue that real estate was important since
| they put in a bottom bar for chat, video, and spaces whatever
| that is.
| wil421 wrote:
| I deal with some legacy web apps and ticketing system at
| work. They could use a hamburger menu or two. 10 buttons, 15
| tabs, and a million inputs most people don't use.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| > Hamburger menus could also frequently be done away with
| when you look at how many options they have. Like Gmail's app
| has them when it could fit the icons across the screen as a
| bar.
|
| Just cracked open Gmail to check this. In the hamburger side
| menu, there's 18 items not even counting labels. No shot you
| fit this across the screen as a bar.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| >1280x720
|
| screen resolution vs browser resolution
|
| the most common mobile browser resolution is 800x360
|
| also, 5 years is not that old
| acherion wrote:
| > the most common mobile browser resolution is 800x360
|
| Really? You're saying most people are using their mobile
| phone in landscape mode?
| digging wrote:
| Pixel density isn't the problem, physical size is. Phone
| screens are small and many people have poor vision. Some even
| scale up the contents of their browser 25% or 50% or even
| 100%.
|
| The more text you have, the more difficult it is to ensure a
| usable UI on small screens, let alone a good one. Don't be
| upset about the use of symbols instead of text, but about the
| use of bad symbols. Nobody needs the "play" button on a video
| widget to say "play" - they know what the right-facing
| triangle means. (Ironic because I don't know if it makes
| geometric sense to even say the triangle has a facing, but as
| a symbol it's well understood.)
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| I suggest "right-pointing triangle." Indicating direction
| with the vertex on the longer axis is a common idiom.
| zogrodea wrote:
| I like having greater content area by default, and the text
| next to an icon in the Gmail Android app is nice too. (The
| spam button, with its explanation mark, could easily be
| mistaken for an important button otherwise.)
|
| It's one of the reasons I prefer how Vim and VS Code look
| over Intellij and Visual Studio standard. Let me better see
| what I'm focusing on without distractions (the content)
| instead of shoving a gazillion buttons on your UI in the
| default view.
|
| Edit: I was too harsh about Intellij I think. The old UI I
| was thinking of doesn't look bad in my opinion, but I still
| think I would have enjoyed my experience with Visual Studio
| more if it had a stronger focus on content (the code)
| visually.
| et-al wrote:
| I agree hieroglyphs make discovery difficult. But I believe
| designers like them because they allow for consistent design
| across different languages. E.g. accommodating for German
| localisation can be difficult.
| winstonrc wrote:
| I built the nav bar at the top of my website[0] to be
| scrollable if the content doesn't fit horizontally. I'm
| slightly concerned about users not realizing there are more
| options to scroll over, but I prefer it to a hamburger menu
| that has to open and cover the content since you can see every
| option and read the corresponding word. No need for any of that
| when visiting on a desktop however.
|
| [0] https://www.winstoncooke.com/
| jefftk wrote:
| It looks to me like any device with at least 300 horizontal
| CSS pixels can see your whole nav bar, which should be nearly
| everyone.
|
| On the other hand, hamburger menus typically have a lot more
| entries than this, enough that a horizontal menu wouldn't
| look good even on desktop.
| pdntspa wrote:
| I think the biggest opponent to what you're advocating are new
| users, they are so easily intimidated by too many things on the
| screen. These are the people that dominate focus groups and so
| designers seem to have wrapped themselves around the axle over
| this one (terrible) rule.
| donmcronald wrote:
| > Hamburgers and Hieroglyphs!
|
| Hieroglyphs sums it up so nicely. Lol. I'll also add hidden,
| context sensitive options to that list. I like having options
| that are disabled (aka greyed out) if they're unusable because
| at least I can see there's a possibility to do something if I
| get conditions right. Instead, modern designs will hide those
| options and, if you don't know the magic conditions needed to
| expose them, you'll never see them.
|
| An example of this is Ubiquiti with their Unifi stuff. If you
| go to manage switch ports, the page they give for that doesn't
| have an option to "Select All" ports. You need to select at
| least one port first, and then the "Select All" option
| magically appears. So not only is it hidden, it gets the
| context wrong. Think of having it as a disabled checkbox.
| Everyone would immediately realize the context is wrong because
| having the "Select All" checkbox disabled when no ports are
| selected would be obviously dumb.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I've been seeing this more in content, and also apps that are
| "browsers" really - some view control that have a mobile &
| PC/MacOS equivalent - like they are intentionally formatting
| everything for portrait type display on mobile
|
| My devices are a literal ton of iOS ones, and then 4k and a 2560
| x 1440 display which I use most frequently lately.
|
| Tons of whitespace, oversized text everywhere and incorrect use
| of Z-index are some of the hallmarks of this mobile-first design.
| hans_castorp wrote:
| Not directly related (or is it?): I just hate sites where all I
| see is some fancy wallpaper image and a slogan (if at all).
|
| Then I have to scroll down on my 27" monitor to be able to
| actually read anything on that site. That is stupid - at least in
| my opinion.
| atq2119 wrote:
| Proposal to introduce the term "villain image" for this sort of
| thing.
| strangescript wrote:
| What you really want is two apps, completely different UX's and
| its not worth the effort more times than not. No one is going to
| Herman Miller's website for example and not buying a chair
| because they don't like the desktop web app experience.
|
| They might pass though if they can't get the site to work well on
| their phone.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Huh? I've definitely bounced off shops because their web app
| experience sucked.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Same for restaurants who over-design their website and make
| it difficult to find the only three things I care about:
| location, hours, menu.
| Isthatablackgsd wrote:
| Don't forget contact too. It was difficult to find contact
| information on some sites. I remember 10 years ago contact
| information are usually at the bottom of the main page or
| in the nav menu. Now, it took some soul searching to find
| it where they buried it in the submenu. Sometime I usually
| use Google Maps to get the address or phone number since
| some site don't make it easier to find it
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| The trend that I have found to be truly aggravating is
| restaurants recognizing that sometimes _I just want to look
| at the menu_. I don 't want to place an order. Don't make
| me tell you when I want to pick up my order or where I want
| it delivered. I just want to browse and make a decision
| later.
| cyberax wrote:
| I have just cancelled about $500 in monthly subscriptions on
| Patreon, because I refuse to reward utter management failures.
|
| I refuse to go to restaurants that have QR-code menus that
| download a PDF with unusably small entries.
|
| Unless you HAVE to use something, you can still vote with your
| wallet. Herman Miller is not the only furniture company in
| existence.
| digging wrote:
| > I refuse to go to restaurants that have QR-code menus that
| download a PDF with unusably small entries.
|
| I either go on the restaurant's website directly to find the
| menu or ask for a physical menu. I've never been tripped up
| by that. I understand I'm still rewarding the owner for their
| bad choice, but I'm not going to force my friends and family
| to get up and leave a restaurant we all wanted to try out
| because of it.
| Animats wrote:
| > I refuse to go to restaurants that have QR-code menus that
| download a PDF with unusably small entries.
|
| It gets worse. I've been to a restaurant in Silicon Valley
| where not only were the menus reached through a QR code, the
| linked page was not the menu. It was the onboarding funnel to
| get customers to sign up for a food-delivery service. You had
| to sign up to get menu access. Then you could order online.
| Dine-in was just ordering food delivered with a really short
| delivery trip.
| lopkeny12ko wrote:
| You and I live in completely different worlds. I will
| absolutely not complete a purchase if your website is unusable.
|
| In fact, this happened last week--I was trying to purchase a
| plane ticket and the animations were so excessive and poorly
| done that it obscurbed a form field that made it impossible to
| book the ticket. I bounced and booked a ticket from a competing
| airline.
| fkyoureadthedoc wrote:
| The prissy prima donna web developers in this thread would have
| you believe that all users are just like them and obviously
| bounce from any site that isn't perfect (as defined by them of
| course). In reality most sites are shit and people just suffer
| through them anyway because something they want is on the other
| end.
| kimi wrote:
| I can only think "first world problems".
| lsmeducation wrote:
| I like my first worldism. Nothing satisfies me more than a nice
| coffee and a smug "I cant stand Jira" in the morning. My life
| is hard.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Ummm yes? The overwhelming majority of articles on this site
| are addressing 1st world problems. Are you posting this from
| your MSF rotation in Gaza?
| meiraleal wrote:
| The Negative Impact of not being mobile first: it took me 5
| attempts to dismiss the annoying cookies popup.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Yeah, as someone who can't use touch screens, this is a serious
| pain point in a lot of my web browsing. Mobile first design is an
| accessibility problem.
| caseyf wrote:
| i wish that "Compact" and "Comfortable" options for spacing were
| as common as dark/light mode
| adrr wrote:
| Dark mode requires visual content rich sites to have two sets
| of assets. Example would be a marketing chart with a white
| background needs to have a corresponding asset with a black
| background with different color text and bars.
| omarfarooq wrote:
| That can be solved with transparent background images, and
| brand color palettes that balance contrast in the two modes.
| _greim_ wrote:
| The visual design problem mirrors a problem with the organization
| producing the website. Before mobile, a website was the entire
| online presence of a company; every subdivision within the
| company had a presence above the fold. The culture and conceptual
| structure of web development developed around this concept. As
| mobile mandates pushed things below the fold or off the site
| entirely, web teams found themselves unprepared and have adapted
| awkwardly, as this article shows. Mobile app teams never had this
| cultural baggage, which is one of the many reasons native apps
| are perceived as superior.
| gherkinnn wrote:
| The irritating thing is that it is neither mobile first nor
| desktop first. Most websites I come across are designed and built
| for desktop but using a mobile aesthetic.
| runjake wrote:
| The apps go where the money is, most normal people are mobile-
| first or mobile-only.
| adrr wrote:
| 90% on e-commerce sites.
| runjake wrote:
| 90% mobile? If so, wow!
| blooalien wrote:
| The problem sadly isn't even mobile-first vs. desktop, but rather
| designers who _still_ haven 't figured out that the web is
| _dynamic_ content that should be allowed to _flow_ according to
| the _user 's_ display device size and shape. It's _not_ and
| _never has been_ a static medium like paper. It 's not limited to
| a specific size and shape like paper, and should not be treated
| as if it were. Web "designers" should not be trying to _force_
| the content into any specific size or pixel resolution, as there
| 's just _too many_ different resolutions of screens and width vs.
| height layouts of those screens to _ever_ be able to cover them
| all appropriately without adapting to the idea that the content
| _must_ be able to flow accordingly. It also severely harms
| accessibility for folks with vision issues who might scale up
| their fonts to compensate if doing so causes the content to break
| in horrible ways that make it unreadable.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| The designers probably know that, but it costs money to design
| for 2 platforms. So they pick the 2 biggest platforms for non-
| hackers... Android and iOS...
| blooalien wrote:
| You're _not_ designing for two (or more) platforms at all.
| You 're designing for _one_ platform. The Web. It 's built on
| some pretty well defined standards that a ton of folks seem
| hellbent on breaking to force the web into a shape that it
| simply isn't.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| They didn't mean platform in this way. But in the sense
| that small touchscreens are fundamentally different than
| big monitors + mouse & keyboard. That's why anything that
| is not the simplest website should use two different
| interfaces. (Also, apps don't belong in browsers.)
| albedoa wrote:
| > So they pick the 2 biggest platforms for non-hackers...
| Android and iOS...
|
| I can't imagine you are talking about the same thing here.
| (Or if you are, then you are making OP's point.)
| klysm wrote:
| It's easy to say stuff like this, but go try and implement it.
| It's really hard.
| threatofrain wrote:
| Some designers can use Figma's equivalent of grid and flexbox
| and some can't. What's hard is implementing all the shades of
| gray between two pixel-perfect designs because the designer
| didn't do this basic work.
| blooalien wrote:
| Yeah, it's _not_ really "easy to say stuff like this"
| because everyone who thinks they know better than _actual
| real honest-to-goodness web designers_ will _instantly_ want
| to argue with you to the bitter end why their fantasy web
| design has to be 100% "pixel perfect" layout _exactly_ as
| they envision it on _every single device or browser_ ever
| invented. It 's a huge part of why I'm no longer a web
| designer. More of my time was wasted fixing literal one pixel
| differences in layout between browsers (and browser versions)
| than almost any other part of the process.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I haven't encountered a "pixel perfect" designer for at
| least 15 years now, if not more. Virtually every single UX
| designer I've worked with provides flexible designs that
| scale with screen size.
| butlike wrote:
| Good. I've finally gotten over my nightmares where I'm
| chopping photoshop designs and literally using <img
| src=""> to add a rounded edge on a <td>
| waterhouse wrote:
| This is the most awesome approach for rounded corners:
| https://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/roundy.html
| bmicraft wrote:
| Oh wow, it's even worse than I imagined
| spcebar wrote:
| In my side of the agency world there are a lot of
| designers who design UX that aren't UX designers. A lot
| of them want started in print and expect pixel perfect
| designs/don't understand the need for breakpoints. We had
| a client who got on our case about a design being a half
| a pixel off. That sounds like a joke but it genuinely
| happened.
| nkg wrote:
| I have worked with one of those freaks last year. She
| argued that every block had to be exactly like it was on
| Figma, and she once sent me a screenshot with a little
| ruler drawn on it, to show me a 3px gap. It was such a
| waste of time and energy...
| cuddlecake wrote:
| How _do_ you get a 3px gap though?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| They said the people who claim to know more than actual
| designers will want it pixel perfect. So i.e. The
| designer knows pixel perfect is a fallacy, the client
| doesn't care and wants a pixel perfect match of their
| figma document on their personal laptop screen.
| levmiseri wrote:
| There is pixel-perfection and 'pixel-perfection'. One is a
| pointless fight against the nature of the medium while the
| other is love for the craft, sophistication, and actually
| giving a fuck that something isn't needlessly 2 pixels off
| of where it should have been. A certain attitude that will
| show its mark throughout the UI.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I'm not UX person and I don't know whether "pixel perfect"
| and absolute positioning requirement come from clients or
| designers on average. I'd guess it varies by organization,
| industry and whatever.
|
| But it's worth being clear that mixing such thing _with_
| flowing text and graphic is where things get hard. Html 1
| had flowing text in the 90s and you can still do that.
|
| Moreover, all this is related to overall user hostile
| designs. Organizations broadly don't want their pages to be
| neutral streams of information but want to control a user
| experience that nudges people this way and that and fixed
| are important to that.
| threatofrain wrote:
| If we had an API for web data then accessibility would've
| been a solved problem. The user's client would decide the
| best presentation of information.
| klysm wrote:
| That's too deep on the generic/specific trade off to be
| legitimately useful
| giantrobot wrote:
| "It needs to look exactly like this PSD file I made!"
|
| You get the same with some native UI designers. They kick
| and scream until you've got some custom widget that
| precisely apes the Photoshop layer effects. Then kick and
| scream again when they make changes that take non-zero time
| to rebuild with that custom widget.
| troupo wrote:
| It's not that hard. _Especially_ for the modern-ish web (aka
| of the past 6-7 years). And especially not for the
| 99.9999999% of the web sites out there.
| pphysch wrote:
| > It's easy to say stuff like this, but go try and implement
| it. It's really hard.
|
| Here you go:
|
| main { display: flex; flex-direction: row; flex-wrap: wrap; }
|
| ..and set reasonable width/margin constraints on your primary
| content blocks.
|
| Linear, scrollable flow on small/vertical displays, and a
| denser "grid" on large/horizontal displays.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/
|
| It's literally 120 characters to make a website that flows on
| any (reasonable) screensize and adapts perfectly.
|
| Modern webdev is just throwing frameworks at self-caused
| problems.
|
| (I'm exagerrating of course. But most websites are just about
| showing text, maybe with some images every now and then (news
| sites, reddit, hackernews, google, come to mind). For those
| websites this is certainly true).
| danShumway wrote:
| But that is the job. The job of developing on the web is
| developing for a platform where you do not know the size or
| format of the display or what the inputs are in advance.
|
| The job of a UX designer on the web is to consider this kind
| of stuff and to build a design that's very reactive to
| evolving displays within the demographics and market segments
| that the client wants to support. If that's not happening, if
| the CSS people are just getting handed static designs and
| being told to figure it out -- the problem is not CSS or the
| developers, it's that the designers building those designs
| are not good at their jobs. And there are ways to make this
| easier: notably UX designers involving the CSS department in
| the design phase, and/or making a point to always lay out the
| contents of the page without styling in a hierarchical way
| before making decisions about how to present that content.
|
| But a lot of programming is hard. It's hard for me to write
| maintainable Javascript that doesn't fall apart if a project
| goes over 100,000 lines of code. It's hard to document
| methods. It's hard for me to write code that does complicated
| things that can work on low-end machines. These are skills
| that programmers get better at over time with practice.
| Responsive design is the same; it's just another skill to
| learn.
|
| Imagine trying to shoot a movie and having the
| cinematographer tell you that it's hard to frame everyone in
| the shot since they don't know exactly where the viewer will
| be looking, or the sound mixer telling you it's hard to
| balance dialog and sound effects so everyone is audible
| without it being noticeable that they're muting background
| audio. Or a recorder telling you that it's hard to master a
| pop song given that everyone has different speakers and sound
| profiles on their headphones. Imagine you're building a car
| and the designer tells you that it's hard to make sure the
| controls can be reached by people who are different heights
| and weights.
|
| On one hand, yes it is; all of that stuff is very hard. On
| the other hand, yes, that is also the reason web UX designers
| and developers get paid money; because the job is hard and
| requires training and expertise, and designing a website
| interface requires more thought and intentionality and
| planning than is required to make a PDF.
| leptons wrote:
| >It's not and never has been a static medium like paper. It's
| not limited to a specific size and shape like paper, and should
| not be treated as if it were.
|
| I often get "print first" page layouts, created from dynamic
| data that can have varying amounts of content. These pages also
| have to work in mobile and desktop browsers _and look good on
| all of them_. I don 't find it to be that difficult. Sure it
| takes a little longer, but it's what the job requires. Media
| queries make it all possible, as well as a little bit of
| javascript.
| programmertote wrote:
| Vanguard has been guilty of this as well. Its recent site
| redesign has been all over the place, and sometimes leaning
| heavily toward folks using its phone app (not that its phone app
| is very user friendly either; for example, checking what orders
| one has placed by account is impossible). It used to be that the
| website has a table view that shows almost everything I need to
| know about my holdings. Now, it takes a few clicks to find that
| info and even then, the layout is so sparse (mobile optimized)
| and hard to read.
|
| Maybe I'm getting really old and just like to complain about this
| because I'm not very much used to this phone-oriented UIs.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| I think they also eliminated some of the color hierarchy in
| favor of just making everything big black text swimming in a
| sea of white. So it's a little harder to see which pieces of
| text belong together.
|
| I hate it lol
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Vanguard's website has always been a mess, to be honest. It's
| really hard to figure out how to do some basic stuff like
| transfer money.
|
| I figure their website is so bare bones because it reflects
| their low cost ETFs. They'd rather have a crappy website and
| cheap ETF's than a fancy website with slightly higher cost
| ETFs.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| I'm less concerned with brochure and ecommerce sites. But mobile
| first design for productivity sites and tool interfaces drive me
| crazy. Who normally accesses these tools from their phones?
| dpifke wrote:
| I recently had the misfortune of having to use a background
| check app that was mobile _only_!
|
| It was a real pain to enter past employer and residence names
| and addresses on a mobile keyboard, but even worse when it came
| to dates, because the date picker would only scroll a month at
| a time, starting from the current month and year. To enter my
| birthdate, I had to tap ~550 times.
|
| (I was kinda tempted to file an EEOC claim, since the broken
| date entry has a disproportionate impact on older workers, a
| protected class. But that's not a great way to introduce
| yourself to a new employer's HR department.)
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| Rightfully so, what's in it for them to spend more resources on
| such a niche group?
|
| Desktops/Laptops are for gamers, workers, and programmers. This
| isn't 2006, people don't read articles on their desktops in
| leisure. If they are it's because they were also doing one of the
| three use cases I mentioned.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Desktops/Laptops are for gamers, workers, and programmers
|
| Nah. Like, I'm all of those; but I very rarely play games these
| days, and I've retired from programming. But I strongly prefer
| to use a laptop to browse; I never use a mobile browser. My
| eyesight is too poor, and my fingers are too fat.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| >My eyesight is too poor, and my fingers are too fat.
|
| What about tablets?
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| Think a lot of the issue is the difficulty grasping what size the
| actual screen is. I get webpages on my 1080p monitor where
| everything is just far too big but I guess as far as the code is
| concerned it has limited knowledge of whether the physical size
| of the screen is 24" or 5"
| skydhash wrote:
| I think mobile devices use scaling. The number of pixels
| reported are are not the screen's resolution.
| collaborative wrote:
| Display: inline-block is the answer :p
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Shit like this makes me want to learn more about using
| accessibility features of my browsers. I'm far from going blind,
| but I don't want to scroll through the angry fruit salad of
| alegria art, huge stock images that take a huge amount of screen
| real estate and the important bits being tucked away probably
| somewhere in the bottom.
|
| "Minimalist design" and it still takes multiple megabytes of
| bandwidth to show a pretty nothing.
|
| I'm using Reader Mode or an equivalent whenever I can. If a site
| cannot be dealt with using RM, I mostly go elsewhere.
|
| Now get off my lawn, kids.
| zubairq wrote:
| I think that many user interfaces only make sense on desktop,
| like development IDEs for example
| novok wrote:
| It's an indicator that most of their userbase is mobile. Look at
| B2B SaaS apps and they tend to have the opposite problem
| r113500 wrote:
| Danny o'brien, he runs one of the oldest surviving blogs,
| oblomovka, coined a term "hinternet" sometime in 2007, that was
| when the internet was still being run by the technological elite,
| for themselves, but normal people have also joined. The idea of
| hinternet was that there was essentially two internets. One is
| the sophisticated technology and a value add, and the other one
| is the internet of the viagra pills and popup banners. We, the
| technology elite, would rarely venture into the hinternet, like
| going into a bad neighborhood, where's normal people had no such
| mechanism for discernment, so their experience of the internet
| was distinctly different and inferior.
|
| Now most of the internet is hinternet, and we're all forced more
| and more to rely on it. Banking systems, mortgage platforms, car
| payments, utilities payments are generally designed mobile first,
| desktop later, they employ various dark techniques for "verifying
| real user", which break on open platforms, forcing you to access
| them from iPads and other such locked down devices, or not at
| all. If hinternet used to be the dark shady streets where
| hucksters were peddling you knockoff watches, then now hinternet
| is the dystopian landscape of vertical information integration,
| ran, behind the scenes, by para-governmental institutions. You
| can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital wallet and
| identity management platform, that sells you things.
|
| There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of sophistication,
| but they are of mixed success. On a personal level there's a
| strong disincentive to participate in the hinternet beyond the
| mandatory, carefully navigating poorly designed and conceived
| systems just long enough to achieve an objective. One has to
| login into irs, but one doesn't really need to read that popup
| and upsell blocked, mobile centric news article.
|
| From this perspective "mobile-first web design" is a symptom
| removed from its greater context.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| This is an interesting thing. Honestly can't remember the last
| time I saw an ad or easy phishing thing. Like obv in your junk
| mail but thats literally the extent of my exposure to it,
| everything else is curated and "good" or probably aligns with
| your concept of the priveleged netizens/areas even though Im
| poor as hell. Knowledge wise I suppose I rich so there's that
| but there's also seems like a tradgedy of the commons type
| situation that depends on all the tech-illiterates to be the
| meat shields for advertising and paying for things like YouTube
| gipp wrote:
| > You can't log in into irs without using id.me, a digital
| wallet and identity management platform, that sells you things.
|
| Wow, I just assumed it was some kind of auth flow the
| government runs themselves and never did any research
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The US government _loves_ outsourcing technical problems and
| _hates_ developing that stuff in-house. Even for things we 'd
| assume, naively, to be a core competency like "identifying a
| citizen."
|
| It's how we ended up in a world where some 70% of all retail
| transaction is now fundamentally brokered via private
| institutions using not-real-money (in the sense that credit
| on a credit card is "numbers the private institution tracks
| themselves" until the cash clears, _and_ most cards have a
| loyalty discount program that sums up to the dollars spent on
| the credit card having different value than bare cash), in
| spite of the fact that control of and guarantees for the
| monetary system are something a government should have as a
| core competency. So on 70% of transactions, Americans get
| nickel-end-dimed by private institutions for basic commerce
| (on _top_ of government taxes; the private tax atop the
| public tax).
| spiralpolitik wrote:
| No congressperson ever got rich from the government doing
| things in-house.
|
| Fix that aspect and the situation will improve
| significantly.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Arguably, they did in the past - and the current
| situation is an immune (over)reaction to that.
| Outsourcing is easier than figuring out how to get
| something done while navigating around all the
| regulations and CYA measures, so that things look fair to
| the people (otherwise they'll make a ruckus), and/or
| can't be easily portrayed as unfair by your political
| enemies (who will try to trick the people into making a
| ruckus).
| piperswe wrote:
| login.gov is the government's (quite fantastic) auth flow -
| id.me is a private one that the IRS contracted. I wish there
| were a rule that all online government services needed to use
| login.gov, but alas it's optional.
| eep_social wrote:
| They're supposedly working on it [1] but I don't have any
| sense of whether they're likely to succeed. In particular,
| the IRS is beginning to onboard to login.gov and the goal
| is to be fully migrated away from ID.me at some point.
|
| [1] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-
| oversight/2022/02/irs-...
| sph wrote:
| I'm struggling to understand from your explanation what is this
| "hinternet".
|
| The hard-to-use internet of the 90s, centered around IRC and
| Usenet? The seedy parts of the 90s internet with illegal
| content hosted on free hosts? Because you say today's internet
| is like that, and I don't see any comparison at all however I
| look at it.
|
| How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and goatse)
| anything like the modern sterilized version full of dark
| patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and
| goatse) anything like the modern sterilized version full of
| dark patterns in the hands of a dozen megacorps?_
|
| The hinternet was the Viagra spam and goatse part. The
| modern, sterilized version is exactly that - continuous abuse
| and exploitation. Just with a fig leaf of legitimacy.
|
| EDIT: perhaps a better distinction would be this: O'Brien's
| Internet was/is that which comes from focusing on _benefit
| for the user_ (be it utility or entertainment). The hinternet
| is that which comes from focusing on _making money_. Now,
| focusing on utility does _not_ preclude commerce - in fact,
| the most basic and honest way of making money is by exchange
| for something of value. Focus on value provided includes
| figuring out how to provide it sustainably. In contrast,
| focusing on making money does, in practice, detract from
| making things good, as _fraud and abuse have much better
| ROI_.
| cfeduke wrote:
| From what I gather from Oblomovka[1] [and based on my own
| memory of this period]:
|
| It was a place where the primary early users of the Internet
| did not frequent, but could be something an ordinary person
| would be exposed to out of necessity. (Think, maybe some
| service that lets one send faxes via email; notably you'd
| need to create an account and spend money.) But, at some
| point, this reversed, and ordinary use cases dominate -
| online banking, e-commerce, school - such that even finding
| the original sort of content that comprised most of the
| Internet can be very difficult.[2]
|
| As an example, cooking recipe websites in the early Internet
| contained cooking recipes - no stories, no SEO optimization -
| and then sometimes at the bottom of the page participated in
| some sort of link exchange with other recipe websites and
| perhaps a page hit counter. This was an Internet for the
| technologist, and one might find their way there from a BBS,
| IRC, email, word of mouth, or early search engines that
| naively indexed keywords, or you know, by surfing a webring.
| These sites seldom existed for any sort of commercial gain
| and were often a hobby project.
|
| Today you could reasonably expect to find your way to a
| cooking recipe site via a search engine where each recipe has
| been SEO optimized with a nonsense story and you might be
| prompted to log in with Google or create an account to view
| the actual recipe. The target audience are the people who are
| the norm and would have been those visiting the hinternet two
| decades ago, out of necessity [e.g., pay to send a fax via
| email], but today they are just normal people performing
| normal activities.
|
| Something like today's network of sites two decades ago would
| be hinterlands by the blog's definition - not frequented[2].
| Today, it is the norm.
|
| 1. two competing definitions, circa 2001-03:
| https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2003/04/16/hinternet-fallout/
|
| 2. it's been decided to call this sort of genuine content
| "Small Web" https://kagi.com/smallweb
|
| X. the competing definition of hinternet, which I also like
| (search "hinternet"):
| http://thegestalt.org/simon/cluetrain.html
| WWLink wrote:
| There were also tech sites that reviewed computer hardware
| in writing. Sometimes with pictures. There were websites
| with video game walkthroughs - also in text, with pictures!
| There were websites with silly things people wrote about,
| and funny stories, and the usual tinfoil hat stuff. But the
| tinfoil hat stuff was secluded away on a tinfoil webring on
| angelfire.
|
| There were tons of stores. Usually the more legit ones
| partnered with yahoo shopping or whatever. I remember
| buying Pokemon Yellow from a video game store based out of
| Canada lol. I think it was called dragon.ca? There were
| TONS of places. Some would take a week to ship but you
| usually got your stuff. :D
|
| IRC had something for everyone. Those networks had tens of
| thousands of people online at any given time, talking about
| everything from tech to trash (literally) lol.
|
| There were also web directories. As I recall, google
| started off using one of those as a source.
|
| There was also stuff like AOL that had its own little
| ecosystem of corporate-sponsored stuff.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| All of that still exists, just in reduced numbers. Browse
| Neocities. Or search Wiby.me
| massysett wrote:
| I just went to Google and searched "recipes". The top link
| is allrecipes.com, where the homepage leads me to numerous
| recipes. No stories.
|
| It absolutely exists for commercial gain. It's also a lot
| more useful than what existed 30 years ago.
| saltcured wrote:
| From the context, I assume it is a pun on hinterland as
| borrowed into English. Here, it is mostly synonymous with
| backwoods. The hinterland may sound more literary than
| folksy, or may emphasize an unexplored or less navigable zone
| rather than merely natural or undeveloped.
|
| I wonder what the original blogger really meant by it. The
| discussion here seems to be focusing on either an axis of
| academic vs commercial or high culture vs pop culture, or
| maybe conflating the two. This isn't really about the level
| of development nor navigability but some other more abstract
| quality or purpose.
|
| The developed land could hold a grand cathedral, a brutalist
| housing block, or a luxurious department store. The
| hinterland could have a frontier mission, a rustic cabin, or
| a trading post.
| neuromanser wrote:
| Can you expand on "hard-to-use internet of the 90s"? Beause I
| honestly think it is in most ways harder to use nowadays.
| itronitron wrote:
| you had to read stuff
| soderfoo wrote:
| Best I could think of is the dropped connection whenever
| someone picked up the phone in your home.
| itronitron wrote:
| By way of analogy, 90's internet was like exploring a town
| where you could wander around and check things out, and some
| open lots had billboards with ads on their property. Every
| property had a list of other properties that you might want
| to also check out.
|
| Current internet (hinternet?) is like walking through the
| same town but now there are fences around everything and
| posts with security cameras at every property boundary. When
| visiting a property now you are required to show your face
| and maybe ID, and also have to sign up to get a rewards card.
| When visiting a property you also have people with clipboards
| following you around and taking notes which they pass to
| people with clipboards at other properties.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > How is the 90s Internet (forums, IRC, Viagra spam and
| goatse)
|
| That wasn't at all the internet I had in the 90s. I know that
| part of it existed, but there were really great parts, too.
| dsco wrote:
| It's basically what computer illiterates (which is growing, not
| declining because of mobile use) endure on windows desktop
| computers. At some time they've clicked the wrong link, managed
| to install a toolbar in their browser - and slowly it's been
| infested with random dark patterns. I see it fairly frequently
| when relatives call me about computer issues.
| tootie wrote:
| This is the difference between building a website as an
| experiment for an untested audience and running a modern
| business. The simple reason most websites are optimized for
| mobile is because most users are on mobile. And the reason
| there are ads and email acquisition forms is because they are
| worth something to businesses. Text-only, ad-free, non-
| responsive text content isn't worth much.
| Aerroon wrote:
| But they all suck on mobile!
|
| Using the internet on a phone is a _terrible_ experience.
| Websites take forever to load, they randomly resize things,
| they add pointless headers and footers to the limited space,
| they move the focus around at random etc.
|
| You know how websites sometimes have that button that scrolls
| you back to the top near the bottom right? Those buttons tell
| me that the people making the website never use phones
| themselves. The amount of times I've found that button
| helpful vs the amount of times that I've hit it by accident
| while scrolling is so small that the entire thing feels like
| a cruel joke. Mobile websites are full of these kinds of UI
| patterns.
|
| HN is actually one of the few nice to use websites on a phone
| because it doesn't try to do all of these things. On reddit
| you're better off using the old desktop view than any of the
| mobile views. Same for websites like YouTube.
|
| Google doesn't even have parity in functionality between the
| mobile and desktop websites. On desktop you can filter
| results between arbitrary time stamps. On mobile you can only
| pick between "past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past month
| or past 12 months".
|
| There are a million small things like that that are wrong
| with mobile websites. They ruin the experience.
| tootie wrote:
| Sure, anyone can screwup, I'm just saying "mobile first" is
| valid business strategy. A lot of the annoying things like
| ads and whatever are just never not going to be annoying.
| It's kinda their raison d'etre. Things like date filtering
| on google results probably get so little usage there's no
| incentive to make them fully available. Very few apps are
| built to optimize utility, they're built to optimize
| revenue.
| darepublic wrote:
| Try Firefox with ublock on mobile
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You're lucky if it works with an iPad and that it doesn't make
| you sign your life away to Verizon or T-Mobile the ur-Carrier
| (sic).
|
| I alway get voted down when I use words like "phonish" or
| "phonishness" but I feel that smartphones made life worse not
| better and made people serve computers than the other way
| around. Here's to the next platform.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This "hinternet" is a cool concept, but there's something
| missing from its account.
|
| On one side we have the cultured elites of academia, the
| military and government - as rightful founders.
|
| On the other, the unwashed masses, immigrants of the Eternal
| September. Eventually this hoi polloi of hucksters, chancers
| and grifters became naturalised as the businesses and bankers
| in the new world.
|
| The dotcom era is a colonisation story and the elites are the
| aboriginal natives driven off their own land. It sure fits a
| "woke" narrative.
|
| But what's missing from this fairy-tale is the _actual real_
| people.
|
| The truth is, dotcom, Web2.0 and the empire building between
| 1997 and about 2010 was still a marginal affair, where existing
| money and power moved into the internet, along with a handful
| of rugged "entrepreneurs" (as we like to call ourselves around
| here).
|
| The 99% remained spectators caught between the Scylla and
| Charibdes, and now they are corralled into ranches, all
| lovingly watched over...
|
| The potential for a "people's internet" still remains, but we
| have not solved many (indeed _any_ ) of the classical problems
| of freeloaders, tragedy of the commons.... and at this point I
| think "Web 3.0 and blockchain web" is dead (?)
|
| A good start to moving things forward to an internet that is
| once again public, high-quality and large might be looking more
| closely at the history/narrative of the internet and who the
| real stakeholders are.
| adventured wrote:
| The people have their Internet already. They like Netflix,
| they like Amazon Prime, they love TikTok, they like
| Instagram, they like Pinterest, they like their various chat
| apps, they like their online gaming, and so on.
|
| That is all that they want. Along with some decent ecommerce
| for shopping and safe, easy to use mobile banking.
|
| There's nothing magical about it, and there never will be.
| They don't want fluffy magical bullshit. They already have
| most of what they want and there's nothing grandiose about
| it, it's overwhelmingly just quasi-boring pedestrian
| entertainment and amusement to pass the time. That's what
| they wanted before the Internet, and it's what they naturally
| want with the Internet. It's because they're tired from their
| days, their 307 serious life problems (health, mortgage,
| bills, stress, job), and their exhausting children (that they
| love dearly of course).
|
| No no no, the peoples Internet must be a vision of splendor!
| The masses want to spend all day creating extraordinary art,
| and thinking deeply about complex subjects they just educated
| themselves on! That's not reality, and it's not what the
| masses want at all. Not even remotely close.
|
| They want a garbage pile of chaos like Reddit. Where they can
| insult people without getting punched in the face, and they
| can learn some tips about wood working other there, and they
| can look at photos of modded cars over in another sub, and
| they can go back to insulting someone over in another sub,
| and then they can watch a stream of rockets being fired
| at/from Gaza in another thread.
|
| The peoples Internet is already here.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| There's a huge amount of truth in what you say. Hence I
| used the pejorative "Hoi Polloi".
|
| But you can probably tell I once worked for the BBC. And
| what might look like elitism (of the kind I wouldn't
| apologise for) is really hope for wider humanity in spite
| of the Rupert Murdock effect, in spite of a concerted 50
| year assault on education, and in spite of the
| misappropriation of the internet as a giant firehose for
| diarrhoea. The West's self-devouring and terminal-stage
| enshitification is quite the spectacle.
|
| So when we look at "the people" and say this or that is
| "what they want", something recoils inside me. Do we know
| that? A perpetual cycle where people know what they like
| and they like what they know is not a stasis or fact of the
| world but a precarious place of comfortable mediocrity
| we've come to be. A local minima. There are other places.
| Cultures have flourished. And sometimes they wane.
|
| The Internet (big I) was more than just a lot of wires, it
| was an idea. Maybe some fragments of that idea are still
| alive, I don't know.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| _> So when we look at "the people" and say this or that
| is "what they want", something recoils inside me. Do we
| know that?_
|
| The famous (controversial) Indian teacher Osho had a
| saying on this: "Democracy. Government of the people, by
| the people, for the people...but the people are
| retarded."
| bad_user wrote:
| We often look down on "the people", but the masses have
| more wisdom than the elites, even if societal consensus
| can sometimes lead to terrible solutions to problems.
|
| Democracy is nuanced, much like reality, and this bothers
| people.
| hyggetrold wrote:
| _> the masses have more wisdom than the elites_
|
| I used to think this way also but in recent times I have
| become less sure. Maybe the easiest way to explain my
| thinking is to recall that line from the movie Men in
| Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky
| animals, and you know it."
|
| Obviously the truth is way more complex than that but I
| really do doubt the wisdom of the crowds.
|
| A different example might the guys who wrote up the
| Constitution of the United States. More people were
| illiterate than literate back in those days. The founders
| were a small elite, but they created a framework that has
| served millions of people for a few hundred years.
|
| In any case, yes, democracy is nuanced. It is the best
| system despite its flaws. And to be frank, the real issue
| with democracy is that it's run by people...and hardly
| any of us walk on water. :)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Yeah, it's about how in a monarchy not only can things
| get way more rotten, but also transitions of power tend
| to be very bloody (and wasteful) affairs.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I agree, and my take is that the mass of people has,
| between them, much more "domain wisdom". Different groups
| have deep understanding of different things. Villagers
| understand small settlement dynamics; urban dwellers
| understand towns. People near the sea understand all
| things related to it; people in grasslands understand
| nuances of farming better than those in the mountains,
| etc.
|
| The problem is, you have to reach relevant subgroups to
| access that wisdom - otherwise, when you're just polling
| the _entire_ population on a specific topic, well... few
| subgroups are experts, but everyone has an _opinion_ , so
| it averages down to "dumb, panicky animals".
| sangnoir wrote:
| > [...] _terminal-stage_ enshitification is quite the
| spectacle.
|
| I see you're an optimist. I believe things can - and will
| - get worse for a _looong_ time.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Yeah, I expect a whole next level of enshittification to
| be enabled by mandatory device attestation.
| kodisha wrote:
| > The Internet (big I) was more than just a lot of
| wires...
|
| Yup, it was a series of tubes :)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| There's two types of wants. The low want of a heroin addict
| who wants his next fix, and the higher want of the same
| heroin addict who wants to get clean and a better life.
| These "wants" can both coexist. If you only use their
| _actions_ to infer their wants you completely ignore the
| existence of their higher order wants. It 's dehumanizing.
|
| The people want the internet in the "next fix" sense. But
| I'd argue that the increase in mental illness globally the
| last ~15 years (starting a couple of years after the
| introduction of the iPhone) or even just the recent
| popularity of "digital detoxes" implies that there is a
| collective higher order want for a better internet.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Both you and GP are assuming people to be perfectly
| spherical rational actors in a philosophical vacuum.
| Under this assumption, people are indeed responsible for
| what they get, as the market only serves the demand. But
| that's not the world we live in - in our world, "revealed
| preferences" are bunk, because the suppliers have a lot
| of tools to control the demand.
|
| The "hoi polloi" aren't born with fully fleshed out idea
| of "what they really want". Nor do they have much ability
| to communicate their wants to the market directly.
| Rather, their wants are in large part created by
| marketers, and the only signal they can send to the
| market (via "voting with your wallet") is their _relative
| preferences for options available on the market_. That
| is, they only get to choose from what 's available. And
| what's available is under control of the vendors.
|
| The way this relates to your "lower/higher order wants"
| is that my actions can actually communicate either of
| them. Where I spend my attention, or my money, can be
| driven directly by a high-order want - but I'm still
| limited to expressing that need only by choosing from a
| very limited set of actions or products that are
| available, and then my choice is also heavily biased by
| sales tricks and manipulative advertising strategies.
|
| In short: I claim that the market is currently robbing
| all consumers of agency - "hoi polloi" and ${whatever the
| complement to that is called} alike. This is especially
| pronounced in tech industry, as commercial software
| resist commoditization - most apps and services are
| sticky and not interchangeable, so the UX decisions
| aren't being strongly influenced by competitive pressure.
| The vendors have an _actual choice_ of how useful or how
| abusive they want to be. And they should get the blame
| when they choose the latter.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| This is an insightful explanation.
|
| I see a three stage change, from the pre-Bernays world of
| informational advertising and functional markets, to the
| post-Bernays world of contrived demand driven by
| psychological advertising, to what we have now.
|
| Now we have policy driven economics in which
| technological goods are foisted upon the population and a
| post-hoc rationale of why they are necessary is
| relentlessly pushed as an explanatory narrative.
|
| We're approaching the point where the "very limited set
| of actions or products " is so dominant that the only
| choice looks like abstinence; the "Luddite's" choice to
| not be abused.
| kevinsync wrote:
| What about the middle ground want of a heroin addict who
| loves heroin but wants pure, unadulterated, properly-
| dosed, controlled, trustworthy heroin from reputable,
| consistent vendors, accessed sanely and easily, taken
| quietly and unobtrusively, so they can float around and
| have a good time when it fits into their life?
|
| Isn't that the dream of good technology and good
| internet?
|
| People want the "next fix" internet because that's all
| they know. People would likely prefer a different
| internet if they ever had the chance to experience it.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > The people have their Internet already. They like [...]
|
| Those are the things that have literally no value me. You'd
| think the internet would be large enough to address pretty
| much everybody's needs, including mine, but it's getting
| pretty clear that it's not.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That's the economies of scale at work. It's more
| profitable to address larger markets with cheaper and
| worse products, than a smaller market with better but
| more expensive products.
|
| Now, given the near-zero up-front costs to making
| software, there should _still_ be enough room for all the
| niche needs, but the annoying thing is, the computing
| ecosystem itself - the hardware, the software platforms
| (OS, browsers) and even the tools used to make them - it
| 's all being optimized for the mass market / lowest
| common denominator. As silly as it is, professionals
| can't get good tools, because the tooling is caught in
| the gravity well of more generic, mass market products.
|
| The part that really gets me is how this starts making
| effective use of computers ("bicycle for the mind" stuff)
| impossible. My go-to example: it doesn't matter if you
| figure out how to make fully open source & open hardware
| smartphones for nerds. Even if you make them competitive
| on price and power with mass-market products. It doesn't
| matter that you somehow hired John Ousterhout and Edward
| Tufte to make the maximally ergonomic and functional apps
| for the platform. I'm still going to buy a regular locked
| down smartphone, because I need one to be able to use my
| bank account, and my bank - like all other banks - demand
| you use a locked-down device from a major vendor, with
| full device attestation ("because security").
|
| The freedom of computing stops at the network.
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| > As silly as it is, professionals can't get good tools,
| because the tooling is caught in the gravity well of more
| generic, mass market products.
|
| This also happened in hardware.
|
| Back in the day we could design wide range devices using
| quite widely available "mil-spec" semiconductors and
| components - a common difference was in logic circuits
| where you had 74-series in consumer and commercial (0
| degC to 70 degC and -40 deg to 85 degC temperature
| ranges) and milspec 54-series that would suffer -55 degC
| to 125 degC.
|
| Following something in the 90s called the Perry
| initiative IIRC, the rules changed to test-based
| performance that enhanced "market supply" rather than
| prescribed manufacturing methods, so after STD-883 almost
| all wide range components disappeared.
|
| Sure if you're NASA or the US DoD you can get stuff made,
| but increasingly everyone has to source from the same few
| commercial suppliers. The upshot is that if you're
| organising an Antarctic survey, or going into the desert
| it's almost impossible to kit our with modern gear that
| won't fail. You're stuck trawling eBay for some 1980s
| Soviet stuff.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Kuro5hin, Slashdot, heck- The WELL all still exist. Old-
| school platforms and communities are on the internet. So
| do old-fashioned personal websites. They might have a
| pittance of users, but they're out there. Is that not
| what you want? But what you can't want, is for a large
| amount of people to use them, if they have no inclination
| to.
|
| It'd be great if everyone started making their own
| Neocities site. Or even just drop contemporary social
| media and join the new Friendster
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38021802) or
| Spacehey. But the cultural impetus just isn't there.
| pdntspa wrote:
| And we are all worse off for it.
|
| Let the "people" have their mobile apps. Keep computing
| hardcore!
| ParetoOptimal wrote:
| > There are attempts to cultivate little gardens of
| sophistication, but they are of mixed success.
|
| Mastodon comes to mind, whose openness allows me to browse it
| from emacs with mastodon.el.
|
| Removing full or even useful content from both RSS and
| notification emails comes to mind as well.
| n8cpdx wrote:
| An internet for the technical elite... sounds like gopher (if
| more people used it)
| charlie0 wrote:
| Don't we technically still have the non-hinternet in the
| Darknet/Tor? I've been there a super long time ago and I don't
| remember it being any better.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| > forcing you to access them from iPads and other such locked
| down devices, or not at all
|
| Why does HN have to turn literally everything into an
| opportunity to bash Apple?
|
| Apparently most of HN is not aware that _multiple_ Android
| manufacturers implemented _hardware destruction_ features when
| a device detects it has been rooted? That Google sold devices
| which were nearly impossible to root, jailbreak, or install
| another OS on, to protect the interests of a carrier (Verizon)?
| torartc wrote:
| Skill issue.
| tempodox wrote:
| It's not just web design. Desktop software is being ruined by
| mobile-only app design.
| josefresco wrote:
| Desktop software has been ruined by touch UI. Big buttons made
| for fat fingers means we get "Fisher Price" UIs. Not a bad
| thing for the casual user, but for power users it feels like
| we're moving backwards.
| notjustanymike wrote:
| This is a really long article to say "Content dispersion is bad".
|
| Yeah, obviously. More so if you use a generic image like Waze.
| It's not a usability problem, it's a quality problem. Apple does
| just fine with full width desktop heroes because they include
| relevant images.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Over the years it's become clear to me that frontend is probably
| the hardest part of the stack. People think they can just shit
| out some bootstrap react app and it's perfect, but being able to
| write complex UIs that can work on any browser, any device, with
| all assistive technologies, and all languages, is extremely hard.
| You need someone with a deep knowledge of html, css, and the
| supportive web apis. A good frontend engineer is incredibly rare,
| even at big tech. What's even more rare is a UX designer that
| also thinks about these things, who are worth a million bucks.
| smokel wrote:
| The irony is that we are now all very enthusiastic about a text
| based user interface.
| martin_drapeau wrote:
| UI, in my mind, has always been the hardest part of the stack.
| It is even more true today. A front-end dev must: - Deal with a
| subjective human (not an objective machine) - Deal with
| designers and product managers - Be constrained by the back-end
| engineer and infrastructure - Make it work on multiple devices
| and browsers - Use the framework someone else chose - Not break
| anything
|
| Kudos to all front-end devs out there!
| dasil003 wrote:
| I don't mean to minimize the effort of FE as I agree it is
| under-appreciated. But if the BE folks don't work closely
| with PMs and designers then you're already fucked and no
| amount of FE lipstick will make up for it.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Not only are good frontend engineers rare, but I've also
| noticed that it seems to be common for the best ones to migrate
| out of frontend work. They get tired of spending all day
| fighting with colleagues who have coding skills but not design
| acumen, and the same traits that make them a good frontend
| engineer also make it very easy to transition to a role that
| comes with a less psychologically costly work environment.
| 128keaton wrote:
| That, and you have to spend so much time justifying your
| value. Most people can appreciate when things look nice.
| However the bar is usually pretty low, set to above "barely
| working" in most cases. That, coupled with the things you
| mentioned above, makes the field difficult.
| dimal wrote:
| Personally, I love front end work. I love the crazy
| challenges and weird constraints. I love seeing a UI --
| something that a human interacts with -- at the end of the
| process. Server side work can be interesting for a little
| while, but if I don't see the results in the UI, it feels
| hollow.
|
| Strangely, even though I've been doing this for twenty five
| years and I've never been better at it, in today's bullshit
| interviewing environment, I can't get a job because I can't
| solve algorithms or do system designs in forty five minutes.
| And so I'm sitting on the sidelines right now. It's the most
| bizarre experience of my career.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| Yeah I moved out of frontend work for the backend. Backend
| work is a series of black boxes. You can make a million
| mistakes and it won't necessarily be an issue. With the
| frontend your work is exposed for everyone to see and
| critique. Not only that, but it's very hard to actually
| compartmentalize changes. A component that looks fine in
| isolation might be completely out of place in a larger peice.
| I frequently found myself near panicking that I didn't mess
| something up before launch because it was nearly impossible
| to handle all cases that we cared about through tests. Of
| course we would hire people to run through the site once
| before launch. But what about after we fix all the bugs? Did
| we introduce new ones after fixing the old? Are all of our
| translations stoll appropriate? Where they ever?
|
| While I don't do frontend work, I still push UX and
| management to minimize the surface area and complexity of the
| frontend. Keep to simple html elements, flowing top to bottom
| with minimal css, etc.
| ng12 wrote:
| Personally I try to find work where:
|
| 1. I'm the only FE dev, with a strict separation between BE
| and FE work (and a BE team that's happy with this
| arrangement).
|
| 2. I'm given the keys to the castles in terms of technology
| and architecture for the FE.
|
| This lets me maximize time spent understanding our product,
| our users, and iterating with PM/Design.
| JodieBenitez wrote:
| I'm mostly a backend engineer, but I occasionally have to make
| UIs. It's not only that it's the hardest part of the stack (I
| agree with that, but it can also be an interesting challenge),
| it's also that it's the part of the stack where everyone and
| his dog think they have a say. It's infuriating really.
| gedy wrote:
| Thanks for this, my peers thought I was insane to move in the
| front end about 10 years ago (after having been in the industry
| for 10 years already).
|
| But it's so important for SaaS type companies to do this
| correctly, I felt like I was treading water and stagnant with
| "backend code" that was mostly just piping the db data to the
| UI.
| Julesman wrote:
| Yeah, agreed. Somehow CSS and a very general concern for UX
| have become my most valuable skills as a developer. I think the
| title of the article isn't correct. It should be "The Negative
| Impact of Responsive Design by People Who Aren't Good At It."
| ess3 wrote:
| Indeed. It's really a bummer that "frontend engineer" has more
| become synonymous with "react engineer".
| karaterobot wrote:
| Thanks for saying so. I was a front-end developer for many
| years, and felt both the difficulty and the persistent lack of
| appreciation for that difficulty. I ended up quitting and just
| becoming a designer, because if I'm not going to get any
| respect, at least I shouldn't have to keep running on the
| treadmill of new technologies. I have also done back-end
| development, and it is certainly difficult in its own way, but
| for the money I'd rather work on that than the front end.
|
| Having done all three, I have a mental model with two axes:
| appreciation and meddling. It might be appropriate to sketch it
| here.
|
| With design, the result of your work ends up being visual, so
| you get a lot of appreciation for it. Maybe too much,
| sometimes. On the other hand, _everyone_ has an opinion about
| how you could do your job better, and they 're happy to stick
| their fingers into your work (because it's so easy, you know?).
|
| With back-end development, nobody is going to meddle in your
| work except other engineers: by meddle, I mean step in and tell
| you how to do it _better_. That 's because they don't know what
| you do at all. The other side of that opaqueness, though, is
| that you rarely get credit for good work. Stuff just works the
| way it should.
|
| Front-end development is in between the two. People will give
| you credit when things work the way they should, and when they
| look nice, and so on. But, half the time when an application is
| "snappy" and performant, they'll credit the designer for it (ha
| ha). At the same time, they'll also tell you how things
| "should" work, based on how other applications do it.
| Meanwhile, you're stuck between what the designer approved, and
| what the back-end supports, and you're just doing your best to
| make it all work.
| hasoleju wrote:
| I like the mental model and I have often witnessed the
| meddling you mentioned. My favorite kind of meddling: The
| current state of a software product is presented to C-Level.
| After listening (usually) for a few minutes one of the most
| senior people in the room starts expressing a strong opinion
| about how a certain color should be changed. Now the color
| scheme discussion starts. The complexity of enabling an
| interaction of a user with the software through the interface
| is not discussed at all. At least changing a color usually
| doesn't harm the usability too much.
| iamcasen wrote:
| You've outlined it so well! "you're stuck between... and
| you're just doing your best to make it all work."
|
| Couple that with the fact that the whole front-end world has
| gone completely bonkers, reinventing the wheel so many times
| in the last 10 years I'm surprised my head hasn't separated
| from my body.
|
| It's funny that things have come full-circle these days,
| going back to server-rendered views. My career literally
| witnessed the entire move from HTML -> SPA -> HTML again. It
| only took roughly 16 years.
| mmcnl wrote:
| You don't see the value add?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Over the years it's become clear to me that frontend is
| probably the hardest part of the stack.
|
| I learned how hard frontend is when developing a browser-based
| game.
|
| The backend code was simple and easy to test with unit tests.
|
| Frontend though is a slog to write, and even greater slog to
| test.
|
| I wonder how much better frontend would be if JavaScript wasn't
| the chosen language. It's just such a bad language in so many
| ways.
| njovin wrote:
| I agree wholeheartedly that frontend work is very, very complex
| (and has only gotten more so in recent years), but I disagree
| it's the hardest part of the stack simply because you typically
| don't have to worry about scale.
|
| Imagine a system processing billions of records per
| day/week/month, dealing with data caching, data warehousing,
| providing realtime notifications to users and external systems,
| managing queue workloads, handling inbound requests from
| various APIs, syncing data between backend systems, running
| multiple data stores and scaling across multiple regions,
| redundancy, and handling incidents that arise on the backend.
| This is typical for complex web software.
|
| A frontend system that provides the interface to that backend
| system will usually not have issues arise in the middle of the
| night due to the automated processes happening on the backend,
| will not have to worry about how many users are using the
| system nor how much underlying data there is.
|
| No matter how difficult it is to do the initial development of
| the frontend (or to keep that code updated when browsers
| change), at the end of the day once the development is done
| it's static code interfacing with a much more complex
| underlying system that requires constant attention as
| underlying data and business requirements evolve.
| zeroCalories wrote:
| The frontend isn't done after the initial work. Requirements
| frequently change and update as management gets new ideas.
| Additionally, the frontend isn't spared from the concerns of
| scaling. You'll often be tasked with demands to decrease load
| from clients to help the backend keep up, which will involve
| lots of clever caching and tricks like debouncing. Finally,
| scaling on the backend isn't nearly as hard these days given
| all of the existing tech you can leverage like k8s and the
| cloud. Modern tech has only made the frontend harder as
| requirements have increased.
| dundercoder wrote:
| Honestly that's the reason I stayed in backend work. Frontend
| seemed to be too much like the English language- more
| exceptions than rules, only changing nearly constantly.
|
| I'm grateful to those who have the patience and skill for it.
| ertian wrote:
| Generally speaking, interfacing with users is the hardest part
| of almost any program. Even when writing simple CLI tools,
| 80-90% of the code is often UI-related, even though it barely
| qualifies as an 'interface'. Flags, documentation,
| sanitization, reasonable error messages, type-checking and
| sanity-checking the inputs...and then, generally, a handful of
| lines of actual, useful code.
| lispisok wrote:
| I think UI's are an inherently hard problem and HTML/CSS/JS are
| the completely wrong tools for the job. Every time I'm doing
| front end webdev it feels like I'm trying to hammer square
| blocks into round holes.
| yonatan8070 wrote:
| At a previous job I did (not tech related) I had to use some
| internal web app, and that thing was absolutely full of these
| mistakes, everything has padding, the text has padding, the box
| around the text has padding, the table row cotaining that box
| has even more padding.
|
| This led to an app that could fit like 4 table rows on a
| standard 1080p display, and every row of that table had very
| little actual info
|
| On top of that, for some ungodly reason text size was defined
| by view width, and on some of the old 4:3 displays that were
| there, it was damn near unusable
| wg0 wrote:
| This is pure for my information only.
|
| Has flex+grid eased the situation somewhat? With media +
| container queries?
|
| If not, why not? Are these models too complex or the browsers
| still are buggy/inconsistent in their implementation of these
| layout algorithms?
| mmcnl wrote:
| There are nice technical solutions. Media queries + flex +
| grid (when you need it) give you all the tools you need.
| There's just a lot of ways to do it wrong.
| akira2501 wrote:
| I use flexbox exclusively. My personal opinion is that if
| you're using media queries for anything other than "screen"
| vs "print" you're absolutely doing it wrong, in particular,
| media queries for screen size are a red flag.
|
| To me, the trick to using flexbox effectively is to use it to
| create fully reactive layouts the way that Gtk or Qt would
| design them. I create flexbox interfaces in terms of "VBox"
| and "HBox" containers, I use flex-grow to handle the concept
| of "box packing."
|
| Once I started seeing it through this lens, and when CSS
| finally added calc() and other functions writing good and
| consistent frontend UIs that mimic precisely how almost all
| other desktop software behaves became incredibly simple.
|
| The only real complaint I have is that after I have a
| finished product, going back and making changes is harder
| than what other techniques might afford, thankfully HTML
| added <template> and by incorporating that liberally into my
| designs I've regained some of the original careless
| flexibility I had before it.
| xormapmap wrote:
| I know we all generally just do what the boss tells us but:
|
| > being able to write complex UIs that can work on any browser,
| any device, with all assistive technologies, and all languages,
| is extremely hard
|
| Why do we keep doing this? If you get rid of the animations,
| popups, and invasive ads, then with what's left you can
| probably do away with all of this crap.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Frontend is complex. That's also why some people think the tech
| stack is "overly complicated". Deploying rich interactive user
| interfaces with the push of a button to the entire world is a
| marvel, why would people expect that to be easy anyway?
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > You need someone with a deep knowledge of html, css, and the
| supportive web apis.
|
| And this is just for working in the browser. Once you your
| product is big enough you just know there will be requests for
| a native app on mobile. Oh but also the mobile version of the
| website needs to keep working. So now you're adding in
| requirements of learning Swift, Java, and the platform specific
| UI frameworks/SDKs.
| peebeebee wrote:
| As a webdesigner myself I kind of disagree. Simple content per
| screen just works better for the example they gave. It's easier
| to visually parse. Their condensed version has a lot of multi
| column layouts which I really dislike.
|
| High content density works for desktop applications, but not for
| what's basically a brochure website.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| What's cool about the article's take, though, is that it's
| based on an actual usability study and not just something
| someone said.
| lagt_t wrote:
| Where's the peer review?
| mumblemumble wrote:
| Let's not set up a double standard here. It's not like non-
| evidence-based opinions are subject to peer review.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| A study needs peer review, but some web designer's opinion
| is just to be accepted as gospel?
| deepfriedrice wrote:
| Agreed. It's hard to believe that marketing pages, after
| decades of evolution and testing, haven't landed on what users
| actually want, rather than what they say they want.
|
| Scrolling is such a natural behavior for internet natives.
| Being able to leverage a large screen to visually compare
| things has its place, but the article uses a horrible example:
|
| > Our condensed product page prototype took the same
| information from the original dispersed page and arranged it in
| a 2x2 grid that allowed users to compare multiple services
| simultaneously, without having to remember the details of each
| service.
|
| What's to compare? They're disparate services.
|
| I do like the example of the product specifications. But that
| was more of an objective usability issue: requiring more clicks
| for more information.
| josefresco wrote:
| Another web designer here: I agree. Notice how the screenshots
| are "zoomed out" which makes the multi column look rich and
| more visually appealing. While I'm all for using the horizontal
| space available to you, everything we're taught about "call to
| action" leads to single element design.
| jddj wrote:
| The thing that I truly find awkward is no nice touch equivalent
| to hover.
|
| It's such a useful piece of the UX to have thrown away in the
| move to mobile first.
|
| Other than that I probably fall in the "it's not that hard" camp.
| Of all the problems you have to solve, getting it to look
| reasonable on a few different screen sizes is pretty far down the
| list in terms of time and complexity.
| extraduder_ire wrote:
| I think long press handles both that and right-click on
| touchscreens. Or at least that's what I use to get at image alt
| text on mobile firefox.
|
| Actual hover detection would be possible, but I imagine that UX
| would suck unless you were using a stylus.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| Long press is already an engrained mobile OS behavior (begin
| text selection). And it doesn't solve the problem because the
| hover state is largely non-visible beneath the user's finger.
| Sanju_2306 wrote:
| hover like effect with touchscreen was possible in Xperia Sola.
| neilv wrote:
| > _to consume all content._
|
| I've decided, whenever anyone weighs in on
| information/interaction design, and says "consume...content",
| what they are saying is, "Hey, we've been stabbing everyone in
| the face all wrong, here's a better way to stab everyone in the
| face."
| yetanotherloss wrote:
| Our AB testing indicates 12% higher laceration engagement is
| possible with additional modal enstabbators.
| aa_is_op wrote:
| Add Substack to the list of brain-dead companies that use a
| mobile-first UI for an app that's primarly used on the desktop.
| Cause nobody types 3,000-word newsletters on their mobile, that's
| for damn sure!
| melenaos wrote:
| Mobile-first is not mobile only design!
|
| This article has completely misunderstand the term, mobile first
| it's the technical way of organizing the CSS to render the mobile
| viewport first and then the rest of the 'breakpoints'.
|
| Mobile-first design has the advantage, over the desktop-first
| design, that it directly render first the mobile design and the
| cellphone experience is much faster and with less rearragning
| flickering.
|
| Mobile-first doesn't have the corresponding disadvantages at the
| desktop browser since they tend to have a land line internet and
| much faster cpu and memory.
| omarfarooq wrote:
| I think they're assuming or taking the case of mobile first
| design with desktop as an afterthought.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| World Leaders in Research (!)-Based User Experience
|
| ---
|
| And they checked a Herman Miller site. How often do you go to HM?
| When you want to buy a 6000 dollar chair. That's maybe once in a
| lifetime.
|
| On desktop, nobody cares about mobile first trendy large image
| sites, because you can scroll, you have a mouse, you have a full
| keyboard. You can use CTRL-F. You can navigate away from the
| bullshit, QUICK. Your handicap is ZERO.
|
| The real problem is really about mobile sites viewed on mobile.
|
| You search for something and arrive butt naked on sites. What you
| get? Full screen cookie consent pages. Then a subscribe to the
| newsletter full screen modal. Okay, now you get the content, but
| not really, because half size ads, ads on top, ads on bottom kill
| your eery-xperience.
|
| The experience is crazy because you have a restricted way to
| interact with the site. A shitty onscreen keyboard, you have to
| scroll a lot with your fingers. Save the mobile experience first.
|
| On desktop the problem is with large sites, with lots of traffic,
| with lots of users. "Finely" tuned by the sancrosanct A/B tests.
|
| Facebook/Instagram desktop experience is borderline crazy.
| Facebook's comment experience is just plain shit. Koko the
| tacticle sign-speaking gorilla would've made a better job on
| that.
|
| On Instagram, if you view it from desktop, then you are viewed as
| a peasant. How dare you to visit the site from the desktop? Are
| you retarded? Clicking on a post? Go register now, peasant!
|
| Wait a sec, you tried to register through desktop? Now go hang
| yourself, rural monkey! No, you can't set yourself to be 18+ to
| view the boobs, you need a mobile for that. Told ya, go hang
| yourself desktop peasant.
|
| Oh, the creators of React, the bloated bullshit frontend
| experience framework created by colour haired individuals that
| every brainwashed idiot loves like a plush polar bear.
|
| Time to push back and send the naive + trendy developers to the
| soon to be established Mars base.
| motoxpro wrote:
| Not sure if I understand you correctly, but the article talked
| about the friction created by scrolling and "Ctrl+F"ing. Cookie
| consent, 18+ (I assume you're talking about Reddit), etc are
| all laws, which I think you would have more luck contacting
| government officials than a front end dev.
|
| The best part of programming is no one knows, or cares, what
| tech you used as long as it works, so if you want to make a
| website out of html, PHP and no JS you're free to do that.
|
| If you want to work with people, you might have to make
| compromises because people have different opinions, but
| websites like IG could be built in a weekend by one person
| anyway, right? /s
| berniedurfee wrote:
| I disagree with almost all of these conclusions. I appreciate web
| pages that are sparse and concise. High information density is
| _not_ generally a good thing.
|
| I like clean websites with lots of space. I don't mind long
| scrolling websites, though I don't particularly like the trend of
| stupid animations that happen as you scroll down.
|
| I appreciate that "mobile first" has forced web designers to
| simplify web sites to be concise. Less is more!
| jksmith wrote:
| I could say the same about web on desktop. Desktop native is
| still the best for desktop. Browsers insert friction and are rent
| seekers.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| I've been a web developer since before "mobile first", and since
| before mobile as a serious web target. Granted when it did become
| a serious target, we had different terms as well: adaptive and
| responsive design come to mind. "Mobile first" as a concept was
| not then--and never has been, for anyone who takes those other
| concepts seriously--"mobile at the expense of all else".
|
| What I mean is that quite a lot of these examples and others
| people frequently cite when complaining about "mobile first" are
| not inherent to "mobile first" per se. To my mind, they're an
| incomplete application of the principle. And the principle became
| prominent when the inverse problem was more universal: designs
| (or simply their implementation) targeted desktop first, and
| added mobile affordances as an afterthought.
|
| "Mobile first" shouldn't mean that other web experiences aren't
| just as important a consideration. Philosophically, it comes from
| the perspective that a broadly usable and accessible web
| experience accounts for the most stringent constraints and works
| out from there.
|
| I distinctly recall solving problems like those discussed in the
| article well over a decade ago. It was a lot of work. It requires
| a lot of care and attention to detail. That doesn't excuse
| skipping any of it! And it really should be more achievable as
| the standards have evolved. But it does require dedication to
| addressing a large matrix of users' needs and usage conditions.
| nologic01 wrote:
| This is definitely not a web-only issue. I have seen the same
| issue with convergent KDE apps (Qt UI based).
|
| Not an expert in this space but intuitively it feels that what is
| missing in a widely adopted heuristic of how to "best", or at
| least, "least-bad" map the information and interactivity
| components of a given UI to different screen geometries.
|
| It feels like a hard problem to crack: in some cases there might
| not be a good solution at all. So the heuristic should be able to
| say "no, what you are trying to do does not match any known Homo
| Sapiens sensory configurations".
|
| Think e.g. how you would map a large and busy DAW screen [1] with
| hundreds of dials on a small mobile. You'd probably have to
| rethink the entire workflow, segment into small chunks, smoothly
| switch screens while providing summaries and connecting elements
| etc.
|
| [1] https://soundcamp.org/music-and-sound-production-
| blog/best-f...
| moribvndvs wrote:
| I hate the "hero" UX concept and how everyone uses it in a
| useless landing page. Scrolling and clicking through endless
| marketing BS to figure out what you do and why it's relevant to
| me. It's the business equivalent of restaurant sites that don't
| put their hours, address, and phone right in your face.
| hypertexthero wrote:
| I enjoyed making simple, fast websites using HTML, CSS and a
| smattering of JS for progressive enhancement, usually with Django
| on the backend.
|
| Industry got obsessed with JS frameworks made for giganto-orgs as
| a "solution" for everything.
|
| Eyes became fixated on the claustrophobic mobile-first screens.
|
| Went back to doing primarily graphic design. Less money, much
| happier.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| Don't hire this guy, I guess. Mobile first problems was solved
| like what, 10 years ago? The problem the other way around is
| still way more prominent. The amount of sites that still can't
| function normally on any mobile is just silly.
| AtNightWeCode wrote:
| I also wonder how the heat maps looks like during these tests.
| Let me guess, there are none...
| seydor wrote:
| I wonder how a global brand like IKEA manages to have such a
| horrible browsing experience
| 6031769 wrote:
| It's the only way to bring the horrible shopping experience of
| their bricks-and-mortar outlets to the internet user.
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