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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

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Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#171

Post by ryandrake »

jdmoreira wrote: post #53

I'm an iOS developer. The problem is multifaceted. Designers have completely disregarded these devices. They design for the latest and greatest in Figma and when we implement their design and eventually run it on an iPhone SE of course everything is super crammed, labels overflow into each other, you can't see some text, things just generally look bad, etc... etc... Our UI code has multiple ifs at this point where we…

This is not a mobile device problem or an iOS problem. This is a competence problem with your designers. The role of a UX designer is not to produce a portrait-only, default-font-size-only pixel-perfect picture on three popular phone screen sizes, and throw it over the fence for developers to develop and not ask questions. Designers must ask, what if the user prefers landscape mode? What if their fonts need to be larger for accessibility reasons? What if they are on an odd sized phone, or even one we haven't even seen yet?

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#172

Post by dmckeon »

simias wrote: post #92
tinus_hn wrote: post #45

A big part of the problem is people just not following the guidelines. If you have a toolbar with buttons that have labels, it’s not going to fit. But if you’re following the guidelines, you don’t have labels and it fits. If you have a list with a refresh button on the bottom you have to scroll to see that button on a small screen. But if you use the standard pull to refresh control, you don’t even need the button. I…

You make good points but IMO that's an Apple problem first and foremost, not an application designer problem. If an application doesn't follow the guidelines and breaks on some of the phones supported by the app store, then Apple should tell the application makers to fix it lest the app be removed. Last week I defended the move by Apple to remove that "crab house" app because they're the custodians of their walled ga…

Alternately, Apple could choose a different and non-binary way of curating apps. An app store with 4 or 5 scales of 0 to 9 scores: UX, privacy, cost/benefit, user reviews, etc. would be a lot more useful to me than a store with x00,000 apps all in an undifferentiated pile.

Even trying to find specific app from a specific vendor, while being sure to not get some lookalike evil clone from J. Random Hacker can be challenging.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#173

Post by chrismorgan »

ramraj07 wrote: post #142
chrismorgan wrote: post #56

The Google Maps thing isn’t entirely about screen size (though I would hope it wouldn’t be quite so bad on larger screens—but I’m only familiar with how it looks on a small-by-modern-standards Android phone, where it’s about the same as on the iPhone depicted in this article, or even a little less); it’s about the product’s overarching philosophy, which has changed over the past decade (in a direction I strongly disl…

I have followed the brilliance of google maps from an ux perspective for decades now, and don’t fault them that much for their new changes: it has become much more common now that I actually don’t care much about where a place is, more only about if I found the right place, and how do I get there. If I use public transit then the map becomes even more irrelevant. Given how good Googles places info is, the only time t…

Meanwhile, I get frustrated by the changes in their cartography style almost every time I use Google Maps. Most of the time I do want an actual map, and even when I’m not so fussed about that, the old style conveyed more useful details for the sorts of things I was doing. If you want to explore an area geographically, the changes have been terrible.

It’s not uniformly worse than it was a decade ago; there are some areas like highlighting business districts and such where in the last decade they’ve— uh— caught up with paper maps. But if Google Maps presented me with a “show maps like they were ten years ago” option, I’d enable it in an instant, because the cons of the last decade have been far greater than the pros for how I, all my family and most of my friends use it.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#174

Post by gregoriol »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #98
gregoriol wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hover is quick and natural on desktop, but why would you want to long press a tab bar button on mobile? That's long and unnatural. Just press it (quick and natural) and see what it does!

“Just press it (quick and natural) and see what it does!” And if it deletes something you wanted to keep you have learned a valuable and lasting lesson :)

If a button does that kind of critical action, it better have a better and much more visible explanation + confirmation than just a hidden hover tooltip

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#175

Post by greggturkington »

skohan wrote: post #36
iamben wrote: post #14

We've had this discussion on HN before and I'll make the same point, because this is very similar with responsive websites as well. All too often I see designs that don't think about odd size tablets, or (as here) phones less than 375 or 414, or whatever else. It absolutely boggles my mind, especially when you can attribute a "this is how much these users spend" amount to it (an ecom store, for instance). Most of the…

> Most of the time it's not much extra effort to make it work properly I strongly disagree - with smaller devices you might be talking about an entirely different layout, and maybe a separate set of assets. More time for designers, more time for developers, and a whole category of tests for QA to verify during regression tests. You're talking about widening the entire development pipeline.

Developers that think we should support the iPhone 3 just to be nice have not worked on enterprise-level apps. They underestimate the cost of the things you describe--design, QA, support, etc. It's more than a media query.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#176

Post by atomicUpdate »

tinus_hn wrote: post #141
hanniabu wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use these smart hamburger menu overlay or scroll controls, they look bad on untested devices. Don’t use hamburger menus. What is a good alternative to a hamburger menu? I can't think of anything that wouldn't have the similar issues.

The alternative to hamburger menus is to design your app navigation so you don’t need them. Use the settings app for settings, so they don’t clutter your app. Have the user tap an ‘account’ control to do account related things like logout or change passwords. The problem is (oversimplified) these developers start with 20 things they want to show, and then they pick 4 things they can cram in the toolbar and the rest i…

> Use the settings app for settings, so they don’t clutter your app.

I’m glad most app don’t do this, except for where they have to for notifications, etc. It’s really unintuitive to go to another app to adjust settings for an app you’re already in.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#177

Post by vulcan01 »

iamacyborg wrote: post #19
bluedino wrote: post #15

Here on HN, the username/score/logout links are triple stacked in the upper right and I’ve accidentally hit logout more times than I can count. iPhone 12 mini

I think that depends on your score. I’m on the 12 mini as well and those links are spread over two lines for me.

Problem is, they have one more digit in their karma than you...

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#178

Post by bouke »

ruph123 wrote: post #167

One thing that really annoyed me who always preferred the smaller iPhones like the SE: When Apple updated their Music app to make everything super big and bloated it basically got unusable. Especially for classical music where you could not see past the long name of the symphony to see which movement it was. And even while playing you had to wait for the running text to reach the important part. And all this was just…

Yeah that’s what bothering me as well. Seems to be happening everywhere though, reduced information density and increased whitespace and fonts. So as we’re all buying something with bigger screens, we still keep loosing real estate.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#179

Post by skohan »

ryandrake wrote: post #170
iamben wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reply to you both - I'm specifically talking about the web. I have no experience building apps, so can't comment there. But for the web, I'm absolutely happy to argue it's not that much more effort.

Whether it's the web or an "app," it should work sensibly at any reasonable resolution. It doesn't have to look good, or look like the pixel-perfect, happy-path Photoshop mocks the UX designer made, but it should function. Desktop developers have been doing at least an OK job of this for decades. Yet here we are, where it's a struggle to find an app that even sensibly supports landscape mode, or supports a user-confi…

Arguably most of the examples given in the post "work sensibly". They have some aesthetic issues but they should function

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#180

Post by canuckintime »

aikinai wrote: post #101
formerly_proven wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple devices are full of dark patterns (to get you to enable "upload everything always to iCloud") and bad UX. Even super basic stuff like the alarm clock ("bedtime") has become a Rube Goldberg-esque nightmare, and good UX elements have been replaced with garbage in other places as well. For example, setting the time of an alarm requires you to drag in a 5x5 mm area for hour and minute, respectively. Not only is tha…

> For example, setting the time of an alarm requires you to drag in a 5x5 mm area for hour and minute, respectively. The numeric keypad taking up the entire bottom half of the screen is what they’re expecting you to use. Providing that is why they switched to the new design. Dragging in the time box is just for some backward consistency; it’s not the intended interaction.

Oh, I didn’t even notice the UI change because for years I’ve been exclusively setting all my alarms with (Type to) Siri. If I add the Alarm shortcut to Control Center, would this numeric keyboard be faster? I wager it’d be more reliably/accurate than Siri
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