Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

lukew.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 241 posts

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#221

Post by vidarh »

err4nt wrote: post #202
function_seven wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you load up a site I do it is as well designed as a mobile app. Surely people don't complain about the inability to zoom in their iOS settings app, or in the clocks app. Why would my site be any different? They have that ability (at least on iOS. Don't know about Android, but I assume it has similar settings). It's under the Accessibility options. Why don't you allow users the ability to zoom your sites?

I do allow zoom when it's appropriate: usually when I'm either targeting desktop users and don't plan (or don't have budget) to specifically target mobile users with their own experience, or when user scaling of the viewport makes sense to the project. It's FAR better to pan and zoom around a working desktop layout than to have a broken responsive layout, so I only disable user-scaling on sites with a specifically ta…

Thank you for proving the point that you can't design to meet everyones need in a way that removes the need for zoom.

Yes, your examples absolutely need zoom, or they will be totally unusable for a large number of people.

I have close to perfect sight, but big fingers, and even on my 5.5" phone the buttons in the first ones were annoyingly small.

In the second one, the text was annoying small. Again on a 5.5" phone. A lot of people wouldn't be able to read it at all without zoom.

> I wonder if the group of people that can't manage to browse with user-scaling turned off on their modern, high-end mobile phones are the same who can't seem to load any website posted to HN that uses JavaScript because not everybody uses a browser with JS enabled…

No, they are people who far to often run into designers who assumes everyone has perfect eye-sight and dainty little fingers and so thinks it's ok to disable zoom.

The only time it is acceptable to disable zoom is if you provide your own, context-aware zooming mechanism and make very, very sure it does a better job than the generic browser zoom.

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#222

Post by vidarh »

err4nt wrote: post #183
abakker wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, so you're suggesting that we not enable a "usability feature" because Apple's guidelines suggest that there are alternative ways to specify the correct viewport? I get the design angle, and I don't disagree that setting the correct viewport is a good idea, but you shouldn't assume that good design and correctly setting the viewport will work for everybody. The fact remains that the zoom gesture is critical on mob…

> K, so you're suggesting that we not enable a "usability feature" because Apple's guidelines suggest that there are alternative ways to specify the correct viewport? No that's the opposite of what I'm saying. Apple has created a usability feature called 'User Scaling' and enabled it by default for usability purposes. Apple also added the tags that control the viewport, including disabling User Scaling, and strongly…

> Clearly, whatever I'm doing it making it easier for mobile users to get in the door with their dollars, and I have the numbers to vouch for that!

The flaw in this argument is that you are measuring across the total population, and totally ignoring that while your overall changes may help some proportion, some parts of it may actively prevent others from using the site at all.

Great for you if all you care about is the money. Not so great if you want to e.g. ensure people with disabilities have a good experience too.

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#223

Post by hobarrera »

deanclatworthy wrote: post #7

There is a small irony that when reading an article about mobile UX, the website has disabled zoom meaning I can't actually see any of the images in the article.

Can zoom just fine on firefox, so it's probably not a cross-browser thing.

But yeah, it's still incredibly ironic.

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#224

Post by icebraining »

err4nt wrote: post #186
cleaver wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me: 1. I'm old enough to need reading glasses. 2. etc.

If you have poor eyesight, are you aware that you have the option of increasing the font-size device-wide in your device settings?

Why should my mother have to change device-wide settings on my device just because she wants to read something using it?

(Yes, people do lend their devices.)

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#225

Post by icebraining »

chronomex wrote: post #190
brudgers wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, your program needs to calculate what date that is Yes it does, Qnd that is harder for the programmer and easier for the user. Calendar wudguts suck for: > last week of august next year. Twenty years ago parsing user input and calculating a date was resource constrained and ambiguity was expensive because the query was hitting Sabre on some mainframe. Today we've got gigahertz and gigabytes in our pockets and we'r…

And yet we still have to manually query every combination of departure and return dates to find reasonable airfare.

Not on Adioso, which is why I use them. You can choose a city (with multiple airports) for the departure location and something like "about X weeks/months" for the travel duration. And then drill down, since they display a range of dates.

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#226

Post by vidarh »

Lewton wrote: post #115
vidarh wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I try to zoom, it is already a demonstration that your design does not work for me on my device. I would not prefer to pan - if I resort to it, it's because I have to because the site design is broken. At that point you better not have disabled zoom too, if you want me to come back to your site.

> If I try to zoom, it is already a demonstration that your design does not work for me on my device What? There's plenty of reasons to zoom even if the design is perfect.

I think you misunderstand me.

If you e.g. can't read it because the text is too small, the design is not perfect (for that user at that time), and zoom should not be disabled.

My point was that the moment a user is trying to zoom, for whatever reason, they have already decided that the design is not perfect for them in the present circumstances on the device they're currently using.

And so the only thing disabling zoom is going to achieve is annoying the user by artificially preventing them from trying to improve a situation they've already deemed is suboptimal.

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#227

Post by icebraining »

auganov wrote: post #78
aembleton wrote: post #3

This is the case for mobile phones. On a desktop or laptop, the dropdowns are preferable because most browsers will let you select the day, month year using your keyboard.

Yes. And please - if you feel like reinventing the dropdown be decent enough to re-implement that feature. Example of an offender: https://www.google.com/advanced_search

Which ones are you talking about? I can use the keyboard to select values on those dropdowns just fine (at least in Firefox).

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#228

Post by icebraining »

lnanek2 wrote: post #62
ivanhoe wrote: post #15

This really depends on the situation: imagine something as classic as a birthday selector, what would you use for a year selection? The only applicable alternative is a slider control, but such a slider with a 100+ values might be very hard to use with the needed precision. Another common example would be a list of countries (or any long list of words actually), you can't use a slider there, it would be very counter-…

I see country drop downs that allowed typing as well to selection. Usually it's some Javascript UI widget that does progressive enhancement, but it is available.

Nowadays, you can even have suggestions-as-you-type in pure HTML: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/datal...

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#229

Post by simoncion »

dang wrote: post #218
simoncion wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your points are good. I'm pretty sure brudgers is either trolling or dysfunctional in some way.

> I'm pretty sure brudgers is either trolling or dysfunctional in some way. Whoa, that's not nice. Please don't make personal slights in HN comments.

After perusing brudgers' comment history, it's clear to me that the comments I was replying to were just extremely unusually disjointed or scattered. Mea culpa.

I still believe that I was being trolled, but it is now quite clear to me that brudgers appears to be completely capable of having entirely reasonable, insightful conversations. Sorry for any offence. :(

However, -for future reference- when speaking of obviously, chronically disjointed and confused commenters -say, a more polite Terry Davis- what is an HN-acceptable way to structure the sentiment in my comment?

This is a serious, non-confrontational question. :)

Re: Dropdowns Should Be the UI of Last Resort

#230

Post by simoncion »

dragonwriter wrote: post #166
simoncion wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...sites with smaller viewports... Every smartphone sold in America in the last four years has a far higher screen resolution than the machine on which I first browsed the internet back in the 1990s. Indeed, most of them have a higher screen resolution than the laptop on which I regularly browse the internet today! So, no, the viewports on mobile devices aren't really smaller. It is -however- very true that one's i…

> Every smartphone sold in America in the last four years has a far higher screen resolution than the machine on which I first browsed the internet back in the 1990s. Indeed, most of them have a higher screen resolution than the laptop on which I regularly browse the internet today! A good point, and important to keep in mind. > So, no, the viewports on mobile devices aren't really smaller. Except, in the ways that t…

Hnnh. Everywhere I've seen the word "viewport" used, it has referred to the number of pixels on the screen, along with the aspect ratios of both the pixels, and the screen itself. I dabbled in OpenGL a long way back; this is probably where I was first introduced to the term.

I would call the concept which you are calling "viewport", "screen". e.g. "This phone has a much smaller screen than this nice desktop monitor."

Post reply on HN