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

Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

lwgmnz.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 267 posts

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#31

Post by afavour »

mattmanser wrote: post #24
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?

And then you make it suck for everyone else. Mobile first often made the experience suck for desktops. Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. The author says: Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. But that's a false dichotomy.

> Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone.

No it doesn’t. iOS’s UI toolkit has numerous tools to allow a design to adapt to screen size. There’s no reason an adjustment for a smaller screen would have any effect on a larger one.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#32

Post by danielheath »

afavour wrote: post #25
skohan wrote: post #10

Why would you? There are a tiny share of small screen size phones out there, and often you need a substantially different design for a small screen. Basically you are doubling the layout effort on your designers and app developers (or let's say 1.3 times modifier at least), and those designs have to be maintained as well. The alternative is to really have a "one size fits all" design, but this will likely mean making…

> Basically you are doubling the layout effort on your designers and app developers (or let's say 1.3 times modifier at least), and those designs have to be maintained as well. Judging by the screenshots in the article this really isn’t true. Devs just need to bother to test with these small devices, they’d see the padding and offset issues immediately and it would be an easy fix.

Y’all are getting multiple test devices?

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#33

Post by kcmastrpc »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #21
skohan wrote: post #10

Why would you? There are a tiny share of small screen size phones out there, and often you need a substantially different design for a small screen. Basically you are doubling the layout effort on your designers and app developers (or let's say 1.3 times modifier at least), and those designs have to be maintained as well. The alternative is to really have a "one size fits all" design, but this will likely mean making…

why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?

none of these reasons negate the cost of implementing layouts for _literally every device on the planet_. it's not practical, nor do the bean counters really care because the loss in revenue is very much less than the cost of implementation.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#34

Post by forgotmypw17 »

mattmanser wrote: post #24
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?

And then you make it suck for everyone else. Mobile first often made the experience suck for desktops. Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. The author says: Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. But that's a false dichotomy.

>And then you make it suck for everyone else.

In Russian, there is a saying: To a poor dancer, their own butt gets in the way...

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#35

Post by bradley_taunt »

mattmanser wrote: post #24
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?

And then you make it suck for everyone else. Mobile first often made the experience suck for desktops. Tiny screen first just makes the experience suck for everyone. The author says: Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. But that's a false dichotomy.

> Mobile first often made the experience suck for desktops.

I’d have to argue that poor design work in general is the cause for this. “Mobile first” never meant to neglect the desktop experience - designers who do that are just poor designers to begin with.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#36

Post by skohan »

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.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#37

Post by afavour »

danielheath wrote: post #32
afavour wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically you are doubling the layout effort on your designers and app developers (or let's say 1.3 times modifier at least), and those designs have to be maintained as well. Judging by the screenshots in the article this really isn’t true. Devs just need to bother to test with these small devices, they’d see the padding and offset issues immediately and it would be an easy fix.

Y’all are getting multiple test devices?

You can’t use simulators?

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#38

Post by skohan »

solarkraft wrote: post #17

> Also, I don’t care if the statistics for small devices is less than 1%, it’s just pure respect for those users. Thanks. This attutude of respect on the UI side is why I'm tempted by the Apple platform. Unfortunately it looks like it's not as perfect as hoped initially and there's a lot of disrespect on other ends.

What's the cutoff? If you have a single user who's running iOS 7 and you have to slow down feature development 50% to support them, do you have to do that out of respect?

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#39

Post by forgotmypw17 »

paulcole wrote: post #27
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why? pride in worksmanship, perhaps... because 1% is still quite a few users for whom the experience sucks... or perhaps just plain old empathy... because not every customer can just replace their device... or... i dunno... just avoiding someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news?

> someone posting embarrassing screenshots of one's app looking like shit on hacker news The horror! My mom will for sure delete her local bank’s app if she sees the post showing that the padding is a few pixels off on a phone she doesn’t own.

I don't know about you, but I would be ashamed if something I wrote showed up in this article...
Post reply on HN