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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

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Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#41

Post by skohan »

afavour wrote: post #31
mattmanser wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm quite sure all the screenshots in the article are the result of adaptive designs being broken due to edge cases. Constraint-based adaptive designs are great, but they have their limits. Unless you have a very simple design it is not going to work on every form factor.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#42

Post by dep_b »

I used an iPhone SE 2016 until recently and I never really ran into situations where an app was unusable because of this. Also a lot of these design mistakes could be described as “reinventing UINavigationBar or UITabBar, crappy”.

One thing that really annoyed me was doing an accidental shake gesture while typing something. The blocking Undo dialog’s buttons are covered by the keyboard and you cannot do anything but restart the app.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#43

Post by shadowfaxRodeo »

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…

Everybody fits into a 1%.

Why design for vision, hearing, motor, cognitive impairments, older browsers, feature phones, 2g connections, motion sensitivity, unusual input devices, smart watches, tvs, game consoles, low-powered devices, languages other than English?

I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm very tired of hearing this argument. It's not that hard to accomodate people, especially on Apple devices, they give you all the tools to do this.

Don't be shocked if X group is a small fraction of your users if your design has made it clear they're not welcome.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#44

Post by skohan »

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.

Unintentional privilege-based UI ergonomics

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#45

Post by tinus_hn »

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.

If you use these smart hamburger menu overlay or scroll controls, they look bad on untested devices. Don’t use hamburger menus.

Most of the screenshots in this article are from iOS apps that show Google Material Design. It’s not too surprising this doesn’t work properly on Apple devices, the design doesn’t fit and you can’t implement it using the toolkit Apple designed, built and tested to work on all their devices.

Edit:

By the way you don’t even need to get a tiny phone to test this because most of the problems also show up when you increase the operating system font size which you’re also supposed to test.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#46

Post by iamben »

kawsper wrote: post #29
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…

> 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). It also happens the other way around, they break it for odd-sized devices and then they go look at their numbers: "It's less than 1% of our revenue", WELL OF COURSE IT IS! It's broken!

Yeah, see that loads, very frustrating. "Desktop CVR is double that of a tablet, so we don't bother with tablets..."

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#47

Post by spaniard89277 »

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.

I am by myself, I have no money backing my sites, how much time spent catering to outliers do you think is reasonable?

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#48

Post by konjin »

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?

How does any of that make money?

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#50

Post by tinus_hn »

formerly_proven wrote: post #23
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.

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…

Boo hoo. If it bothers you you can just type in the time, the large control got replaced by an enormous keyboard.
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