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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

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Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#61

Post by skohan »

shadowfaxRodeo wrote: post #59
skohan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they aren't worth my time. What if I am running a bootstrapped startup, and supporting small screens is the difference between being able to out-compete my competitors on features or not? Just because these tools exist does not make it zero effort. It's a very entitled view to assume that every product has a duty to accommodate you. Yes it feels bad to be left out of something, but that doesn't mean it's owed t…

I'm talking from the perspective of the developers. It's not that difficult to accomodate people. Following principles on progressive enhancement is actually easier than not doing it. If you're looking for a way to out-compete your competitors, how about making an app that works for the people they've left out?

> If you're looking for a way to out-compete your competitors, how about making an app that works for the people they've left out?

You're free to run this experiment, but my guess is that it will not be a meaningful differentiating factor

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#62

Post by ludwigschubert »

tinus_hn wrote: post #50
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…

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

Come on, that’s neither helpful nor kind. The controls were larger in previous OSes, and now look like they violate Apple’s own 44pt minimum size target.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#63

Post by skohan »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #22
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…

Important note: the author is actually talking about the 2020 iPhone SE. There has got to be tons of those + iPhone 8/7/6S’s still in use.

Ok I missed that detail - I think it's reasonable to support iOS8 size screens given the market share. But the logic holds with iPhone 5 and below size screens for example.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#64

Post by tinus_hn »

ludwigschubert wrote: post #62
tinus_hn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Come on, that’s neither helpful nor kind. The controls were larger in previous OSes, and now look like they violate Apple’s own 44pt minimum size target.

The large control you are talking about was replaced by a keyboard. The small control is completely optional.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#65

Post by polyrand »

I use an iPhone 8 (more or less the same as the SE 2020) and I don't find this bugs often, but they are definitely there.

Regarding web design, I always set the iPhone 5/SE view as the baseline. I think it's a lot easier to go from there to a bigger device than the other way around. Also, the worst that can happen is that there's some empty spaces on the sides or some card gets wide. However, when you start from a big device and then try to fit the UI to smaller ones it's a lot harder.

Another problem is the rendering engines. I once had to help a friend with a problem that was only happening in my iPhone, but when I used Chrome (in my laptop) with the mobile view it worked ok. I could then reproduce the bug using Safari (in my laptop) with the mobile view active, so I guess it was because of the small size + rendering engine. Those things are also hard to debug and catch.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#66

Post by sfvisser »

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…

Google Maps is not much better on larger screens unfortunately. It’s almost as if it wants to obscure the map area, no matter what you try.

When using it you kind of feel how a once pioneering piece of tech and UX initially built by a small team got taken over by corporate Google which knows best what their users need...

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#67

Post by tyfon »

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…

The custom buttons without labels are a pet peeve of mine actually. I can never guess what the buttons do when they only have pictures and each app use their own icon set.

There are some apps that use standard buttons that I recognize but far too many want to be fancy and roll their own making the app practically unusable unless you guess correct or press all buttons to see what they do.

But you are correct in that if everyone followed the guidelines, used the standard UI elements and images etc it would be much better. I could even forgo button labels if that happens :)

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#68

Post by RikNieu »

kawsper wrote: post #20

I have an original iPhone SE and I very rarely hit this, mostly by more amateurish applications, but it is still very frustrating when it happens. For an example there's an application I use to put money on my washing card, and also book washing machines in my building, and that doesn't work on my iPhone SE, even though that application is mostly a webview. It could be nice if Apple could detect these issues in the r…

It's weird that they don't. Every time I push to the istore they review it will multiple devices.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#69

Post by chrismorgan »

On the web, people came up with the concept of “mobile-first”, meaning that you should first of all make sure everything can work with the smallest size, and then add whatever adjustments, improvements, extra functionality due to size, &c. for larger screens after that.

(Of course, in practice people made a hash of it (as they always do) and it often became mobile-only design, with users of larger screens getting a comically bad experience that was manifestly designed for tiny screens; but that’s not the idea of mobile-first.)

I’d say it’s generally a sound philosophy, even though at larger sizes you may desire to recompose the UI quite substantially. It’s generally easier and/or safer to design for small screens and reformat or add extras for larger screens, rather than to design for large screens and reformat or remove for smaller screens.

But people definitely regularly don’t go small enough in their idea of “mobile”. I decided some years ago that I would target 300px as my baseline width, and I feel that’s served me well. (And if convenient, I make it work past 260px.) 300px is a bit smaller than anything mainstream, and is thus pretty safe. (I haven’t often done much that needs a baseline height, but I’d use 300px and/or 450px there, considering both portrait and landscape usage as necessary or applicable.)

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#70

Post by kergonath »

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 always tap the poster’s name when up- or down-voting a comment on my iPhone XR. HN’s UI in general is not great for phones (though at least it is simple and effective, which is great).
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