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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

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Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#71

Post by chrismorgan »

tyfon wrote: post #67
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 i…

On Android, by convention you can long-press icon-only toolbar buttons and the label will show as a tooltip. Non-native apps (fuzzy definition) lack this far too often, but it’s always worth trying. Not sure if iOS has something like this.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#72

Post by thegeomaster »

tyfon wrote: post #67
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 i…

I have to pile on the rant - OK, maybe the screen real estate is precious and you don't have space for buttons - but allow me to somehow discover what they do!

In desktop applications, you can over over a toolbar button and you get the label underneath. Why can't I long press a button in a mobile app and get a toast that says what it does? (I see the sibling says this should work, but I don't remember the last time I wasn't disappointed by trying this and failing.) You're making me miss the useless-90%-of-the-time question mark button at the top of every window in Windows!

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#73

Post by kergonath »

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.

Most of the time, just using the OS-provided controls would save these problems before they even happen.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#74

Post by tyfon »

chrismorgan wrote: post #71
tyfon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

On Android, by convention you can long-press icon-only toolbar buttons and the label will show as a tooltip. Non-native apps (fuzzy definition) lack this far too often, but it’s always worth trying. Not sure if iOS has something like this.

Yeah I used to be on android, I had less issues there. This is my first iPhone (version 11) and I'm not sure if I will keep with apple. The tracking of google is bothering me big time though so I might just accept a worse user experience to avoid that.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#75

Post by wruza »

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.

I am SO happy they did that. Choosing 4 digits by scrolling two pairs was a nice looking stupidest idea from the beginning. The fact that you had to wait for animation to complete didn’t help. And if you didn’t wait and hit “save”, it silently used a former value. I was late at least once because of that. I also had few predefined alarms to not deal with that crap too often.

I know many ways to improve an old control, and I believe Apple has a pile of folks smarter than me who did the same, but someone stubbornly retained that and that is a win that they finally gave up.

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#77

Post by Kye »

skohan wrote: post #55
shadowfaxRodeo wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

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…

1%s talk to other 1%s

Re: Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore

#80

Post by jiggawatts »

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…

While we're on the topic: YouTube, which is inherently a video content viewing service, goes out of its way to obscure the video content. The TV app, the mobile app, and the browser app all insist on overlaying the content with random garbage that no sane human being could possibly be more interested in that the content that they launched with the intention of watching!

Heaven help you if you open a popular live feed. The wall of random teenage stream-of-thought noise streaming down across the video is just unspeakably crass. Why was this added, you ask? Because some overpaid manager at Google saw that Facebook was doing more video, so turning a video streaming service into a social network seemed like a brilliant idea. I mean why not? Why wouldn't people watching NASA feeds want snotty little kids spaming swearwords on their television?

PS: products slowly morphing to become nigh unrecognisable is a pre-Internet issue. The MTV channel used to show just music videos!

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