6 ms·
Ask HN: Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
A full 3rd or more of the time when i try to tap on the "new" link at the top of HN, i accidentally tap the "jobs" link with my average-sized fingers because my phone wraps HN such that "jobs" is directly below "new", with like 3 pixels of gap between them.
Similarly, the links across each post in the list, along with the near-microscopic "up" arrow, require teeny tiny baby fingers to tap reliably.
Certainly no tiny babies are using HN, so... please, HN, fontSize+=2 for the links! :-D
- valine 3y agoI prefer it to most sites, it leaves more room for text. HN feels much more information dense than similar websites like reddit.
- sgbeal 3y agoOn a desktop it's fine. For fingers on a phone screen it's... well, it's less than fine.
- smolder 3y agoOn my sort of large phone all the links and buttons are just big enough that I can press on the right things consistently without zoom. My issue is that I accidentally hit them when scrolling sometimes.
- kaba0 3y agoTake a look at tildes’s website. It’s orders of magnitude better, while still showing more content.
- disadvantage 3y agoI only browse HN on my phone, and don't login to comment / submit URLs. I've bookmarked /newest so I go there straight away and don't have to hunt it down every-time and squint to see it. I would recommend using a desktop workstation for interacting with HN for submitting, commenting, upvoting, etc
- sgbeal 3y agoi'm currently living on a boat (since a month) and don't have that luxury. It's a phone or nothing. #TheAddictionIsReal
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoNothing that can be done about it now, but for the future you might want to look into getting a smart phone keyboard. I presume that tabbing through the links would work even on a smart phone browser.
- sgbeal 3y ago> Nothing that can be done about it now, but for the future you might want to look into getting a smart phone keyboard. i've tried 3 of them over the past 10+ years and hated every one of them. The fact is that Android apps are simply not designed with physical keyboards in mind. They're designed for touchscreens, with keyboards being (if anything) third-rate citizens.
- pavlov 3y agoJanuary 2007. Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone web browser. “And to zoom in on any page, you just drag with two fingers… like this.” The crowd goes wild. Nobody has ever seen multitouch gestures before. Still works!
- sgbeal 3y agoYeah, but it's annoying! It "should" "just work." This is the 21st century, for Pete's sake! PS: you lost me at "Steve Jobs".
- brimstedt 3y agoThis means two actions (zoom+click) when one would be enough. Efficiency first!
- rektide 3y agoEfficiency for whom? This works great for me. You'd make my experience awful by making things bigger, reducing information density.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoSurely CSS can detect and cope with screen sizes.
- aendruk 3y agoThe issue here isn’t screen size. @media (pointer: coarse) { /* UI for fingers */ } I frequently use small viewports on my laptop and the pervasiveness of this misconception drives me mad. I try to fit more information on the screen and websites respond by spatially bloating as if designed to impede.
- shashashasha___ 3y agois this a serious answer or trolling? how would web experience on mobile be if i have to manually zoom everything all of the time? fact is NH on mobile web is not optimized for unknown reasons. its not a big challenge to do it either. I have a userscript that makes everything bigger and removes junk out.
- dinosaurbone 3y agoI use a third party app to get around this. Makes the mobile experience infinitely better in my opinion.
- sgbeal 3y agoLink please?
- arcanemachiner 3y agoGlider on Android is okay.
- FireInsight 3y agoI love using Glider. What pains me however is how scuffed the commenting feels, and the UI jumps around a lot when opening a post with lots of comments...
- vdgio 3y agoAny specific app you would recommend?
- aniforprez 3y agoHarmonic on Android is pretty good
- ShamelessGenius 3y agoNot available on Github or Fdroid.
- KMnO4 3y agoI would recommend taking a look for yourself. If I search the App Store for “Hacker News” I see no less than a dozen options. Shouldn’t take more than a minute to look at them and evaluate which one would be best for your needs.
- vdgio 3y agoThis reminded me of the Game Boy magnifying glass. I might have to dig it out.
- wmf 3y agoThey're encouraging you to think like a hacker and fix it yourself with either a user stylesheet or an app.
- gedy 3y agoSure, I appreciate it's "old school" - though the markup, nested tables, embedded formatting, spacer gifs, etc make this rather hard.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoI don't know. I was over 40 when I purchased my first touchscreen device, a 10" tablet, and I was definitely worried that it would be as the OP described, and I would barely be able to control the thing with my fat greasy fingers. But it worked like a dream, and I was amazed at how accurate and sensitive it was. I would definitely not enjoy working on a very small screen. I did have some feature phones with screens about 2x3", but those were not touch-enabled. I currently have a phablet of sorts, a Moto g Play phone, and so it's got a relatively large screen. I have no problems navigating HN on the phone, which I do every day, usually while I eat. I have learned that touchscreen operation does take a delicate touch, of course. The slightest feather brush of the tip of my finger is enough to activate any link, and no more is used, lest the tap mash three other links nearby. And I agree with the poster upthread who recommends zooming. Phones have tons of accessibility tools; use 'em!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- klyrs 3y agoI gladly suffer the ux for the information density. I occasionally favorite comments that I meant to flag, or vote the wrong way, but these actions are all undoable. I've never deleted a comment by mistake; there's a confirmation prompt for that.
- mdlman 3y agoHa. Just tried to upvote your comment and opened your profile instead. Still appreciate the information density, but I can see how it’s a pain for people who are more active here than I.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoWhy not both? I don't think HN uses its space on mobile that well to begin with. You can make small tweaks to improve readability while simultaneously leaving more space to add in properly sized actions on comments.
- lpapez 3y agoWhy not simply inject a tiny bit of client side CSS and fix it yourself? True to the hacker spirit.
- sgbeal 3y ago> Why not simply inject a tiny bit of client side CSS and fix it yourself? True to the hacker spirit. Because, as the OP states, i'm on a phone.
- redsaber 3y agohopefully someone can create a script for phones since Firefox Nightly in Android got Tampermonkey add on
- lpapez 3y agoYou don't even need Nightly since February, version 110 added it :)
- RGBCube 3y agoTampermonkey is available in the stable Firefox app too, btw. Though I wish Stylus supported Firefox mobile, it's better for CSS as it only does CSS.
- FireInsight 3y agoWith Nightly and an addon collection on addons.mozilla.org, you can install Stylus too.
- lpapez 3y agoIn that case you can use Firefox Mobile and Tampermonkey addon to inject custom CSS.
- BaseballPhysics 3y agoWell you just changed my life. I've used Firefox Mobile for years but never considered that Tampermonkey might have been among the supported add-ons...
- cratermoon 3y agoYep, it's tiny. On my iPad mini it's still enough of a pain that sometimes reach for the pencil. On my Android phone, I've noticed that sometimes the text size switches between tiny and not-quite-tiny when I refresh when I'm visiting new. The accessibility on mobile devices leaves much to be desired. Even on desktop the text is small, down to 7pt, which leads me to have Chrome show HN at 125%.
- fuzzythinker 3y agoYa, it's been said that "it is part of the issues to be fixed in the next UI update" for like 10 years now. To me, the most annoying part of using HN w/o other clients on mobile is not this, which can be addressed with extra care or zoom in. It's the idiotic decision to somehow think the post text is less important than comments and so the font color must be set to be lower. It's so low that it's unreadable in mobile. For long posts like many show-HNs, I have to just skip reading it until I get back to desktop, which isn't only not ideal, but also defeats the purpose of show-HNs since the ones that doesn't stay at top are the ones needed all the attention and HN is not helping by making it unreadable. Ya, a simple css color change to match comments' color need to be part of the fixes to be addressed when there's a blue moon.
- Springtime 3y agoI have wondered if the very minimal changes have been as there's some anticipation that the easier HN becomes on mobile the more likely users would comment while on the go, which may be considered a negative if it affects comment quality (eg: generally shorter time windows to read/parse content and therefore make thoughtful comments about, more challenging on phone OS UIs to write and edit longer form comments). I'd be curious what the internal stats are for comments made on mobile since I wonder if the stats are already high and whether they show any trend of less highly rated comments.
- weinzierl 3y agoWhen I see both an up and a down arrow next to a comment and I zoom in so that I can touch just one of them it seems the other one lights up as well. At least that is my impression on the iPhone. So do these little tiny arrows really vote up and down or are they just a neutral engagement signal? I always intended to look in the code but as it fits this topic, I guess I can just as well ask here.
- acumenical 3y agoSkill issue
- sgbeal 3y ago> Skill issue Presumably you're talking about the HN developers' skills?
- jrflowers 3y agoThis is a site where I have seen people say that light grey text on a tan-grey(?) background is actually a good thing, which reminds me of two relevant bits of history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrmalmstorg_robbery https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norrmalmstorg_robbery and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_von_Sacher-Masoch
- figure8 3y agoTry using a mobile browser, like Opera, that supports text rewrap on zoom. It is a revelation.
- abdusco 3y agoI use Kiwi Browser on Android. It's a custom build of Chromium with extension support. I install Stylus and write some CSS to fix anything that bothers me.
- jacooper 3y agoIf you are on android, try glider, a 3rd party client from the Play store.
- tennisflyi 3y agoThere are a couple addons/extensions that gussy it up.
- AnonHP 3y agoHN is not backed by a large organization/company and does not have money to employ a few people to redesign the site and make some long desired and badly needed improvements. /s While you’re complaining about link sizes, did you notice how tiny and close the voting buttons are and how bad the general accessibility of HN is? In a way, I think all this bad design prevents people from using it too much…and that may actually be a good thing. If this answer seemed pointless, that’s because nobody can answer this question properly on an Ask HN post. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com may probably get a more appropriate answer.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoI'd rather take speculation than a lack of an answer or the umpteenth "we hear you and we are working on it" answer only to wait years for nothing. I wish Stylish worked on Firefox mobile. These are issues I can solve myself if the right tools existed (at least, the ones that exist on desktop).
- lyvxh 3y agoWell, I use Stylus, and it works fine on Android (but you need to use a "custom addon collection" to add it, which is only available on Beta and Nightly). I see no reason why Stylish wouldn't also work. https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extension-support-in-firefox-for-android-nightly/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2020/09/29/expanded-extensio...
- johnnyanmac 3y agoWell that's very out of the way, can't believe that existed for 2 and a half years. I'll look into it.
- user568439 3y agoI think it’s intended. It keeps ”casual” users from joining. And if it bothers you there are ways to solve it.
- nokya 3y agoLol. That post made me laugh. One of the main reasons I never up/down a comment is because the arrows are too easy to misfire.
- joker_minmax 3y agoMine doesn't have a downvote button. How can I fix this? I kind of like only being able to upvote, but I want to know what is wrong to be missing it
- deepserket 3y agoAccounts with low karma are limited. Ideally this should solve the "mass downvoting to impose your pet echo chamber" problem that can happen in other online communities. With the ongoing fall of reddit if I were an admin i would propose a limit based on account age, in order to not shift the common etiquette suddenly.
- qwery 3y agoYour web browser is broken. Well, they all are. Browsers on small screens should be built to browse web pages on small screens. There are seemingly obvious things to do like increasing font sizes[0] and margins -- the browser decides what to do with the content, after all. But such things aren't true solutions when the page is designed for a different device / resolution / form factor[1]. Your problem is with input though -- making elements bigger is a hacky solution at best. Browsers on touch screens should be built to browse web pages on touch screens. Touch input events are a particularly poor representation of the operator's intent -- compared to keys, pointing device with cursor, etc. -- yet a lot of software built for touch seems to assume the opposite. The software decides that the user definitely wants to click on something and it just needs to find which thing. As all good web browsers know, the extremely precise touch event position corresponds exactly to the (region of the) element that the user wants to click on. This is a certainty[2]. So what if the user tapped precisely on a background element for no reason at all? So what if there are multiple clickable things nearby? The user would have sent different coordinates if they wanted to click somewhere else. [0] you generally do get some control over this, in lieu of a solution to the problem [1] and the browser must, as much as possible, style the content in the way (not-) specified, even at the cost of the user experience / accessibility [2] It is, by definition, without doubt. A fact. A universal truth. A ---
- tredre3 3y agoWeb browsers (and the whole touch input stack really) are already fully aware of touch precision and do very clever things to infer what you're actually trying to touch. In my experience it's already surprisingly accurate, too. Saying that making things bigger isn't a solution is nonsense. Shifting blames to browser makers is even less of a solution. Making HN 200% bigger if it detect a small screen would fix most issues and it's 3 lines of CSS. But sure, let's wait until that magical browser you describe arrives to fix everything instead. Any day now.
- qwery 3y agoThe whole stack is undoubtedly doing a heap of clever things, they are very impressive devices. I'm not sure what "fully aware of touch precision" means exactly. I mentioned precision a few times to hint at the common misunderstandings about precision and the irony of interpreting subpixel touch coordinates as literal point/s that the user touched, deliberately and specifically, when they were generated from someone smooshing a number of body parts against a small touch screen display. Simply making things bigger isn't a comprehensive solution (to what is a difficult user input problem, as you know), but it is something that can help, and crucially can be implemented in web browsers. I want web browsers to be less cowed by web designers/developers, to empower the users. I'm not trying to change your mind/experience. I know that a lot of people must be similarly unaffected by such issues. Not everyone is in that privileged group, however.
- friend_and_foe 3y agoSmartphones and touchscreens in general have a UX issue: the surface you read gets interacted with directly. So attempting to create a content rich reading surface has this problem. With smartphones it is compounded by the small size of the screen. You'll see this with all sorts of other mobile UIs that are web based. Honestly, as much of a pain in the ass as it can be, I prefer it to existing mobile UX "solutions" out there, it might suck to pinch zoom on links before I touch them, but it sucks even worse to interact with the majority of mobile web interfaces.
- tipsytoad 3y agoMaterialistic is a good android app for HN
- Shawnj2 3y agoThere’s a good HN client on iPhone called Hack that’s roughly modeled after Apollo
- joshxyz 3y agolmao yes this has been an issue for years, hn discriminates against my fat fingers! haha.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 3y agoOp clearly hasn't seen a 2 years old trying to press anything on a phone. Their fingers might be tiny, but they manage to press the whole screen. Lol