4 ms·

Name a few example sites that kept it simple

SilasX 3y ago
Hacker News, old Reddit. Both work fine on both mobile and desktop. (Reddit started breaking features like double tap to zoom though.) Yes, on a large screen you might have to increase the size. But a mediocre design you can recover from is better then being stuck with some meth addled designer’s unusable one.
- kitkat_new 3y ago
  Hacker News YX could be way better though
- imachine1980_ 3y ago
  Old Reddit doesn't work well on mobile devices at all. While it can scale the user interface, it's designed with a mouse in mind, making everything appear too small. I like using Old Reddit on desktop, but it's not user-friendly on mobile. For example, on HN (Hacker News), it's simpler; there are no images or different-sized icons. Even here sometimes struggle to tap the right links or flags, and I have to manually go to the settings to undo it. I'd prefer this over a poorly optimized mobile UI. However, optimizing the mobile web page would solve these problems.
  - SilasX 3y ago
    Rotate your device to landscape and it's fine. I guess part of the problem is sites training everyone not to do that. (Quora's expert designers will happily throw content into the void of the iPhone's notch on landscape, inventing a problem that didn't exist in older designs, despite them having been created before the notch ever came out.)
    - imachine1980_ 3y ago
      Rotate isn't good solution it like saying not open site in full screen open it in half screen o is similar to mobile, I use mobile on the go and can't acomodate bad design whit behavior changes you need too change the design, so people can use it whiout needing to change everything.
      - SilasX 3y ago
        I find landscape easier to use on mobile. I don’t get the hate for it.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  old reddit never figured out how to deal with deeply nested threads without ending up l i k e t h i s
  - esafak 3y ago
    Maybe that is a feature: stop when you get to that point.
    - SilasX 3y ago
      Or just load a comment closer to that one.
- KronisLV 3y ago
  > Hacker News The links are too close together on a small phone screen and I cannot tap them accurately half the time. This might mean the difference between upvoting/downvoting something, or flagging something instead of clicking on the context option, when I don't mean to. HN is pretty great when it comes to desktop, though - simple design, no dark patterns, except for maybe the comments with lower score becoming unreadable, which is bad from an accessibility point of view and an odd design choice otherwise. > old Reddit Again - by far the best site when compared with the new version, which has bad performance on both desktop Firefox and mobile Firefox; in addition to lots of dark patterns, sometimes refusing you the ability to view a page if you don't sign in, in addition to nagging you to download their app. It's still bad, though - too zoomed out, can't read anything without zooming in a lot with a phone and when you do, you need to scroll horizontally, which makes reading paragraphs of text a pain. Curiously, they do/did have a version that actually looked okay on phones (i.reddit.com, or something like that), but it doesn't seem to open anymore and redirects to the main site instead. I think that once you go below ~400px of screen width, designing a decent UI becomes difficult regardless of what you do. It's so much easier to mess around with the meta viewport tag and offer a slightly zoomed out version, but even then you still have the challenge of making something usable across multiple platforms, input methods and so on.
  - SilasX 3y ago
    I said that they're fine -- which they are -- not that they do every feature the best possible way. In any case where the initial rendering is bad, it's trivially fixable with your existing browser affordances. On HN, yes, the arrows are small. And you can trivially zoom in whenever you need them to be bigger and more easily select one over the others. This is worlds ahead of mobile-first designs that lock you into one specific view that you can't modify. As I said in the other comment: "mediocre design you can recover from" is much more pleasant than meth-addled design you're stuck with -- which about sums up HN/old reddit vs typical mobile first. >It's still bad, though - too zoomed out, can't read anything without zooming in a lot with a phone and when you do, Huh? New reddit doesn't do that any better, which can fit only a tiny amount of readable text on the screen as well.
harrydehal 3y ago
In terms of keeping it simple, but having a responsive design that covers mobile/tablet/desktop -- do these count? https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system https://designsystem.digital.gov https://designsystem.digital.gov

Hacker News, old Reddit. Both work fine on both mobile and desktop. (Reddit started breaking features like double tap to zoom though.) Yes, on a large screen you might have to increase the size. But a mediocre design you can recover from is better then being stuck with some meth addled designer’s unusable one.

kitkat_new 3y ago
Hacker News YX could be way better though
imachine1980_ 3y ago
Old Reddit doesn't work well on mobile devices at all. While it can scale the user interface, it's designed with a mouse in mind, making everything appear too small. I like using Old Reddit on desktop, but it's not user-friendly on mobile. For example, on HN (Hacker News), it's simpler; there are no images or different-sized icons. Even here sometimes struggle to tap the right links or flags, and I have to manually go to the settings to undo it. I'd prefer this over a poorly optimized mobile UI. However, optimizing the mobile web page would solve these problems.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Rotate your device to landscape and it's fine. I guess part of the problem is sites training everyone not to do that. (Quora's expert designers will happily throw content into the void of the iPhone's notch on landscape, inventing a problem that didn't exist in older designs, despite them having been created before the notch ever came out.)
  - imachine1980_ 3y ago
    Rotate isn't good solution it like saying not open site in full screen open it in half screen o is similar to mobile, I use mobile on the go and can't acomodate bad design whit behavior changes you need too change the design, so people can use it whiout needing to change everything.
    - SilasX 3y ago
      I find landscape easier to use on mobile. I don’t get the hate for it.
jazzyjackson 3y ago
old reddit never figured out how to deal with deeply nested threads without ending up l i k e t h i s
- esafak 3y ago
  Maybe that is a feature: stop when you get to that point.
  - SilasX 3y ago
    Or just load a comment closer to that one.
KronisLV 3y ago
> Hacker News The links are too close together on a small phone screen and I cannot tap them accurately half the time. This might mean the difference between upvoting/downvoting something, or flagging something instead of clicking on the context option, when I don't mean to. HN is pretty great when it comes to desktop, though - simple design, no dark patterns, except for maybe the comments with lower score becoming unreadable, which is bad from an accessibility point of view and an odd design choice otherwise. > old Reddit Again - by far the best site when compared with the new version, which has bad performance on both desktop Firefox and mobile Firefox; in addition to lots of dark patterns, sometimes refusing you the ability to view a page if you don't sign in, in addition to nagging you to download their app. It's still bad, though - too zoomed out, can't read anything without zooming in a lot with a phone and when you do, you need to scroll horizontally, which makes reading paragraphs of text a pain. Curiously, they do/did have a version that actually looked okay on phones (i.reddit.com, or something like that), but it doesn't seem to open anymore and redirects to the main site instead. I think that once you go below ~400px of screen width, designing a decent UI becomes difficult regardless of what you do. It's so much easier to mess around with the meta viewport tag and offer a slightly zoomed out version, but even then you still have the challenge of making something usable across multiple platforms, input methods and so on.
- SilasX 3y ago
  I said that they're fine -- which they are -- not that they do every feature the best possible way. In any case where the initial rendering is bad, it's trivially fixable with your existing browser affordances. On HN, yes, the arrows are small. And you can trivially zoom in whenever you need them to be bigger and more easily select one over the others. This is worlds ahead of mobile-first designs that lock you into one specific view that you can't modify. As I said in the other comment: "mediocre design you can recover from" is much more pleasant than meth-addled design you're stuck with -- which about sums up HN/old reddit vs typical mobile first. >It's still bad, though - too zoomed out, can't read anything without zooming in a lot with a phone and when you do, Huh? New reddit doesn't do that any better, which can fit only a tiny amount of readable text on the screen as well.

harrydehal 3y ago

In terms of keeping it simple, but having a responsive design that covers mobile/tablet/desktop -- do these count? https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system https://service-manual.nhs.uk/design-system https://designsystem.digital.gov https://designsystem.digital.gov