7 ms·

This explains exactly why physical restaurant menus are so much better vs mobile site menus. If I'm viewing the menu of a restaurant on my phone, I always look

• marcosdumay 2y ago
  I love how "mobile friendly" seems to just mean it will waste some space your phone screen can't afford.
  • fbdab103 2y ago
    Plus, if there is wasted space, you can jam an ad in there.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • anal_reactor 2y ago
    I permanently use desktop mode on my phone browser
    • psnehanshu 2y ago
      Why on Earth?
      • nofunsir 2y ago
        Because it's objectively better. I also exclusively use desktop mode, and I can tell when a site's designer can't comprehend this choice.
        • unclebucknasty 2y ago
          >site's designer can't comprehend this choice. I've built responsive sites that work as you'd expect in desktop mode, and I'm not 100% certain how other sites that don't are built. They seem to degrade into some odd hybrid between desktop and mobile. It's like the worst of both worlds. So, for example, you get hamburger menus, instead of the full desktop nav. And you get a different layout with an increased PPI, but it's not quite mobile and not quite desktop. I can only assume that they are looking at the agent string in addition to implementing media queries / breakpoints. But there's also something weird going on with the PPI. Whatever it is, seems like it takes more effort to create a poorer design.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • mattmanser 2y ago
        I wouldn't do it permanently, but I use the feature sometimes myself. Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images). Some sites exclude information in mobile view. I'm sure there's other reasons too. Facebook, Reddit and Amazon all have terribly made mobile versions of their sites, for example. Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly.
        • ChymeraXYZ 2y ago
          > Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images). Best are the blogs that have embedded images of graphs or something and they are as large as you can make them (edge to edge). Try pinch to zoom... nope. Tap on image... Here is a smaller version of the image (not edge to edge). Oooookay... Can I zoom now? Hahahhahah....nope!
        • JohnFen 2y ago
          > Some sites disabled pinch zooms I've always wondered why sites do this. What's the point of it? What does the web designer get from it?
          • essentia0 2y ago
            double tap zoom is annoying. it is easy to imagine inexperienced users getting lost because of it.
        • psnehanshu 2y ago
          > I wouldn't do it permanently, but I use the feature sometimes myself. Exactly my thought. I too use it sometimes, but "always" is a bit too much.
        • wkat4242 2y ago
          > Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly. I think it's intentionally bad. They just want to force you to use the app instead. Hence the 5 times a minute "Reddit is better in the app" popups too. Unfortunately the real reason of course is "Reddit can collect much more information about you if you use the app". It's not about "being better". That's a choice, if they wanted to provide a phenomenal web app experience they could easily do so.
    • EchoReflection 2y ago
      same here. also your username is amusing :)
  • staplers 2y ago
    Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once This is due to accessibility regulations. Apple design guidelines and Material guidelines explicitly state how small font can and should be. Ask any designer you know.
    • cheq 2y ago
      No, there are physical limits, and those are the ones determining mobile screens.
    • nemomarx 2y ago
      My phone has a text size setting, and if I needed bigger text for readability I could set it - why can't we have that conveyed as a user preference somehow?
      • adamhartenz 2y ago
        You just said it yourself. Your phone provides that preference. But a good default is essential, and given to us based on Apple and Googles research, which was probably actually done by Nielsen Norman Group
        • JohnFen 2y ago
          The "good default" should be the default size that the browser uses, in my opinion. The designer of the website is not in a position to know what the best font size is.
        • coryrc 2y ago
          I'm glad my betters dictate what can be done.
    • mewpmewp2 2y ago
      But is it right to punish everyone else because of accessibility reasons?
      • 2y ago
  • ajmurmann 2y ago
    Best are the mobile friendly pages that don't allow you to pinch-zoom while the desktop version does.
    • farkanoid 2y ago
      I'm disproportionately enraged by this.
• kcb 2y ago
  Yea I still don't get how little the mobile web takes advantage of pinch to zoom.
  • abracadaniel 2y ago
    Some sites even hijack the gesture to disable it, which is super frustrating.
• elpakal 2y ago
  Definitely understand the tradeoffs here but you could set your default text size in your OS settings to be smaller to get more volume on your screen.
  • Dalewyn 2y ago
    One reason I personally prefer proper, physical menus is because they are always physically bigger than my phone or the tableside tablet if a restaurant uses those. Why the sincere fuck must I peck around on a screen for ants when I am paying money to be served?
    • wredcoll 2y ago
      Because you're not paying enough to get that service?
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        Indeed. Unless you're some kind of VIP, the relationship between you and the restaurant is that serving you is the necessary dance required to get money from you, to be done as cheaply as possible. You don't pay enough for the business to actually care about responding to your individual preferences; it's cheaper to let you go and for a less preferential customer to take your place. This is the usual race to the bottom on the market.
        • zeroonetwothree 2y ago
          Spoken like someone that has never run a business
          • dylan604 2y ago
            Spoken like someone that has just started to run a business and has not yet gotten burned out from asshole patrons/users/clients that absolutely ruin the experience. In my experience, it is the middle of the spectrum of users to shoot for. The upper to top end expecting so much stuff to be given to them and expect way too much babysitting and pampering at the expense of other customers and give lots of attitude. The middle segment just wants the service at a fair price and to be treated with respect and are typically polite about it. Then the lower end wants the same services at the lower price tiers and complains that there are other things not included at the base price. There's no way to make everyone happy all the time.
• zeekaran 2y ago
  Even brand new restaurants do this, and it's maddening. I also go straight to Google Maps for the menu. The best restaurant websites have the straight PDF of their menu, and automatically visible from the landing page of the site. Don't make me interact with a burger menu and then several clicks later finally get the menu, grr.
  • Reason077 2y ago
    A PDF isn’t a great UX when viewed on a mobile screen. You’re going to be tapping and pinching and zooming to see different parts of the menu, and probably switching tabs back and forth to actually place the order. There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around. Nice clear typography, easily scroll through items by category, one tap to add to order or to get more details (and often photos) of the dish. It’s just not an art that every restaurant (and restaurant software vendor) seems to have mastered yet, unfortunately.
    • nojvek 2y ago
      pinch and zoom is an excellent navigation mode to quickly scan an overview and zoom into what you care about. I wish more mobile interfaces make good use of that. Instead we have a various versions of drilldowns and poorly implemented search. Half the time I can't even tell what the full list of items are on a mobile menu.
      • nofunsir 2y ago
        I agree. It's a difference of O(n^2) or worse for drill-downs, and O(log n) for a pinch and zoom.
    • JohnFen 2y ago
      > There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around. I can honestly say that I've never seen a good mobile-friendly menu anywhere. I'm not saying that they don't exist somewhere, of course, just that I've never seen them.
    • nofunsir 2y ago
• dkryptr 2y ago
  Even if you have the full menu on your phone, you still have to zoom into the menu to read it and pan the view. I don't see how that's any different from scrolling through a categorized menu in a website on your phone.
  • bobthepanda 2y ago
    zooming and panning is often easier, particularly if a website is hijacking scrolls and slowing them down, doing scroll snapping, etc.
  • jahewson 2y ago
    The difference for me is when the menu gets large then it becomes laborious to scroll through a long linear menu vs a rectangular representation of that same data - which allows for much shorter scrolls. Imagine the menu on a restaurant was handed to you on a 4ft long receipt, you’d get pretty fed up of moving it up and down.
  • mewpmewp2 2y ago
    Zooming allows you to narrow in on the content you desire from a big picture point of view while vertically scrolling you just must hope that you get lucky to find what you are looking for.
• bobthepanda 2y ago
  not only that but it's significantly easier to do family-style group ordering with a physical menu. doing that with a digital menu is maddening. "where's X?" "below Y, no you've scrolled too far", ad nauseam.
  • ajmurmann 2y ago
    Dining with a group where only one person speaks the local language fluently dials this up to 11. Lots of that pain will now start already while trying to figure out what everyone wants. Scrolling back and forth to help translate.
• TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > This explains exactly why physical restaurant menus are so much better vs mobile site menus. It also explains why trading UI for pros haven't changed at all compared to these Bloomberg Terminal screenshots. Sometimes a dense UI is precisely what you need. And the one thing that matters for people trading "manually", clicking on things, is latency: there should be no room for "wait, did the server get my order or not!?". In a way TFA explains why a restaurant isn't a trading floor.
  • obmelvin 2y ago
    Dense and functional looking UIs are also prime for any sort of B2B software. It facilitates giving buyers the impression that the software is more functional than something super polished.
    • obmelvin 2y ago
      To be clear, by super polished I mean that something that looks like a modern consumer app is sometimes discounted.
• rsch 2y ago
  For bonus points, some menu web sites also do that on their desktop web sites. I have seen many of them that show like 10 items on a 27″ 1440p desktop monitor.
  • nofunsir 2y ago
    More than "some". I truly think it's time we lose all the whitespace.
    • docmars 2y ago
      I still think it should be offered as a preference to people. Pages and content requiring high cognitive load is difficult for a lot of people, so packing information too densely can feel overwhelming, making people lose their place as they're browsing through content. It's the same reason we have paragraphs in writing, rather than walls of text. We need tools that help us spatially recognize + remember content so we have a relative frame of reference to quickly get back to something we're looking for. It's the same reason we have pages in a book -- not just that it's easier to carry a book versus a long scroll of paper, but it's objectively easier for our minds to handle the limited amount of content each page provides, as we get ready to flip to the next. The amount of pages we've read in a book also give us a natural indication of progress. In a similar way, UIs that are split up a little better give those of us who do get overwhelmed a better way to organize the content we're looking for. This is why the majority of web apps have distinct views dealing with different content and reachable utility dealing with that content.
      • Dylan16807 2y ago
        Paragraphs are a small split and 98% of dense web pages still have the equivalent. That's not a defense for sparse design trends. And pages are pages because that's convenient to make. And to bring up restaurant menus in another spot, look at that density! If twenty pages was better I feel like we would know.
      • internet101010 2y ago
        "compact mode" is what JetBrains calls this option.
• krsdcbl 2y ago
  I think you're missing an important demographic, people with even minor motoric or visual impairments, who'd face great friction when accessing information, if it weren't for technologies that let us adapt UIs to various physical circumstances of their usage. A phone screen becomes a well sized and flexible canvas, given sufficient dexterity and eye sight. It can easily be a comparatively tiny medium as well.
• hurril 2y ago
  Yes. Mobile friendly sites tend to suck because they take us back to WAP and the 90:ies. Even desktop sites suffer from a weird movement recently where all text is unbearably HUGE.
• brailsafe 2y ago
  I usually see a huge menu as a red flag that the food will probably suck. Lots of items or lots of unrelated types of food.