10 ms·

Absolutely not. Disabling default zoom behavior is like hijacking the scroll bar - bad, ugly and puts users off. Also horrible is the tri state or undeterminat

Absolutely not. Disabling default zoom behavior is like hijacking the scroll bar - bad, ugly and puts users off. Also horrible is the tri state or undeterminate checkbox. All of the above are very trendy pieces of 'css and html codes' commonly found on popular DIY web dev sites. *edit: spelling

err4nt 11y ago
I do a lot of responsive design, and I turn zooming off So I CAN give you a proper responsive design that you can read and interact with on a small touchscreen. Why on earth would you prefer to pan around a desktop site designed for a big screen with a tiny cursor when you've got a tiny screen and a massive cursor (fingertip)?
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  How about giving me a proper responsive design, and then still letting me zoom in if your design sucks for me and the text is too small? Not everyone has the same eyesight or the same size phone.
  - err4nt 11y ago
    If zooming is better than having a properly designed layout for the device you are using, how did all the app developers get it wrong? Nearly every app on my phone is formatted for a small touchscreen, and not simply a desktop-sized program on a desktop shrunk to fit my phone screen (allowing me to zoom in and push a tiny cursor around). Form follows function, and so an app designed for a mobile device would look different than an app designed for a desktop computer. The hardware and capabilities are very different. The great part is, with recent support in CSS we can build one site and target desktop users and mobile users with entirely different hardware, and give them a unified experience and layout that's tailored to their device. When they use the desktop it's the same website, fit to their screen and ready to be used with a mouse and keyboard. When it's from a mobile device - all of the same information and actions are still there, just presented in a way that's intuitive and natural to users of a mobile device. If you've ever used a mobile simulator on a computer you'll know how awkward it is to emulate the most natural and smooth fingertip gestures with a mouse. It's clunky! Well trying to pretend you're a desktop with a mouse when youve got a tiny screen and a big mouse (fingertip) is just as awkward and useless. With zooming enabled, every tap you make takes 300ms longer to register because it's listening to see if that tap is a tap or going to be part of a zooming gesture. I design my stuff to look good well beyond normal tolerances for screen sizes, and trust me - I am not your enemy here. I do what I do to give the best experience and if zooming ended with an easier-to-use experience then for sure I would enable it. I do a lot of other things to make it easy for mobile users too: - use tel inputs for numerical entry (mobile users get a keypad instead of a keyboard) - user email inputs for emails and turn off autocapitlize (mobile users get a keyboard with an '@' symbol) - use retina graphics, or render imagery in code for retina and pixel-dense displays - every layout I create works from 300px-1500px, and some of the more important elements in the layout I may get working from 200px-2000px to be certain they will work everywhere. - I use a massive wish-list of fonts that includes great defaults for OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS - I use the least amount of JavaScript that makes sense to accomplish what I need to do (I hate sites that constantly crash the tab on mobile) - I add offline and web-app tags according to the project to help users who may add the site to home screen have the best experience (not all sites are built for web app mod) - I also add in special icons just for mobile users so if they bookmark the site they will have a nice icon as well - I disable text-selection or pointer-events for items that may be errantly tapped on, or to help you be able to more easily select text you are trying to select on mobile. Text selection, copy, and paste on mobile is a magnitude more difficult than for a desktop user So I'm not just disabling it because somebody told me to, or showed me that's how it's done. I work hard and develop, and use these devices, and building a desktop site you can pan around does not provide as good an experience as a properly designed responsive site. I'm a mobile user too, trust me when I say I fight for your experience to be the best there is!
    - DanBC 11y ago
      Nothing you list is a justification for disabling zoom. You can do all of that while allowing users to zoom.
      - err4nt 11y ago
        Nothing in my list was meant to be a justification for disabling zoom. My justifcation for that is: I am a formally trained designer and I design UI properly for the devices and hardware my projects are intended to be accessed with. The other stuff I mentioned were just other examples of things 'from the frontline' that I do to optionally enhance the site for mobile users with no effect on desktop. I design everything with two very different targets in mind.
        epistasis 11y ago
        Please please stop disabling zoom. I beg of you, I have to abandon sooo many sites because they are unreadable because I can't zoom. >I am a formally trained designer and I design UI properly for the devices and hardware my projects are intended to be accessed with. If designers were actually licensed, I think that disabling zoom should be an offense that results in a 2-year revocation of design license. It's so user hostile that it's unacceptable. That you are trotting out your "formal training" in response to user pleas shows that you really don't have many legs to stand on.
        wlesieutre 11y ago
        Responsive design (noun): a design methodology to ensure that a website is equally terrible on all devices
        err4nt 11y ago
        These aren't my user pleas, and these users haven't even seen my sites. We do listen to our users, and there absolutely IS such thing as licensing in this industry: http://www.rgd.ca/ http://www.rgd.ca/
- vidarh 11y ago
  If I try to zoom, it is already a demonstration that your design does not work for me on my device. I would not prefer to pan - if I resort to it, it's because I have to because the site design is broken. At that point you better not have disabled zoom too, if you want me to come back to your site.
  - err4nt 11y ago
    > If I try to zoom, it is already a demonstration that your design does not work for me on my device. THIS! This is how I feel exactly! When you load up a site I do it is as well designed as a mobile app. Surely people don't complain about the inability to zoom in their iOS settings app, or in the clocks app. Why would my site be any different?
    - function_seven 11y ago
      > When you load up a site I do it is as well designed as a mobile app. Surely people don't complain about the inability to zoom in their iOS settings app, or in the clocks app. Why would my site be any different? They have that ability (at least on iOS. Don't know about Android, but I assume it has similar settings). It's under the Accessibility options. Why don't you allow users the ability to zoom your sites?
      - err4nt 11y ago
        I do allow zoom when it's appropriate: usually when I'm either targeting desktop users and don't plan (or don't have budget) to specifically target mobile users with their own experience, or when user scaling of the viewport makes sense to the project. It's FAR better to pan and zoom around a working desktop layout than to have a broken responsive layout, so I only disable user-scaling on sites with a specifically targeted mobile experience where I can deliver a better experience by disabling user scaling than leaving it on. Here's an example where disabling user zoom vastly improves user experience: a tool I built for myself with the purpose of allowing me to test other websites responsively at different widths while using a device with a fixed-width screen. I.E. this tool lets me test websites at different browser widths while on a phone with a fixed-width. http://staticresource.com/speedtest.php http://staticresource.com/speedtest.php Now, if I were to have had user scaling enabled do you think the experience on that site would be better? Clearly not! But on the other hand, here's a chart with all of the values in hexadecimal plotted in a grid so I can understand and visualize the relationships between values in hexadecimal colour notation (like #1166aa). This page is an illustration, and though I do have some crude responsive styles to help it fit on narrower screens, I intentionally left user-scaling on to make a better user-experience, until/unless I decide to go in and give it a better mobile-specific experience: http://staticresource.com/misc/grid.html http://staticresource.com/misc/grid.html Now, if I were to have had user scaling enabled do you think the experience on that site would be better? Clearly not! There's no right or wrong answer for every. single. website. You have to look at how it will be used, who will use it, on which hardware, and what will provide the most value to them. That decision happens case-by-case and there's always a trade-off happening. I wonder if the group of people that can't manage to browse with user-scaling turned off on their modern, high-end mobile phones are the same who can't seem to load any website posted to HN that uses JavaScript because not everybody uses a browser with JS enabled…
- kryptiskt 11y ago
  You are making the world worse, what do I care if your site looks nice if I can't read the text? I happened across such a site when I tried to buy a train ticket from my phone a couple of weeks ago, absolutely horrible. I simply don't get the calculus, people who don't need to zoom won't and they get to see a nice site. What on earth do you win by preventing people that need to zoom from doing that? That they get to see a nice design that they can't use? And that is supposed to be better than seeing a usable site that needs panning? That's insane. I certainly hope your kind of thinking will go away quickly.
- DanBC 11y ago
  You really need to stop disabling zoom. It's hostile to a wide range of users. This includes far more people than those with a traditional visual impairment.
- Lewton 11y ago
  Consider your post score an informal poll....
  - err4nt 11y ago
    Have I been on sites where I wished zoom was enabled? Yes Have I been on sites where I wished zoom was DISabled? Yes The point is, I design my stuff so it feels like a native app. I design my stuff so it is as accessible as the apps that came with the device. Zooming is a feature added to mobile browsers so mobile users have a fallback to view websites that dont support mobile screen sizes, but designing websites for mobile intentionally to make use of a fallback for non-mobile support isn't using the mobile device to its fullest potential? Without zooming, how do you all use things on your phones that ARENT websites? They don't zoom either... If I enable zooming for users, every tap on every mobile device is going to get slower for every user. Is that in the interest of better UI? Do you think users tap more, or zoom more when using web apps? Would you rather fill out a desktop Credit Card subscription form by zooming and panning around, or using a form designed to be input with a thumb where all of the fields are fit to the screen width? I can tell you right now, if I designed our sites like some of these HN commenters want it would be comfy for them to browse and we would lose thousands of dollars revenue. As others have noticed, there are browsers that have a zoom override, as well as bookmarklets and other ways you can bypass the no-zoom thing if you're a mobile user with special needs or who likes zooming. YOU can enabled that device-wide for yourself if that's how you like it, but it doesn't make sense for all projects to be built the same way when the goals and intended support for projects varies widely.
    - DanBC 11y ago
      > Without zooming, how do you all use things on your phones that ARENT websites? They don't zoom either... Yes they do! https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204390 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204390 >> Zoom >> To enable Zoom, use three fingers and double-tap the screen. >> To increase the level of Zoom, use three fingers to double-tap and hold, then move your fingers up or down on the screen to increase or decrease magnification. > If I enable zooming for users, every tap on every mobile device is going to get slower for every user. Is that in the interest of better UI? I do not understand your point.
- jedberg 11y ago
  Even on a proper responsive design, sometimes the images are too small to read (like this article for example, which has screenshots of other phones). Furthermore, even on my desktop I'll use zoom sometimes (you know you can zoom on the desktop too right?) because I can't read something, and it's a lot easier to zoom than to try and screenshot it and then enhance in some other program. Further down you said you've been on sites where you wish zoom was disabled. Can you show me even a single example? Did you mean that you wish the designer hadn't relied on zoom for their page to work? Because that's a very different thing than "the site was perfectly ok on mobile but they had zoom on and I didn't want it on". In fact, if their design was good enough for zoom to be off, how did you even know they had it on?

err4nt 11y ago

I do a lot of responsive design, and I turn zooming off So I CAN give you a proper responsive design that you can read and interact with on a small touchscreen. Why on earth would you prefer to pan around a desktop site designed for a big screen with a tiny cursor when you've got a tiny screen and a massive cursor (fingertip)?

wlesieutre 11y ago
How about giving me a proper responsive design, and then still letting me zoom in if your design sucks for me and the text is too small? Not everyone has the same eyesight or the same size phone.
- err4nt 11y ago
  If zooming is better than having a properly designed layout for the device you are using, how did all the app developers get it wrong? Nearly every app on my phone is formatted for a small touchscreen, and not simply a desktop-sized program on a desktop shrunk to fit my phone screen (allowing me to zoom in and push a tiny cursor around). Form follows function, and so an app designed for a mobile device would look different than an app designed for a desktop computer. The hardware and capabilities are very different. The great part is, with recent support in CSS we can build one site and target desktop users and mobile users with entirely different hardware, and give them a unified experience and layout that's tailored to their device. When they use the desktop it's the same website, fit to their screen and ready to be used with a mouse and keyboard. When it's from a mobile device - all of the same information and actions are still there, just presented in a way that's intuitive and natural to users of a mobile device. If you've ever used a mobile simulator on a computer you'll know how awkward it is to emulate the most natural and smooth fingertip gestures with a mouse. It's clunky! Well trying to pretend you're a desktop with a mouse when youve got a tiny screen and a big mouse (fingertip) is just as awkward and useless. With zooming enabled, every tap you make takes 300ms longer to register because it's listening to see if that tap is a tap or going to be part of a zooming gesture. I design my stuff to look good well beyond normal tolerances for screen sizes, and trust me - I am not your enemy here. I do what I do to give the best experience and if zooming ended with an easier-to-use experience then for sure I would enable it. I do a lot of other things to make it easy for mobile users too: - use tel inputs for numerical entry (mobile users get a keypad instead of a keyboard) - user email inputs for emails and turn off autocapitlize (mobile users get a keyboard with an '@' symbol) - use retina graphics, or render imagery in code for retina and pixel-dense displays - every layout I create works from 300px-1500px, and some of the more important elements in the layout I may get working from 200px-2000px to be certain they will work everywhere. - I use a massive wish-list of fonts that includes great defaults for OS X, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS - I use the least amount of JavaScript that makes sense to accomplish what I need to do (I hate sites that constantly crash the tab on mobile) - I add offline and web-app tags according to the project to help users who may add the site to home screen have the best experience (not all sites are built for web app mod) - I also add in special icons just for mobile users so if they bookmark the site they will have a nice icon as well - I disable text-selection or pointer-events for items that may be errantly tapped on, or to help you be able to more easily select text you are trying to select on mobile. Text selection, copy, and paste on mobile is a magnitude more difficult than for a desktop user So I'm not just disabling it because somebody told me to, or showed me that's how it's done. I work hard and develop, and use these devices, and building a desktop site you can pan around does not provide as good an experience as a properly designed responsive site. I'm a mobile user too, trust me when I say I fight for your experience to be the best there is!
  - DanBC 11y ago
    Nothing you list is a justification for disabling zoom. You can do all of that while allowing users to zoom.
    - err4nt 11y ago
      Nothing in my list was meant to be a justification for disabling zoom. My justifcation for that is: I am a formally trained designer and I design UI properly for the devices and hardware my projects are intended to be accessed with. The other stuff I mentioned were just other examples of things 'from the frontline' that I do to optionally enhance the site for mobile users with no effect on desktop. I design everything with two very different targets in mind.
      - epistasis 11y ago
        Please please stop disabling zoom. I beg of you, I have to abandon sooo many sites because they are unreadable because I can't zoom. >I am a formally trained designer and I design UI properly for the devices and hardware my projects are intended to be accessed with. If designers were actually licensed, I think that disabling zoom should be an offense that results in a 2-year revocation of design license. It's so user hostile that it's unacceptable. That you are trotting out your "formal training" in response to user pleas shows that you really don't have many legs to stand on.
        wlesieutre 11y ago
        Responsive design (noun): a design methodology to ensure that a website is equally terrible on all devices
        err4nt 11y ago
        These aren't my user pleas, and these users haven't even seen my sites. We do listen to our users, and there absolutely IS such thing as licensing in this industry: http://www.rgd.ca/ http://www.rgd.ca/
vidarh 11y ago
If I try to zoom, it is already a demonstration that your design does not work for me on my device. I would not prefer to pan - if I resort to it, it's because I have to because the site design is broken. At that point you better not have disabled zoom too, if you want me to come back to your site.
- err4nt 11y ago
  > If I try to zoom, it is already a demonstration that your design does not work for me on my device. THIS! This is how I feel exactly! When you load up a site I do it is as well designed as a mobile app. Surely people don't complain about the inability to zoom in their iOS settings app, or in the clocks app. Why would my site be any different?
  - function_seven 11y ago
    > When you load up a site I do it is as well designed as a mobile app. Surely people don't complain about the inability to zoom in their iOS settings app, or in the clocks app. Why would my site be any different? They have that ability (at least on iOS. Don't know about Android, but I assume it has similar settings). It's under the Accessibility options. Why don't you allow users the ability to zoom your sites?
    - err4nt 11y ago
      I do allow zoom when it's appropriate: usually when I'm either targeting desktop users and don't plan (or don't have budget) to specifically target mobile users with their own experience, or when user scaling of the viewport makes sense to the project. It's FAR better to pan and zoom around a working desktop layout than to have a broken responsive layout, so I only disable user-scaling on sites with a specifically targeted mobile experience where I can deliver a better experience by disabling user scaling than leaving it on. Here's an example where disabling user zoom vastly improves user experience: a tool I built for myself with the purpose of allowing me to test other websites responsively at different widths while using a device with a fixed-width screen. I.E. this tool lets me test websites at different browser widths while on a phone with a fixed-width. http://staticresource.com/speedtest.php http://staticresource.com/speedtest.php Now, if I were to have had user scaling enabled do you think the experience on that site would be better? Clearly not! But on the other hand, here's a chart with all of the values in hexadecimal plotted in a grid so I can understand and visualize the relationships between values in hexadecimal colour notation (like #1166aa). This page is an illustration, and though I do have some crude responsive styles to help it fit on narrower screens, I intentionally left user-scaling on to make a better user-experience, until/unless I decide to go in and give it a better mobile-specific experience: http://staticresource.com/misc/grid.html http://staticresource.com/misc/grid.html Now, if I were to have had user scaling enabled do you think the experience on that site would be better? Clearly not! There's no right or wrong answer for every. single. website. You have to look at how it will be used, who will use it, on which hardware, and what will provide the most value to them. That decision happens case-by-case and there's always a trade-off happening. I wonder if the group of people that can't manage to browse with user-scaling turned off on their modern, high-end mobile phones are the same who can't seem to load any website posted to HN that uses JavaScript because not everybody uses a browser with JS enabled…
kryptiskt 11y ago
You are making the world worse, what do I care if your site looks nice if I can't read the text? I happened across such a site when I tried to buy a train ticket from my phone a couple of weeks ago, absolutely horrible. I simply don't get the calculus, people who don't need to zoom won't and they get to see a nice site. What on earth do you win by preventing people that need to zoom from doing that? That they get to see a nice design that they can't use? And that is supposed to be better than seeing a usable site that needs panning? That's insane. I certainly hope your kind of thinking will go away quickly.
DanBC 11y ago
You really need to stop disabling zoom. It's hostile to a wide range of users. This includes far more people than those with a traditional visual impairment.
Lewton 11y ago
Consider your post score an informal poll....
- err4nt 11y ago
  Have I been on sites where I wished zoom was enabled? Yes Have I been on sites where I wished zoom was DISabled? Yes The point is, I design my stuff so it feels like a native app. I design my stuff so it is as accessible as the apps that came with the device. Zooming is a feature added to mobile browsers so mobile users have a fallback to view websites that dont support mobile screen sizes, but designing websites for mobile intentionally to make use of a fallback for non-mobile support isn't using the mobile device to its fullest potential? Without zooming, how do you all use things on your phones that ARENT websites? They don't zoom either... If I enable zooming for users, every tap on every mobile device is going to get slower for every user. Is that in the interest of better UI? Do you think users tap more, or zoom more when using web apps? Would you rather fill out a desktop Credit Card subscription form by zooming and panning around, or using a form designed to be input with a thumb where all of the fields are fit to the screen width? I can tell you right now, if I designed our sites like some of these HN commenters want it would be comfy for them to browse and we would lose thousands of dollars revenue. As others have noticed, there are browsers that have a zoom override, as well as bookmarklets and other ways you can bypass the no-zoom thing if you're a mobile user with special needs or who likes zooming. YOU can enabled that device-wide for yourself if that's how you like it, but it doesn't make sense for all projects to be built the same way when the goals and intended support for projects varies widely.
  - DanBC 11y ago
    > Without zooming, how do you all use things on your phones that ARENT websites? They don't zoom either... Yes they do! https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204390 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT204390 >> Zoom >> To enable Zoom, use three fingers and double-tap the screen. >> To increase the level of Zoom, use three fingers to double-tap and hold, then move your fingers up or down on the screen to increase or decrease magnification. > If I enable zooming for users, every tap on every mobile device is going to get slower for every user. Is that in the interest of better UI? I do not understand your point.
jedberg 11y ago
Even on a proper responsive design, sometimes the images are too small to read (like this article for example, which has screenshots of other phones). Furthermore, even on my desktop I'll use zoom sometimes (you know you can zoom on the desktop too right?) because I can't read something, and it's a lot easier to zoom than to try and screenshot it and then enhance in some other program. Further down you said you've been on sites where you wish zoom was disabled. Can you show me even a single example? Did you mean that you wish the designer hadn't relied on zoom for their page to work? Because that's a very different thing than "the site was perfectly ok on mobile but they had zoom on and I didn't want it on". In fact, if their design was good enough for zoom to be off, how did you even know they had it on?