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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 ph
by 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 agoNothing you list is a justification for disabling zoom. You can do all of that while allowing users to zoom.
- err4nt 11y agoNothing 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 agoPlease 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 agoResponsive design (noun): a design methodology to ensure that a website is equally terrible on all devices
- err4nt 11y agoThese 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/
- 11y ago