Hacker News Reader

Comment by crysin | Hacker News Reader

In my experience its more about the screen real-estate more than the ability to use one hand to navigate a phone that drives people to upgrade their phones to the phablet sizes. People don't seem to care that they can't reach everything on their screen with just their thumb.

View on HN

This is especially made clear by app designers who hide all the UI elements of the app in the corners of the screen. If they were truly concerned with ergonomics AT ALL, they would adopt accessibility models such as this - https://medium.com/@mibosc/mobile-ui-ergonomics-how-hard-is-...

I’d _love_ to see an updated version of the linked article.

iOS 13 makes improvements to this, with modal popups showing in a "card" style that can be swiped down to dismiss (as long as you're at the top of any scrolling content).

That the "Done" buttons in an upper toolbar have persisted for so long after they were reachable is a bit embarrassing. It was a great design for the original 3.5" iPhone screen, started to get iffy on the 4" iPhone 5 depending on how big your hands are, and has been stupid since the iPhone 6 in 2014.

There's still other buttons up there, but you can get away without them more often than before. I guess the concession is that phones are assumed to be two handed devices now, which I think is unfortunate. If I want to two-hand something I have an iPad for that. Give me a one-handed phone with the same camera as the flagship. RIP iPhone SE.

More on the popover cards here (EDIT better link): https://medium.com/@hacknicity/view-controller-presentation-...

Don't people know you can double tap the home button and it will move the screen halfway down so you can reach the top buttons? I have no problem using my iPhone 8 one handed using that:

https://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/973834

I always forget my rarely-used magical gestures/presses. I've had a 7+ for a good long while but only ever trigger that by accident. Couldn't have told you how to do it. Ditto Apple Pay.

[EDIT] I think part of why I haven't made it part of my normal use of the phone is that the shift-from-normal-one-handed-grip-to-double-press-home-then-back-again maneuver is risky (of dropping it) enough I'd shy away from it and just use two hands.

I tried that in an Apple Store with an iPhone X and still couldn't reach the top toolbar buttons. Maybe I have stubby thumbs.

True. I would imagine that people who use phones for gaming and video would really benefit from a bigger screen, but I don't do a ton of either of those on my phone anymore.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com