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Comment by iamben | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I still very often get "here is the desktop design, here is the mobile design". Depending on who is developing the designs depends how that's going to translate.

I have all the time in the world for developers that reflow the page and remove/adjust elements at different breakpoints (based on the design) between 'desktop' and 'mobile' so the experience is good for everyone. Sadly, most people don't bother.

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I believe true webdesigners are in decline. You have lots of people who do this as a side gig after reading a few tutorials. In a way that’s a nice compliment for the accessibility of the tech, but not accessibility for the end user.

Same with “We only tested this on Chrome.” of sites/apps, of which are there are many, as I can attest, as I never use Chrome.

It's just plain hard to keep up with front-end tech. Most people use front-end dev work as an entry point. They quickly realize there are more sane jobs available on the backend and migrate there.

> sites/apps

I don't think apps are as relevant to current discussion. For apps (not public websites), there are different requirements depending on the target audience.

I wouldn't be mad at a B2B web app being desktop only, no mobile CSS.

But I agree that web apps should still be compliant with safari + FF + Chrome.

> I believe true webdesigners are in decline. You have lots of people who do this as a side gig after reading a few tutorials.

In decline from when? Picking it up after reading a few tutorials has always been a common way to get into web work, and if anything I feel like it's been getting more professionalized over the last twenty years.

Just the general gist over the last few years. I am not saying there are no really skilled professionals, I am just seeing a lot of lower par work from jobs I take over. Plus just by surfing the web and noting the quality.

I’ve been doing web development since 2007, and I’m struggling to think of an era that had more professionals doing front end than we have now. I’m not sure my experience agrees with you

You’re getting better. :)

IMNSHO, more or less the case since they stopped using tables for layout.

Convincing a client to pay for time to spend checking the design and tweaking it in the space between the breakpoints can be more hassle than it's worth.

That said, sane breakpoints can usually avoid unexpected hamburgers on the desktop.

Agreed, Tablet is the only intermediate I consider. The rest is just not worth the time investment.

What tablet? Aren't we talking pretty much anything between about ~500px and ~1200px here? That's pretty much tablet zone...

You caught me, for me that means col-md with Bootstrap ;-)

You convince them in the same way you convince a PM to give you time to write tests for your work: you don't give them an alternative. "You want this done? That'll be 20 billable hours." And your estimate includes the time needed to do work you're willing to sign your name to. When I hire a plumber or an architect, I tell them what needs doing, but I expect and trust that they'll put in the work (and bill me accordingly) to ensure that it gets done properly, even though I don't understand all of the specifics of what doing those jobs properly entails.

If desktop + mobile make up >95% of your audience it's hard to justify the cost of creating a third set of rules for the rest.

That makes sense on the surface, but you should design for all possibilities, current and future.

I learned this lesson the hard way. The client was on desktop. The users were 40% phones. Everything was great for months and months.

Then one day the owner of the company that owned the company tried to look at the web site on her grandkid's iPad. Fan met shit that day.

that's something I don't understand. the Dev tools in Chrome and Firefox make it really easy to test through every resolution without problems. every UI change I make I view in all possible resolutions and its quite obvious of something breaks and I adjust accordingly.

The tooling isn't the problem, time is. Every device and resolution you support takes time and at some point you hit a point of diminishing returns.

If it takes too much time, you are probably doing something wrong like having hardcoded layouts for different resolutions instead of using reflow as much as possible.

Even with all reflow it's hard. Should I reduce a width a little bit more so that it become 3 columns instead of 2 on iPad vertical at risk of having some line wrapped? Things like that.

I like to start on the desktop but build in a way I know the objects will flow. Then I set up a tester with a bunch of breakpoints and check as I go and make micro adjustments to each element that is "off". Then you can set the element inspector to the side and just keep shrinking the screen to make sure nothing is awry as the width gets less and less. I don't really have X sets of 'rules', just elements adjusting at the point it feels right to adjust them.

For my day job working on a UK e-commerce site that gets roughly 100,000 uniques a day, our split is 70/30 for mobile/desktop. Unfortunately within the company it’s closer to 1/99. So no matter how many times I repeat the phrase “mobile first”, the higher-ups just don’t get it. Luckily I can make rational decisions for them!

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