Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by ronyfadel | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

ronyfadel

This “well designed” page is so hard to read on mobile

View on HN

To be fair, it's from 2012, so it's missing out on a literal decade of mobile web design.

Even then, it's over designed? Is that a thing? Kind of like an over produced song.

But one of the design principles is "Long Lasting"

"It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society."

The units conversion app shown on the page is particularly pretentious and poorly aligned with user needs. Everything about it is there to say "look at me" and "see how fashionable I am in the eyes of 2008 tech fashion." None of it is there to make the app easy or fast to interact with, nor is any of it there to make the results of the units conversion easy to read or use. The fact that the page designer chose this image to explain what good design is lays bare that the emperor truly has no clothes here.

In terms of aesthetic choices, I think the design does hold up quite well.

In 2011, 6% of internet traffic was mobile, compared to 56% in 2021 (according to the first Google result I clicked)

I wouldn't say not having a mobile-responsive design back then was entirely a design failure. I recall in the early days of smartphones, the vision for mobile browsers was they were "desktop class" and would display pages exactly like how they are on desktop. Look at Steve Jobs' original Safari demo during the iPhone reveal. Everyone was blown away by the full desktop experience of The New York Times and Amazon. This website was a few years into the iPhone revolution, but it was early enough into the mobile responsiveness era that I don't think it takes away from their point. The current design could be adapted to a mobile responsive page without needing an overhaul of the existing design language.

I agree with most of what you said but the iPhone was released in 2007. This was released in 2011.

Yeah, the "mobile-first" movement didn't happen overnight—and ironically, because of Steve's influence, it took the longest for people who latched on to the ethos behind the original iPhone Safari. Just look at Gruber—Daring Fireball still isn't mobile-optimized.

4 years is not overnight.

And Gruber's CSS has more to do with his obsessive to a paralyzing degree nature, than to sticking to whatever was said in a keynote 15 years ago.

Besides, double tapping a paragraph zooms into what becomes a good reading experience on mobile. It’s that dangerous “good enough”.

He obviously should update his site and ditch Verdana, we have better fonts and screens this days. But, if anything, it’s a testament of how good the original design was that it stood the test of time and what was designed for IE5/6 on 800x600px screen is still good on an iPhone 12.

And we’re all using this orange website that was definitively not conceived as mobile first. More like mobile barely.

Eh, it took the mobile web until at least 2014 to get some momentum. As someone who was designing websites in this era, 2011/2012 was still the early days. "Smartphones" were still trickling out to the general population. A mobile-friendly site was considered a "nice-to-have." The screens were so much smaller back then—it was reasonable to assume people would jump to a laptop/desktop to read a longer article like this.

I don't know what's going on with Gruber—at this point it feels like he's made an almost religious choice to never add another line of CSS. LOL

I was there too, I’ve been designing for the web since 1998. I was very much selling mobile websites in 2011. Probably delivering special purpose CSS through user agent inspection, but still.

Something that is long lasting can be a bit dated by the time it's ten years old, given how fast tech can move.

Yes! Dieter Rams came up with those 10 principles, but I doubt he still listens to music with the wall-mounted reel-to-reel tape player he designed (though it's still beautiful).

In fact, the reel-to-reel probably felt dated within much less than 10 years.

To be fair, it's hard on a desktop too, and with JS off the diagrams are hidden. I've clicked mostly to ensure that yet another website dedicated to design has a bad design.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com