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Comment by andrew_ | Hacker News Reader

The mobile experience is so incredibly bad. Tried to add a markup to the site, brutal time trying to navigate it. Moved to a different tab and lost all my input. Image upload is capped at 5mb; which is under the average size my s10e takes by default.

Great concept, garbage execution.

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Is it really necessary for every website to work perfectly on a pocket sized screen?

Some ideas just work better on a big screen, mouse and keyboard. We shouldn't limit ourselves just to make everything work on an iPhone.

The initial execution was to mimic an excel spreadsheet but as we get more feedback we hope to really produce a better UI and UX.

As I stated; S10e. Not iPhone. It looks like you just reacted rather than reading, but to answer the question in earnest: no, we don't have to make sites work perfectly on every device.

That doesn't preclude criticism, however. Might want to check out current stats for mobile browsing. I've been in web development for 20 years and the numbers continue to go up. So again; no, but you're excluding a lot of traffic, and users. And for a site relying on crowdsourced data, that seems like a poor choice.

Crowd sourcing the data is the only way to uncover the real pricing that happens behind the scenes 3 hours into a dealership trip to buy that new car once you finally sit down at the finance guys office. It happened to me and it's happening in crazy high numbers of interactions. The prices listed online or initially viewed then get bludgeoned by "the mandatory addon and adm" bat once you burned half a day at the dealership and finally sit down to "talk numbers". Utilizing OEM MSRP or posted pricing data I feel paints a more flawed picture!

Start with “I have 60 minutes to conclude this deal [90 if for some reason you need to test drive it]” and start packing up your things at the 55 minute mark.

If you spend 3 hours at a dealer after you’ve identified a single car you’re interested in, part of that is on you.

Yes, I’ve walked out twice. One dealer rescued the deal; the other lost the sale to a dealer about 20 miles away.

ive easily waited an hour just to have a trade-in valued. this is part of the deal since you wouldnt land in the finance office until your trade in is valued.

Doesn’t work when someone else will happily buy it

Someone else will always buy any new car. They are not nearly so likely to buy it from that specific salesperson and so that salesperson's commission is still very much at risk, even if the dealership is at zero risk of being stuck with the car.

At this point it's not preference. A large number of people - especially lower income and young - are mobile-only.

This sentiment has become equivalent to "is it really necessary for everyone to access this?" Buying an entire desktop computer for home use just to cover the fringe cases is now a luxury.

(Not to mention the two primary use cases are reporting and viewing prices on your phone when you are at a dealership)

The old guard like Leo are still resisting the new truth backed by stats. As of Q2, mobile represented nearly 60% of web traffic [1]. You don't need to develop sites with mobile compatibility, but it'd be foolish not to.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/277125/share-of-website-...

I don't think it's resistance, I think it's lack of exposure. I don't interact with people who don't use keyboards and monitors, I only find out about them by proactively looking at stats and user research.

Even though I know better all my products are still desktop-first then checked against mobile screen sizes. It's just the reality of how designers and engineers still work. We should probably get to a place where we have a secondary monitor that by default shows 3-4 virtual mobile devices the entire time we're working.

What percentage of authentic (human clicked, human viewed) web traffic do you think mobile is? It is no longer 2008.

> We shouldn't limit ourselves just to make everything work on an iPhone.

I don't see anything this site would have to "limit itself" by to support mobile.

Thanks for the feedback. It is greatly appreciated! We are certainly after UI and UX experiences!

Great to hear. When I sit down in front of my laptop tomorrow, I'll try again.

We plan to really give it a UI and UX scrub and upgrade as soon as we have some funding. We are operating an MVP right now gathering as many data points as possible and trying to figure out which tasks need implemented first.

Have you considered trying to capture the amount of time it took to get from prospective buyer saying "Let's talk about a deal" to discovering the final price ?

Since buyer's time is valuable, and wasted negotiating time frustrating, having a friction-free non-delayed experience would surely be a valuable data-point to many -- as in "I don't want to use a dealer whose average time-to-final-price is more than 30 minutes."

Great thinking, we will certain consider this as a future product feature. Thanks for idea!

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