Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images). Some sites exclude information in mobile view. I'm sure there's other reasons too.
Facebook, Reddit and Amazon all have terribly made mobile versions of their sites, for example.
Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly.
Amusingly, I use my phone to magnify the labels for food ingredients to make sure myself or my kid aren't eating problem foods.
It is amazing how many years people live after their 40's and so much stuff is now "hard" and yet no one will design for it. Even when they themselves will inevitably suffer from it one day.
Best are the blogs that have embedded images of graphs or something and they are as large as you can make them (edge to edge). Try pinch to zoom... nope. Tap on image... Here is a smaller version of the image (not edge to edge). Oooookay... Can I zoom now? Hahahhahah....nope!
I've always wondered why sites do this. What's the point of it? What does the web designer get from it?
Exactly my thought. I too use it sometimes, but "always" is a bit too much.
I think it's intentionally bad. They just want to force you to use the app instead. Hence the 5 times a minute "Reddit is better in the app" popups too. Unfortunately the real reason of course is "Reddit can collect much more information about you if you use the app". It's not about "being better". That's a choice, if they wanted to provide a phenomenal web app experience they could easily do so.
I've built responsive sites that work as you'd expect in desktop mode, and I'm not 100% certain how other sites that don't are built.
They seem to degrade into some odd hybrid between desktop and mobile. It's like the worst of both worlds.
So, for example, you get hamburger menus, instead of the full desktop nav. And you get a different layout with an increased PPI, but it's not quite mobile and not quite desktop.
I can only assume that they are looking at the agent string in addition to implementing media queries / breakpoints. But there's also something weird going on with the PPI.
Whatever it is, seems like it takes more effort to create a poorer design.
Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once
There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around. Nice clear typography, easily scroll through items by category, one tap to add to order or to get more details (and often photos) of the dish.
It’s just not an art that every restaurant (and restaurant software vendor) seems to have mastered yet, unfortunately.
I wish more mobile interfaces make good use of that. Instead we have a various versions of drilldowns and poorly implemented search.
Half the time I can't even tell what the full list of items are on a mobile menu.
I can honestly say that I've never seen a good mobile-friendly menu anywhere. I'm not saying that they don't exist somewhere, of course, just that I've never seen them.
I would settle for a single, zoomable html page.
On the other hand, the spatial benefits to such a plane helps people remember where to look if they want to return to a section, whereas with endless scrolling, it's nearly impossible to find something you saw before until you happen upon it again scrolling back up for an indeterminate amount of time.
This makes me think it would be useful for mobile browsers to allow adding temporary scroll bookmarks while using a page. It'd be useful for browsing lots of items, restaurant menus, on a single page, etc.
("that looks good" [bookmark scroll position] ... [keep scrolling] ... [tap icon to return to the previously saved position])
EDIT: At least restaurant menu sites aren't that bad yet. Can you imagine? "Hamburger. Redefined." <SCROLLS> Hamburger slowly pieces together across the screen tied to your scrolling. "We think you're gonna love it." <SCROLLS> Pickles slowly fade in and out to demonstrate the difference between Hamburger and Hamburger Pro
I simply disagree, and think the EXACT opposite.
Panning and Zooming a two-dimensional, immutable file itself isn't tedious compared to scrolling.
(You're straw-manning PDFs, though it could be any 2D image or mutable document file)
This shouldn't be necessary with a well-designed menu interface. Firstly the whole thing should be indexed anyway, allowing easy jumping between categories. And if something looks good you should be able to favourite it with a single tap, or at least add it to your order with a single tap. (If you end up with too many items in you order, consider it a short-list, reviewing the items and narrowing it down from the final order review page).
A real-world analog would be adhesive color tabs people stick to the sides of books or printed documents to mark a paragraph non-destructively, so they can return to that point later more easily.
Think anchor headings, except user-driven, because many websites don't even use anchors to enable linking to page sections by URL hashes, and without inspecting headings for anchors (by tapping or long-pressing on them), nobody would ever know it's a feature.
I wish I could just mark my current scroll position and return to it later by navigating back + forth between the ones I've saved for a page. I've lost count how many times I've made mental notes saying "This is interesting, I'll return to this bit later" only to struggle finding it again because it's lost in a sea of text. Browsers have no way to temporarily bookmark bits of content without developers (or CMS'es) being smart enough to anchor headings and sections.
This, instead of presenting a bunch of items, or only segmenting by category.
In general, the need to navigate the entire menu is reflective of a bigger problem, which is that nobody ever knows what they want to eat for a given meal.
If somebody can algorithmically solve this in a personalized way, that would be a quality of life improvement beyond fixing mobile menu formats.
Matter of fact, give me an app that spans multiple restaurant menus, understands my preferences over time, and keeps track of what I've recently eaten, then suggests my next meal.
But even with that, your experimentation could be guided. And, man, most times I find myself just needing to eat something versus embarking on some great culinary quest. So, more often than not, it's just one more thing to solve.
It also explains why trading UI for pros haven't changed at all compared to these Bloomberg Terminal screenshots.
Sometimes a dense UI is precisely what you need. And the one thing that matters for people trading "manually", clicking on things, is latency: there should be no room for "wait, did the server get my order or not!?".
In a way TFA explains why a restaurant isn't a trading floor.
A phone screen becomes a well sized and flexible canvas, given sufficient dexterity and eye sight.
It can easily be a comparatively tiny medium as well.
It's the same reason we have paragraphs in writing, rather than walls of text. We need tools that help us spatially recognize + remember content so we have a relative frame of reference to quickly get back to something we're looking for.
It's the same reason we have pages in a book -- not just that it's easier to carry a book versus a long scroll of paper, but it's objectively easier for our minds to handle the limited amount of content each page provides, as we get ready to flip to the next. The amount of pages we've read in a book also give us a natural indication of progress.
In a similar way, UIs that are split up a little better give those of us who do get overwhelmed a better way to organize the content we're looking for. This is why the majority of web apps have distinct views dealing with different content and reachable utility dealing with that content.
And pages are pages because that's convenient to make.
And to bring up restaurant menus in another spot, look at that density! If twenty pages was better I feel like we would know.
doing that with a digital menu is maddening. "where's X?" "below Y, no you've scrolled too far", ad nauseam.
Why the sincere fuck must I peck around on a screen for ants when I am paying money to be served?
This is the usual race to the bottom on the market.
Restaurants are one of the few areas of the market where local businesses that are deeply connected to their communities still thrive.
There are plenty of restaurants & pubs near me who recognise me as a regular customer by name. The people at those places genuinely enjoy making their customers happy. It's much easier to care when your customers are living, breathing human beings with names you know whom you see frequently. The same can't be said for McDonald's, but there are places that aren't so soulless.
On a similar vein: Why do I not get a small discount, say 1%, if I go and use a self-checkout instead of going to a manned checkout? The cashier isn't serving me, so why am I paying for his wages?
I am, of course, fine with receiving less service if I am expected to pay less accordingly.