Ask HN: Have we reached the point where sites need a mobile AND tablet version? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Have we reached the point where sites need a mobile AND tablet version?

4 pointsecaron5 comments

We finally launched the mobile version of LinkUp this week, and since then we've heard nothing but requests of "when will the tablet version be ready?"

Asking this question on SO, you hear nothing but mantras about "responsive design" and "go where the users are." Great points given infinite resources, but if we had those we wouldn't be on HN on a weekend. I had thought that the point of tablet was to make the desktop-experience more portable, but the cries of the masses are leading me to think I was misled.

So to the Hacker News community - are tablet-oriented websites really something in our future?

View on HN

The reason you're getting requests for a "tablet version" may be because (when I tested it out) you're redirecting tablets to the m. version of the site. As you said, a tablet can handle much of what a desktop can, so tablet users tend to be a little annoyed when they are forced onto a version of the site that is clearly made for smaller devices.

I think if you alter your redirection rules to allow tablets to go to the main version of the site, that may satisfy most of your users until you can get a responsive design going.

You'd think - except it was the iPad users that were the first ones asking why we didn't have a mobile version:-) I suppose you can't win them all, right?

Yeah, unfortunately "can't win them all" has been part of the developer platform since the dawn of the internet.

I didn't drill down deep into the UX on the site, but the m. version isn't that bad on a tablet - it's just quite obviously more fitting to a screen 300-400 pixels wide.

If you had iPad users previously saying they wanted a "mobile" version, see if you can figure out what specifically it was about the desktop version of the site that was bugging them. Do the same for the people asking about a "tablet version", and then find a happy medium of the two to start working towards.

Of course you can already predict that a desktop AND mobile AND tablet version is approaching silly, which is why the feedback you got before was a resounding "responsive design". At the moment, that's the closest you can get to "winning them all".

You may not be able to "win them all", but you can certainly piss off everyone by making a stupid decision.

If an iPad user asks for a mobile version of a site, I would assume it would be so that they can view it on a smartphone not on an iPad.

Personally I wish people would get over this fetish for making the tablet version different to the desktop version. If it doesn't work on the tablet you'd be better off fixing your desktop version.

> I had thought that the point of tablet was to make the desktop-experience more portable

Desktops and tablets are designed around two completely different principles. Interaction on desktop is about clicking and typing; tablets are all about multitouch - dragging, pinching, swiping, etc.

As a general point, it saddens me that even tablet app developers seem to forget that tablets have a) bigger screens and b) multitouch. Clearly, new UI metaphors have to be invented for multitouch devices.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com