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Comment by skydhash | Hacker News Reader

> but I could see how they might be alien and uncomfortable to someone that has only ever experienced mobile interfaces

They are different devices. Just because you can drive a sedan does not means you can drive a bulldozer. Or playing piano qualifies you to play the organ. So going from touch and a small screen to keyboard/mouse and a bigger screen, you should expect that the interactions will change.

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Exactly this. The “one UI to rule them all” paradigm has been a persistent, recurring flaw for decades. It probably hit its lowest (to date) with the exhortations to “mobile first design”. The motivation for that was reasonable: conventional desktop UIs of the time didn’t render on mobile. However the ensuing “mobile first” instead became “mobile only” - and consequently wide screen displays with buttons the size of elephants.

Phones and desktops are so radically different that your sedan/bulldozer analogy seems like shades of grey. It’s more like taking a Saturn V rocket to the local shop for a pint of milk.

true, but ~all new users have a stronger mental model of how their phone works vs. big-screen devices.

The solutions is then them building a mental model for the desktop. Using phone strategy on larger screens is a usability issue, because it doesn’t translate well or take advantage of a mouse and keyboard. We went through this with windows 8. It’s a nice idea, but in practice it makes the desktop much more cumbersome to use. It might have a benefit for very new users, but it’s temporary in nature.

i agree, but that want my point. i was trying to point out the rationale behind the root comment to my parent comment

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