Mobile web design: The reign of morons, indeed | Hacker News Reader

Mobile web design: The reign of morons, indeed

jwz.org

217 pointsprotomyth115 comments

I agree with a lot he said there. But I would like to comment on this:

.. it launches the App Store application, presumably trying to get me to go download their custom app. Which is undoubtedly just a wrapper around a WebKit view of this exact same web site, except with more surveillance built in.

Actually the app store version of that magazine uses a custom display view that parses a JSON structure that itself is created by a parsing tool for InDesign files. It's the same structure used by a few other well-known published apps and I inherited that project while I worked at a company called ScrollMotion in NYC. The content package for each magazine ends up being around 500MB to 1GB! Mainly insanely large image files. It does usually include some things like games and embedded videos. But the main reason it wasn't web-based was a requirement for offline viewing. Content is pre-cached.

Just wanted to add that. It was a very early platform and we went on to create a much better one with an HTML5 content creator that could create much smaller packages, but that one is AFAIK, still a legacy app. It's now under the control of Hearst.

So, why does that pop-up still come up inside the app: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6484924 ?

Because, as that post you pointed out says, he clicked a link. That will open a web browser. They can embed links in the content and the app will open a browser just like most apps.

To clarify even further: We used a custom URL scheme that could signal that the content was local. Then they could also use a regular web address if they wanted.

Here's a notion: what if we assume that the entire staff of Esquire is, at varying levels, competent at their job?

So jwz's use case is that he's an inbound link from a social media site, right? So Esquire is optimizing two things here: conversion rate to the downloaded app and amount of time spent on site. The first one is obvious -- people who have the app downloaded are going to spend much more time overall and are going to be more valuable; the second one is a bit trickier, since you play a balancing act between getting users to dive deeper into the publication while making sure they don't leave altogether. In this sort of case, it's pretty reasonable to assume that someone has either the data or intuition to say "Hey, if they're visiting our site from Facebook, they have a pretty big investment in trying to read the article than someone who Googled something vaguely related to the article."

(The same goes true from mobile, where audiences tend to be slower and more captive.)

So, if we understand the series of decisions that led us to such an experience, we then have to ask why were those decisions made? Clearly there's a backlash against this kind of thing -- nobody says "wow, what a great banner ad!" -- but its hard to argue against the financial straits of such a publication. Esquire doesn't have the circulation they used to, and its not a non-profit; they need to make money somehow.

Either way, its hardly fair to pin this on Esquire's web designer. Esquire's management, maybe -- or maybe the legions of people addicted to AdBlock, the legions of people who put a low -- and getting even lower -- value on content.

Now, everything is hinging on that assumption that people are vaguely competent over at Esquire. While it's entirely possible that such an assumption is invalid, I find its a more comforting one than the opposite assumption.

Whatever.

Esquire has a great print experience, but their web one, mobile especially, is awful.

I'm sure their lead print designer gets final say for what goes to press. If their web designer is caving in to every ridiculous demand of management, that's the fault of the designer, not management.

So either the lead "webmaster" has no idea what they're doing, in which case they should get a new job, or they know exactly what they're doing but are hamstrung by management, in which case they should get a new job.

You neatly skipped past the whole "making money" part of the OPs post. Esquire has a great print experience. It is packed with ads. You're just used to it, so you don't care. I very much doubt the lead designer of the print edition can dictate how many ads are in the magazine, or where they are.

The print ads rarely jump in front of the text, permanently obscuring it. It's baffling, but this is a real phenomenon on the mobile web.

It's not just a matter of getting used to ads. Print ads don't jump across the page and hide the text of an article after I start reading it.

Print ads don't have to be physically peeled off the page in order to read the content underneath. They don't cause the pages to fall out of the magazine when you flip them out of the way. They don't cramp the content into a postage-stamp sized corner of the page. They don't inline ads every third paragraph. The ads themselves don't roll around on the page or blink.

There's ads in the print magazine, but they're in a format that doesn't run into absolute conflict with the content.

Its really not, designers in publishing companies do not have final say. The publishers do.

These are established companies with existing management structures. The owners / management controlling the brands will have briefed in a designer to implement all of these elements.

There priority will be leverage the audience of esquire, to allow them maximise the sales they can do via media buyers.

Audience development for sites like these, is often only minimally effected by design. Especially considering these are established brands. They already get the numbers, they dont need to earn them.

Web designers are just the people paid to put the designs together options together for management to choose from.

Those pop up ads also appear inside the esquire ipad magazine app. You subscribe to the magazine, read it on your ipad, click a link to bonus content, and get a giant bonus content blocking ad telling you to subscribe to the very app whose webview you are currently in.

He's not just complaining about there being ads. He's complaining about the site being unusable for reading. If you haven't run into the unclosable popovers on a mobile web site, you're luckier than I am on any given day. If I can't see the article when I first load the page, and if the page then self-destructs behind the popover of doom, I will stop going to that site. There was revenue to be had from me, but not if I know the site is broken.

My argument is that its not outside the realm of possibility that the decision was made -- either via intuition or data -- that the additional value captured by popovers is larger than the value lost by people who bounce as a result of the popovers.

They're getting no value from popovers on mobile devices, so it is either incompetence or insufficient bandwidth to design well for mobile.

you are not in a position to say they get no value from popovers on mobile devices.

For all you know like the OP is trying to say, they might have done the hard math and decided that this is the way they want to say.

I'm not saying it is the best but rather they might be fully aware of what they are doing

> "that the additional value captured by popovers is larger than the value lost by people who bounce as a result of the popovers."

and that, children, is how you know you've lost your soul.

"Do not attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

"...but don't rule out malice."

So you're saying that the entire staff of Esquire is both competent at their jobs and also has implemented a design which is effectively completely broken on the ipad, one of the most popular computing devices of the last half decade?

It comes down to Hanlon's Razor. Sure, we could assume that these folks are all competent. But that then implies that they are, at varying levels, evil. Assuming incompetence is actually the charitable interpretation.

But that then implies that they are, at varying levels, evil.

Or it implies they have motivations perhaps not understood, which was the OP's point.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't say that if something isn't caused by stupidity or incompetence then it must be malice.

No, the dichotomy between incompetence and evil comes from the situation. The Razor is just an illustration.

There are only two choices here. Either they want people to read their articles and are doing a bad job of it (incompetence) or they are luring people under false pretenses and preventing them from doing what they want (evil). There is no third way.

"Motivations perhaps not understood" is just a way of saying that we may not know why they're being evil.

Or they want you to look at ads as part of reading the content. Which is not really how I care to read things, but that doesn't make it evil.

Where does the false pretense come in? The popover crap?

Some anecdata: I just viewed that same article on my phone, an Android G2. Zero trouble. No font-size issues (though I could have upped the font size without zooming in the whole page; I'm amazed at sites that manage to prevent that).

No popover stuff. There was a smallish banner ad at the very top. I apparently got a page designed for a mobile device, because there was no sidebar stuff either.

Could this be an iPad issue?

I just wish that news sites would approach the "get users to spend more time on the site" problem by improving their content so I will read the whole article and want to read another rather than by making it a time consuming process to even start reading.

Yes, they're entirely competent and following exactly the YC/HN mantra: "make something everybody hates".

Never mind "understanding the series of decisions that led us to such an experience". Look at the outcome, for crying out loud.

Nothing else matters.

Nothing else matters.

Lots of other things matter, such as revenue.

>>Lots of other things matter, such as revenue.

Revenue in this case is tied to good user experience, specifically things like how long people stay on your site and whether they click the various links on it.

But you already know that. You're just arguing for the sake of arguing.

From Seinfeld, "The Pitch":

    Russell: Well, why am I watching it?
    George: Because it's on TV.
    Russell: (pause) Not yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofOSlsNz5I8

What if we assume that we are consumers hoping that companies will produce products we want to use? Are we going to be super tolerant and understanding of all the pain their site imposes on us? Or are we going to call them assholes and morons and make it very clear that we can and will get equivalent content elsewhere?

They manipulate and abuse us, we manipulate and abuse them. If we are supposed to be understanding of the self-interested reasons they manipulate and abuse us, can't we expect the same courtesy in return?

The designer isn't to blame here. Its an executive decision designed to hinder use. They dont want you doing something obvious like reading content. They want you looking at all the other pages they have to offer where you also cannot read content. I've found that maybe about 10% of the time trying to scroll an article into view or pinch-zoom I accidentally trigger a click on a link or ad. More clicks! More revenue! Lets keep them struggling to find content and mine all the clicks we can!

This is true, unfortunately. I know quite a few designers who're absolutely appalled at some of the things they're asked to implement. Completely counter-productive and short-sighted. They really do browse their work on mobile so they know exactly what the end result will be.

Yep. Another approach is the dreaded list-type articles that are almost 100% of the content for some sites. You know, articles with names like "Top 10 Cities for Techies" or whatever.

Instead of putting it all one page or even using an AJAX call to retrieve each list entry, the entries each load a new page, complete with ads, etc. A lot of these are butt slow in loading just one page, but hey, they just want those clicks.

So they manage to stretch one lame article into 10 page views, complete with 10x the ad revenue and 10x the latency for the reader. On mobile, this can be even more painful.

Beautifully said binarymax:

Its an executive decision designed to hinder use. They dont want you doing something obvious like reading content. They want you looking at all the other pages they have to offer where you also cannot read content.

They also think: "Wouldn't the world be nicer without these people who want to read our content over the internet."

And they also think "OK the guy who followed the link has an iPad so he isn't among the cheapest bastards of all those who follow links to our glorious magazine, so let's try to make them subscribe."

Anybody has any statistics that supports or disproves the above ideas?

It's up to web designers/developers to take the shitty ideas of their bosses and turn them into something that is at least usable, and hopefully doesn't do evil shit.

The problem is, most developers/designers get saddled with tasks like this, and they think, "I fucking hate that I even have to do this in the first place -- why would I spend another goddamn second on it?" And they leave it the shitty experience that they know their superiors will sign off on.

Like any other job your results are only as good as the pride you put into it.

Fixing your boss' shitty idea is an optional, difficult and mostly thankless job. Getting a boss/client that has at least minimal respect for quality design and engineering is much better for mental health.

I often wish websites would abstain from doing a mobile-optimized version. The many ways of messing it up:

1. Redirecting to the mobile page after the desktop page loads, taking up to ten seconds before i can start reading the content

2. Using some clever swiping / panning mechanic that relies on javascript animation. Yeah, let's build the heaviest ui on the slowest platform, great thinking there.

3. Preventing panning side-to-side and then having content too wide for the page (got this today on arstechnica, cutting off the bars on a benchmark graphic)

4. Asking me to install an app via a popup. On a content-driven site this is never, ever, ok. No site visitor likes this, and it doesn't bring in revenue. It is indefensible.

5. Presenting less content on mobile and offering no clear path back to the full content. Dell does this, i couldn't find out hardware details of their laptops from my ipad. No details, no purchase.

Ofcourse, there are cases where a little attention to mobile goes a long way. My phone operator redesigned their flash-driven website with html5 ... where the primary navigation are dropdown menus triggered by hovering and half the content doesn't load on a mobile device.

That's why I turn off mobile version in my browser.

I feel your pain, and I've experienced some of these problems myself. In my opinion, many of these problems relate to a (poor) assumption that Responsive Design = Mobile Design. So the train of thought is to fit the Old Design onto a Smaller Screen. Instead, they should be thinking about how they can re-design the UI/UX to compliment Mobile, and deliver a better Mobile Experience overall.

Possibly because many designers don't understand what "mobile-optimized" should mean. It often (at least for a content oriented site) doesn't have to be anything other than a resizing of some elements and content areas, easily done with a good layout design and media queries.

I'd comment on this article on web design if I wasn't straining my eyes on that terrible website.

Glass houses = unreliable source.

I had to use safari reader to get through it. This guy needs to take some of his own advice.

This. Complaining about how hard it is to read someone else's website when you use an awful green text on black background is reason enough for me to not take you seriously. It's a Wordpress site, for god's sake, and that is the template you came up with (or chose)? Glass houses, indeed.

It's a design intended to recall the look of the author's original webpage, which has been on the internet since before the word blog was coined.

The man was a pivotal figure in writing the first modern web browser, it wouldn't kill you to show some goddamn respect.

If Jamie's post had been about literally almost anything else web related, I would concur.

There is a difference, I think, between "I find green on black to be hard on my eyes" and "I can't read the content because it is obscured by ads and popovers."

What? Sure, green-on-black may not be your colours of choice, but that's a matter of taste, not of usability. It's not like a grey-on-grey low contrast choice.

I'm not so sure. I consider the colours used on a site to be a factor in how usable it is. I found his site difficult to read, how is that not a usability factor?

Green on black can use different type of green, rather than poisonous lime green on black. Nostalgic emulation of historic monochrome monitors can be fun, but not for reading text for a long time.

I like the brevity of your last sentence. May I suggest saying "tu quoque" instead? It's even shorter.

Today I learned, thanks!

Exactly my thought.

I am sure the author is an intelligent guy who knows his stuff - but I just can't be bothered to read for more than a few paragraphs something that looks so G-d-damn awful. It really is a pain to look at.

> I am sure the author is an intelligent guy who knows his stuff

jwz is a programmer. If you don't know the initials jwz, you should do some research.

On a side note, his site doesn't take away from he facts he presented.

That guy invented one of the most revolutionary ways of looking at things on the internet.

With a green and black blog without any css3, what right does he have to comment on design?!

That's precisely the point - his site is so beyond ugly, that it detracts from his message. He's not talking about programming here - but discussing presentation of visual information. His utter disregard for his readers makes me question his competence in this question.

It's like we had a genius color-blind guy critique a Rothko painting.

> his site is so beyond ugly, that it detracts from his message.

No, not really. It's fairly easy to read. And while it might not be a super design by some standards, it doesn't bother anyone unless you want to be bothered by it. Contrast that with the site he's reviewing, where you physically can't read the content because the site explicitly prevents you from reading it.

> It's like we had a genius color-blind guy critique a

…website.

That's something you should do.

Green on black is ugly. It is not unreadable. Compare this to the "professionals" at YouTube, for example, who actually think medium gray is readable over light gray.

In any case, "I don't like these colors" is not a complaint comparable to "I literally can't read your article without being sent to an app store."

As to why the design is that way, it's a visual reference to how old CRT terminals once looked.

Yah great. And maybe the annoying popup ads are an homage to Peter Max. The irony of reading this rant in green text on a black background is still inescapable.

I completely agree. I find the color scheme very difficult to read. I used to read his blog, but stopped when I realized the green on black was giving me a headache.

What does the article have to do with design? It deals with usability and UX.

On the off-chance that you disagree, why do you think only designers can test the UX of a site?

Ugly personal site != nonfunctional commercial site.

maybe jwz's site is designed this way to keep "looking for ways to be offended" people away?

As much as I agree with what he said, his neon green on black blog style really isn't pleasant to read. I almost didn't finish reading it because of it (and it's pretty short).

But the point stands, don't hurt your users!

(even if you technically have a user/customer differentiation, the customer relationship is likely predicated on you having users)

Yep, a major argument for Safari's "reader" feature. Of course, on these crappy websites that often doesn't work either (because they purposely structured their markup to defeat it).

One of the reasons I love Pocket (Read-It Later) for pretty much every article with substance.

I use Pocket too and I find it amusing that almost every time someone refers to it, they say "Pocket (previously Read It Later)" or some variant thereof.

Does rebranding ever go fully successfully? Maybe it's just too early for Pocket. Also, the fact that they market themselves as "Pocket (Formerly Read It Later)" can't help.

I think "Read it later" was too good of a brand.

And because of how it is worded, it doesn't sound like a brand at all. I believe it has much less cognitive overload than "pocket".

Edit: to add, I see many of the most well-remembered services tend to become verbs at one point or another. So a verb, like "read it later", will probably be more easily successful among all the noun brands which are usually favored.

Ah, the great features Opera had for ages until they dropped everything. Safari adds them and it's all big news. Read a tech magazine recently that was so excited about this "amazing and ground-breaking new feature" that I wondered if they had ever used Opera before.

With that being said, yeah, being able to apply custom stylesheets to websites easily is great!

> Ah, the great features Opera had for ages until they dropped everything. Safari adds them and it's all big news.

Much like everything Apple does, amirite?

> Read a tech magazine

Sounds unlikely.

> recently

Safari Reader debuted in 2010...

> that was so excited about this "amazing and ground-breaking new feature"

I believe you. Really.

> that I wondered if they had ever used Opera before.

Statistically speaking, probably not. Then again, they weren't missing out on much. Unless you like your websites rendered incorrectly.

Hush, go back to your cave.

And hence, the field of marketing. There's a reason why it's so important.

Doesn't Reader automatically infer which parts of the page to style rather than just applying a custom stylesheet?

For browsers not offering anything comparable to Safari's reader mode, and also for sites whose markup it fails to recognize, I find invaluable the Squarefree "zap" bookmarklet[1], which forces black-on-white and also removes almost any sort of annoyance that gets past Adblock Plus.

I don't know what moves jwz to stick with green on black (yes, very retro chic, but we have colors now! Use them!), but his content (writing, whatever) I find at least occasionally of some value; without this bookmarklet, the nearly instantaneous headache would entirely prevent me reading what he has to say.

[1] https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html

So I see two sorts of comments here:

* The article is invalid because I find the author's website hard to read.

This is the ad-hominem fallacy and is not at all relevant to the correctness of his point.

* Don't blame the web designer, blame X

What is the role of a web designer? To design (hence the name) the experience of the user on the web (again, hence the name). The experience on the Esquire mobile site is very poorly designed. If higher-ups request more-visible ads and higher conversion rates for the app, there are ways to funnel this traffic without making the site difficult or impossible to use on a mobile device. This is the job of a web designer.

(If higher-ups are mandating the design itself, they have assumed the role of web designer and relegated the titular designer to simply a web design implementor).

This mobile website is poorly designed. Thus, by definition, it's the fault of the web designer. And nothing is going to change with finger-pointing or blame-passing or the victim mentality so blatantly evident in this comment thread.

  This is the ad-hominem fallacy and is not at all relevant to the correctness of his point.

I don't think it's an ad-hominem to critique design of the site critiquing anothers' design.

It sort of is. If I say George Bush is stupid, and you reply that I'm stupid, you haven't really refuted my point. Though maybe if I say George Bush should recycle, and you reply that I don't recycle, you've indirectly challenged my point by bringing attention to my contradictory hypocrisy. Hmm.

Saying you're stupid for calling someone else stupid can sometimes be a proper response.

I think you have to state why you think the person is stupid and for it to be a valid reason to avoid the response. Sort of like you did with the recycle version of the statement.

Wrong analogy. It's like someone wearing a trashbag telling you you have no style, and someone pointing out that trash-bag-guy has no style either, so his opinion of what looks good is called in to question.

Your second example is a fallacy of circumstance. The virtues of recycling should be examined on their own merits, not based on how well an individual adheres to them.

I can provide empirical, qualitative reasons why recycling saves energy. Does the fact that I chucked a glass bottle into a trash can invalidate these reasons? No, it just makes me a hypocrite. It calls my character into question, but my facts stand apart from that. Thus, it is still an ad-hominem argument.

Your description of a web designer's job is pretty good, your expectations of that web designer's ability to control design decisions is rather unrealistically high.

Of course, you toss out that attempt at salvation by implying that if someone higher up the chain dictates design changes then they become the designer but then I find that just as offensive as the author's original blame of the designer. You are saying anyone who makes design decisions is a web designer and I fully disagree with you there, because you are implying that anyone can be a web designer.

A web designer is not someone that makes design decisions based on anything but design principles to only toss it downward to some peon with crayons to take care of.

We don't know the story here, maybe the web designer is to blame or maybe not.

Plus, the popup is an usability problem, not a design problem.

From my Experience, Good Design and a good User Experience do not always go hand in hand. I've met Designers that were awesome at Designing Stuff, but did not really have any interest in User Experience at all. I've also met Designers that were good at both (which is what I strive for). In some sense, it may come down to what roles and responsibilities you assign to the Designer, how many Designers you have, and how that particular organization works. Generally speaking, bigger organizations tend to have more moving components, which means you may end up with multiple people fulfilling multiple roles. In this type of environment, it's possible that the people involved loose sight of the overall Project, instead focusing on their individual components. This could explain how you end up with a poor User Experience, even with a team of great Designers. Blame it on Management. (hehehe)

> I've met Designers that were awesome at Designing Stuff, but did not really have any interest in User Experience at all.

Those are artists (photoshop pilots, pixel pushers), not designers. Unfortunately the term is so banalized it lost it's meaning, but strictly:

    Design (noun): a specification of an object, manifested by an agent,
    intended to accomplish goals, in a particular environment,
    using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set of requirements,
    subject to constraints

If it's not solving a problem, it's not a design solution. That includes providing the expected/desired experience to the user, which is often the case.

Jwz jumped the shark long time ago. (His site only looks marginally better than Esquire's BTW and all you can read there are rants and creepy things.)

upvoted,look who's talking...

Now if I didn't know any better I'd say you folks are jealous, I didn't see this anywhere else:

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2013/09/hoping-that-the-monsters-don...

Horribly entertaining, maybe you don't like that sort of thing though.

My god, that is probably the best article on processor design I have ever read (though that's not saying much).

You should submit that as its own article (the paper, that is).

That's really entertaining and I was indeed exaggerating about things you find on jwz's blog - sometimes he does link to interesting things but often times it is what it is ;)

The title is a little misleading; Just because one Website has a bad Mobile Experience does not mean we have a 'reign of Morons'. There are lots of Websites out there that have awesome Mobile Experiences, this just (apparently) is not one of them.

But even with this said, I think it's important to note that designing a great Mobile Experience is no easy task. To me, it all starts with the Viewport, which is not necessarily an easy thing to understand. It seems as though the original Use Case for the Viewport was to provide the capability of zooming, presumably to account for Websites that were/are not mobile friendly. Over time, it seems as though the preferred User Experience has shifted to a set (non-zoomable) Experience, which is common with Web Apps. In fact, many of today's common Web Frameworks (example: Bootstrap, jQuery Mobile, etc), set the viewport to a 1.0 scale, and prevent zooming with the max and min scale set to 1.0, and/or an explicit user-scalable=no. So it stands to reason that there are grey areas between the original use case, and how people use it today. This could explain why some of the "Bigger Name" Websites still have Mobile Experiences that require Zooming. But this is still no excuse for the overall User Experience described here, which does not sound good. Just like an App, I believe that Websites (or Website Projects) should have someone dedicated to a User Experience role, which would identify some of the issues raised here, and solve them. When the Advertising in conjunction with the Design makes the Website un-usable, that really is sad.

Coming from working in a publishing company...

It's definitely not the designers fault.

This is purely the result of mixed objectives and committee design. There will be fighting between a publisher, editorial, marketing, sales, designers and tech team.

Each dept. will have a trump card to have there say. Trapped in a false numbers game of milking the most pageviews out of whatever they can. While giving media buyers whatever they need to sell the space to there clients.

The designer will usually have a little or no say in what goes where. fact.

Interesting sidenote: the author invented mozilla (the name), and was a founder of netscape. It might not excuse the hypocrisy of his own blog's design, but I like the point he makes.

Is this becoming a common practice? I've had my own frustrations when I double-tapped content which triggered a giant subscribe/paywall ad to cover everything in my view.

No one is mentioning the elephant in the room, which is that with declining online ad revenue, and now that sites have just about reached the limit of how much advertising they can put on a page layout, they have resorted to "Subscribe to my newsletter" popups, and the one that irks me almost as much, the unmoving bars at the top and bottom of the page to try to keep the user on the site, by providing ever-present links. (Damn you google news,mail,blogger,etc!)

The things jwz is complaining about aren't just a problem for tablet browsing, they are a problem for all browser types.

Just went to look at the Esquire article itself on Firefox with noscript installed on a laptop. 73 scripts and 1 object, that is a record (but I don't usually use Web sites like Esquire).

Does iPad not have a noscript like thing?

You can turn off JavaScript in iOS Safari. Go to Settings > Safari > Advanced > disable JavaScript.

There’s also a Ghostery browser for iOS:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ghostery/id472789016?mt=8

As one who has worked as a web designer and now currently occasionally designs in my fits of development work, I take offense to the first sentence.

This sentence heavily assumes that these decisions were made by a web designer. Or anyone who knows design or usability for that matter.

I can't tell you how many times over my career that I've stated "this is a bad idea" to no avail.

Now this wonderful critique is out there, on a popular blog, that points the finger directly at someone without really knowing if they were the cause of the problems.

'And, to be clear, I then never read the article. Because I know that whatever they have to say will be said better by someone else who isn't such an asshole.'

Here here!

Apple could easily remedy this by denying approval to media apps for websites that offer degraded experiences for iOS users. Problem solved.

Seems non-trivial to effectively enforce in practice. Does not having a dedicated mobile site count as "degraded experiences"? Does having a mobile site that only offers limited functionality count? A mobile site with full functionality, but that takes twice as many clicks to do anything than the desktop version? A mobile site that is technically usable but has large and frequent ads? Or is this only for mobile sites that actually aren't usable, like the one in the article?

Depending on where you draw the line, companies could just degrade their site in the next less egregious way.

That's an extremely bad idea.

Why? Because FREEDOM!?

It funny how many here react to any move by Apple to improve their customer's experience as Evil Incarnate. Maybe Matt Cutts can come by and explain what happens to your website on Google Search when you have a 'download our app' popup.

http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/62902-google-avoid-download-...

How exactly is requiring approval from Apple for your app based on their wishes of what your website should do or not do be considered freedom?

One slight nit-pick: when he says he uses the term "writing" instead of "content" he is talking about two different things. The photo at the top of the article is very much part of the content, and is very much visible. He may not care for the photo, but others do.

Of course, but the time you've decided to hit the close button you've been exposed to all of the ads and esquire has gotten exactly what they want out of you. Hell, if their lucky you try to go back to the site and wait to zoom in and get to see all of the ads a second time!

Except you can't scroll far enough to close it.

The ads and fonts aren't so bad as you can pinch them away by zooming in.

Interstitial and popups are hell on mobile

On a PC/Mac, this is easy enough to avoid by adding crappy websites to your hosts file, pointing them to 127.0.0.1. I do this for Wired and a few others. Or, install Ghostery.

Can you do either on an iPad? I'm assuming no, but I'd love to proven wrong.

Not directly, but if you have a router that runs linux (or has an equiv. to /etc/hosts) you can filter them at the router level.

Ghostery has a browser for iOS:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ghostery/id472789016?mt=8

Here's one mobile annoyance I'd love to see go away: fixed nav bars on mobile.

Here's what Wired looks like on my iPhone: http://i.imgur.com/pvgWa0p.png

Hah! I just recently finished a project where we made the header and footer become unstuck on mobile for that very reason.

Esquire UK recently launched their redesign and has much better UX: http://www.esquire.co.uk/

Perhaps they might apply the same design for the US sometime in the future.

The reason why many media websites are terrible is because the ad/biz dev department sets the parameters. It's a mistake to blame the web designer for being told they have to work in those parameters.

Clicking the link, something made me feel I landed on some sort of obscure hacker blog. I wonder what could have caused that!

By the time I reached the third paragraph, I had to stop reading because of the font colors.

Chrome should really speed up the browser back button. I almost lost my eyes.

This happens notoriously on a Facebook I own. Always popping shit up about promoting posts and running campaigns.

Says the guy with the green on black page...

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