Hacker News Reader

Comment by morgante | Hacker News Reader

> Wikipedia is one of the best examples of a site where I prefer the desktop page on mobile.

I actually have the opposite opinion, that the mobile wikipedia version is much better-designed and intuitive. I prefer the mobile version on desktop.

View on HN

I absolutely despise the fact that all sections are collapsed on load on mobile. That means "search in page" is broken and Wikipedia without search in page isn't Wikipedia at all.

That only needs an "expand all" button; apparently that's been denied, though: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T21924

That is an ancient bug report not related to the current mobile interface ("MobileFrontend"). I think it predates that by a year or two.

You have "search in page" on your mobile browser? (My iPhone doesn't have that!)

Chrome on iOS has in the burger menu "Find in Page". That burger menu scrolls.

It's iPhone's number 1 unknown feature. I've been using computers since I was two and it took me more than a year to find this: just type in the search term in the safari search bar, then scroll down in the autocomplete results (without hitting go or enter). It'll come up after autocomplete and history/bookmark matches - and it's been there since at least iOS 6.

Worst. UX. Ever.

Well I'll be damned.

The other one in a similar vein is pulling the search results down (before typing anything) to get 'Request Desktop Site'. It took a while before I stopped having to pause to remember where that was each time I wanted it.

Before this, when iOS had separate search and URL boxes, typing in the Google search box would offer a prompt to search in the page since ... maybe v3 was it? Hence why that moved to the URL box when the boxes merged. Yes, it sucks.

It does if you use the Chrome browser.

Also you can't view the article's categories. You need desktop view for that.

What mobile device is wikipedia designed for exactly? Its such a small and spartan design that it seems like the kind of thing you'd see on an early 2000's site when stuff like Palm and Windows Mobile came out.

Why aren't the sections already opened by default? Why aren't there any images? My phone out-performs desktops from just a few years back. I don't need this super-minimalist wikipedia. I just need something that's slightly more responsive because I don't have the horizontal space to handle all of its columns properly.

> Why aren't the sections already opened by default?

If sections are all expanded, one has to scroll an unknown distance to get to the section one is interested in. If sections were to expanded by default, it would probably be better to not make them collapsable at all and instead include in the mobile layout the table of contents found in the desktop layout. However the table of contents uses anchor links which may be less usable in a mobile context (easier to lose your sense of place, a user's desire to not click links that may load a new page for performance and/or bandwidth reasons).

I agree that an "expand all" option would be a useful addition, I didn't follow the link in another post that presumably explains why one isn't being added.

That's what anchor tags with an id tag are for, so it scrolls to the section you want. Which they use on the desktop but, wait for it, you can guess what's coming here, not on the mobile site...

I feel like I've had so many conversations of this form:

User: This doesn't work on your mobile site, why don't you just give me your desktop site because it works better?

Mobile web site dev: We can't do that on mobile because X.

User: But X is already a solved problem on the existing site.

Mobile web site dev: Sorry, but we need to do a mobile site.

How often have you been able to browse the content you want just by the section heading? They are somewhat informative, but I find it much much faster and easier to scroll through the sections skimming the text and images.

Collapsibility means requiring high-precision clicking, instead of low-precision sweeping of the finger.

I don't spend a lot of time looking at Wikipedia on my phone but I'd have to say I do like the collapsed section design. I rarely want to read an article top to bottom and having the collapsed sections makes it very quick to view just the section(s) with the most promising heading.

> a user's desire to not click links that may load a new page for performance and/or bandwidth reasons

I see your point in general, but even the average user browses Wikipedia often enough to realize they're always in-page links. If only by accident, I hit the wrong link often enough :)

Imo the Wikipedia app is much better, and addresses all those points. I think it's been getting the main development time lately, because the previous app was ancient/broken and so they tasked a team with redoing it. But now it's ahead of the mobile site, which was previously ahead. I'm not 100% sure why they actually need the app vs. just a good mobile site though.

I'd wager most people agree with you, despite the majority opinion you see on HN. User engagement levels have been higher on every mobile-optimised site I've worked on, when compared to mobile users looking at a desktop version.

This might be because any mobile-optimized site that tracks user engagement levels is more likely to be a good mobile site. People on HN don't say that all mobile sites are bad, just that a lot of bad ones are worse than desktop sites.

Wikipedia mobile is probably ultimately slightly better but uncollapsing through all the sections is dreadful.

I'd really like to be able to collapse sections from the bottom of a section, rather than scrolling upwards frantically trying to find the header so I can re-collapse it.

I really hate how the mobile version removes the ability to view article categories and talk pages.

Sometimes I use the mobile version of Wikipedia just so I can read text that's pleasantly formatted with limited line widths like almost every printed or post-1990's digital text. The wide-as-possible lines, which sometimes make me resort to putting my finger on the screen to keep track of what line I'm on, are a ridiculous legacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com