Hacker News Reader

Comment by mullsork | Hacker News Reader

HN is a bad example seeing as the maintainers refuse to put in the small amount of effort it would take to make it work decently on mobile.

View on HN

I think it's a pretty good example. While site designers should take care to make their stuff look good on small screens, the devices with small screens should also allow users to make adjustments for when the designer didn't do this (or they did, but the user has special requirements). Mobile Safari doesn't even have a text size adjustment, for example. This is madness!

The sad thing is, they fixed this a while ago with a stylesheet that adjusted the page width and text size to fit your display, but reverted it after a bunch of people whined hard.

Regardless, OP should have thought about the site he's posting on.

I think the way conversations thread would be pretty hard to do comfortably on mobile

Reddit manages OK. I wonder what level of petitioning would be required to get the admins to fix HN? Or are all the cool kids using an app which avoids this problem?

Which version of Reddit? Reddit, Reddit Mobile, or Reddit Mobile Beta?

https://reddit.com/.compact is the one I use.

That's no reason not to try. There are always ways to improve.

I agree. I think there are two distinct usability issues to address: content size and font size. That is, how much real estate the virtual viewport occupies in proportion to the display AND the size of font relative to the reader's ability to read comfortably. The trick is sensible adjustments to style attributes to keep layout working properly on the vast majority of devices no matter the zoom level or default font size, within reason.

As a user example, when I load the HN front-page on an iOS device in portrait mode, I'm lazy and switch to rotate to landscape mode to see more without trimming edges and scrolling around. On most sites, I expect to be able to double-tap on a paragraph column to toggle maximize-fit-to-display-width mode and return regular all-content-on-display-width mode.

If some site prevents this, I will not buy their products or use their services, because it's a signal they don't care about usability and will inevitably waste people's time. That's a form of laziness and failure that should not be rewarded. There are usually competitors that want you to switch to their brand (except with govts). Those annoying jQuery Mobile one-sized-fits-all sites deployed by pharmacies, banks, govts and so on.

At least pinch-zoom is functional.

Functional, but not usable (as you have to scroll a bunch of times to read each line).

That depends on your browser.

Yes, I see Chrome has a reasonable default width, whereas the stock android browser is pretty much unusable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com