Why does HN require tiny baby fingers to operate on a phone?
A full 3rd or more of the time when i try to tap on the "new" link at the top of HN, i accidentally tap the "jobs" link with my average-sized fingers because my phone wraps HN such that "jobs" is directly below "new", with like 3 pixels of gap between them.
Similarly, the links across each post in the list, along with the near-microscopic "up" arrow, require teeny tiny baby fingers to tap reliably.
Certainly no tiny babies are using HN, so... please, HN, fontSize+=2 for the links! :-D
Ya, it's been said that "it is part of the issues to be fixed in the next UI update" for like 10 years now.
To me, the most annoying part of using HN w/o other clients on mobile is not this, which can be addressed with extra care or zoom in. It's the idiotic decision to somehow think the post text is less important than comments and so the font color must be set to be lower. It's so low that it's unreadable in mobile. For long posts like many show-HNs, I have to just skip reading it until I get back to desktop, which isn't only not ideal, but also defeats the purpose of show-HNs since the ones that doesn't stay at top are the ones needed all the attention and HN is not helping by making it unreadable.
Ya, a simple css color change to match comments' color need to be part of the fixes to be addressed when there's a blue moon.
January 2007. Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone web browser. “And to zoom in on any page, you just drag with two fingers… like this.” The crowd goes wild. Nobody has ever seen multitouch gestures before.
Still works!
I prefer it to most sites, it leaves more room for text. HN feels much more information dense than similar websites like reddit.
I gladly suffer the ux for the information density. I occasionally favorite comments that I meant to flag, or vote the wrong way, but these actions are all undoable. I've never deleted a comment by mistake; there's a confirmation prompt for that.
Your web browser is broken. Well, they all are. Browsers on small screens should be built to browse web pages on small screens. There are seemingly obvious things to do like increasing font sizes[0] and margins -- the browser decides what to do with the content, after all. But such things aren't true solutions when the page is designed for a different device / resolution / form factor[1].
Your problem is with input though -- making elements bigger is a hacky solution at best.
Browsers on touch screens should be built to browse web pages on touch screens.
Touch input events are a particularly poor representation of the operator's intent -- compared to keys, pointing device with cursor, etc. -- yet a lot of software built for touch seems to assume the opposite.
The software decides that the user definitely wants to click on something and it just needs to find which thing.
As all good web browsers know, the extremely precise touch event position corresponds exactly to the (region of the) element that the user wants to click on. This is a certainty[2]. So what if the user tapped precisely on a background element for no reason at all? So what if there are multiple clickable things nearby? The user would have sent different coordinates if they wanted to click somewhere else.
[0] you generally do get some control over this, in lieu of a solution to the problem
[1] and the browser must, as much as possible, style the content in the way (not-) specified, even at the cost of the user experience / accessibility
[2] It is, by definition, without doubt. A fact. A universal truth. A ---
I have wondered if the very minimal changes have been as there's some anticipation that the easier HN becomes on mobile the more likely users would comment while on the go, which may be considered a negative if it affects comment quality (eg: generally shorter time windows to read/parse content and therefore make thoughtful comments about, more challenging on phone OS UIs to write and edit longer form comments).
I'd be curious what the internal stats are for comments made on mobile since I wonder if the stats are already high and whether they show any trend of less highly rated comments.
HN is not backed by a large organization/company and does not have money to employ a few people to redesign the site and make some long desired and badly needed improvements. /s
While you’re complaining about link sizes, did you notice how tiny and close the voting buttons are and how bad the general accessibility of HN is?
In a way, I think all this bad design prevents people from using it too much…and that may actually be a good thing.
If this answer seemed pointless, that’s because nobody can answer this question properly on an Ask HN post. Emailing hn@ycombinator.com may probably get a more appropriate answer.
They're encouraging you to think like a hacker and fix it yourself with either a user stylesheet or an app.
I use a third party app to get around this. Makes the mobile experience infinitely better in my opinion.
Why not simply inject a tiny bit of client side CSS and fix it yourself? True to the hacker spirit.
Lol. That post made me laugh. One of the main reasons I never up/down a comment is because the arrows are too easy to misfire.
Yep, it's tiny. On my iPad mini it's still enough of a pain that sometimes reach for the pencil. On my Android phone, I've noticed that sometimes the text size switches between tiny and not-quite-tiny when I refresh when I'm visiting new.
The accessibility on mobile devices leaves much to be desired.
Even on desktop the text is small, down to 7pt, which leads me to have Chrome show HN at 125%.
When I see both an up and a down arrow next to a comment and I zoom in so that I can touch just one of them it seems the other one lights up as well. At least that is my impression on the iPhone.
So do these little tiny arrows really vote up and down or are they just a neutral engagement signal?
I always intended to look in the code but as it fits this topic, I guess I can just as well ask here.
I don't know. I was over 40 when I purchased my first touchscreen device, a 10" tablet, and I was definitely worried that it would be as the OP described, and I would barely be able to control the thing with my fat greasy fingers. But it worked like a dream, and I was amazed at how accurate and sensitive it was.
I would definitely not enjoy working on a very small screen. I did have some feature phones with screens about 2x3", but those were not touch-enabled.
I currently have a phablet of sorts, a Moto g Play phone, and so it's got a relatively large screen. I have no problems navigating HN on the phone, which I do every day, usually while I eat.
I have learned that touchscreen operation does take a delicate touch, of course. The slightest feather brush of the tip of my finger is enough to activate any link, and no more is used, lest the tap mash three other links nearby.
And I agree with the poster upthread who recommends zooming. Phones have tons of accessibility tools; use 'em!
Smartphones and touchscreens in general have a UX issue: the surface you read gets interacted with directly. So attempting to create a content rich reading surface has this problem. With smartphones it is compounded by the small size of the screen.
You'll see this with all sorts of other mobile UIs that are web based. Honestly, as much of a pain in the ass as it can be, I prefer it to existing mobile UX "solutions" out there, it might suck to pinch zoom on links before I touch them, but it sucks even worse to interact with the majority of mobile web interfaces.
This reminded me of the Game Boy magnifying glass. I might have to dig it out.
I use Kiwi Browser on Android. It's a custom build of Chromium with extension support. I install Stylus and write some CSS to fix anything that bothers me.
Op clearly hasn't seen a 2 years old trying to press anything on a phone. Their fingers might be tiny, but they manage to press the whole screen.
Lol
Try using a mobile browser, like Opera, that supports text rewrap on zoom. It is a revelation.
I only browse HN on my phone, and don't login to comment / submit URLs. I've bookmarked /newest so I go there straight away and don't have to hunt it down every-time and squint to see it. I would recommend using a desktop workstation for interacting with HN for submitting, commenting, upvoting, etc
There’s a good HN client on iPhone called Hack that’s roughly modeled after Apollo
If you are on android, try glider, a 3rd party client from the Play store.
There are a couple addons/extensions that gussy it up.
Materialistic is a good android app for HN
lmao yes this has been an issue for years, hn discriminates against my fat fingers! haha.
I think it’s intended. It keeps ”casual” users from joining. And if it bothers you there are ways to solve it.