# Mobile phones are fucking up websites



## ska invita (Dec 18, 2014)

So the Guardian has a new web design and i think its awful - aside from ditching red for tory blue its far less clear than it was before

then theres our very own lovely winterval forum. except it isnt lovley any more as all the decorations have been taken down.

what do these two things have in common? both have happened so as to make internet-mobile phone users happy

should start by saying i dont have an internet phone.

there was absolutely no problem with the winterval site on a laptop or a desktop, nor was there with the guardian site.

specifics aside this whole thing is philistinism!! computer progress is meant to be moving forward into greater copmlexity not backwards! everything is getting reduced so its fits on peoples tiny phones and us PROPER computer users have to suffer.

I think you get where im coming from. anyone agree with me?

i never did like smart phones, but live and let live, but now youve gone and ruined it for the rest of us 

(i dont like tablets either )


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## ska invita (Dec 18, 2014)

id be interested to hear what professional website designers think - are you being increasingly told to build shit websites to placate phone users?


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## ohmyliver (Dec 18, 2014)

I know there's been a shift to responsive design (i.e. websites which change layout/sizes according to the resolution used to view them, usually with 3 breakpoints - mobile - tablet -desktop) to cater for different viewports like mobile browsers (a good example is this very bb, if you change the browser size so that it's long and thin you'll see the lay out change). 

But given that an ever increasing percentage of people are using mobiles to access the web, that's a much better solution than making often poorly implemented m.(url) sites, and redirecting to that according to things like the user-agent string sent by the browser. 

If responsive design is implemented correctly it's actually a reduction of overall complexity as it should* (dependant on good design/front end code/backend code/qa to catch issues, obviously) result in a better site for all.  It's certainly *much* better than having a specific site for mobiles and redirecting mobile users there.


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## ska invita (Dec 18, 2014)

yeah it would be nice if a happy medium could be found for everyone - i just fear mobile is taking precedent, and that feels increasingly backward


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## ohmyliver (Dec 18, 2014)

Responsive design *is* that happy medium.  It's implementation is very dependant on the skills of the people involved though. 

I think that mobile is/will increasingly take precedent though.  And unless you can stop an increasing number of people using their phones to access the 'net then that's as it should be.  For example Facebook started having more page views via mobile device than computer about 2 years ago.

It's obviously dependant on the site/type of site though.  But for mass-market sites like The Guardian, it probably makes sense for them to design for mobile/tablet devices first and desktop second, rather than the reverse.  I obviously am saying that without the advantage of being able to say what percentage of their users use tablets/mobiles, but I think it's probably an ever increasing percentage.


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## 8ball (Dec 18, 2014)

ska invita said:


> yeah it would be nice if a happy medium could be found for everyone - i just fear mobile is taking precedent, and that feels increasingly backward


 
Backwards is the new forwards.  Apparently they're considering a manned mission to the moon in 15 years or so...


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## Fez909 (Dec 18, 2014)

ska invita said:


> So the Guardian has a new web design and i think its awful - aside from ditching red for tory blue its far less clear than it was before
> 
> then theres our very own lovely winterval forum. except it isnt lovley any more as all the decorations have been taken down.
> 
> ...


I agree with most of what you've said and have thought about making a similar thread myself in the past, though just about shit web design rather than mobiles being the cause. I think they make things worse, but it's not mobile's fault totally.

However, I reckon the bit I've bolded is completely wrong. Complexity is something that should be avoided wherever possible. Simplicity is the goal, and by building simple things we can combine them to do difficult actions. Difficult is often a result of complexity, so by simplifying we avoid difficulty, which is the true aim, surely?


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## 8ball (Dec 18, 2014)

Fez909 said:


> Simplicity is the goal, and by building simple things we can combine them to do difficult actions. Difficult is often a result of complexity, so by simplifying we avoid difficulty, which is the true aim, surely?


 
Beginning to go a bit Zen there.


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## Lazy Llama (Dec 18, 2014)

ska invita said:


> then theres our very own lovely winterval forum. except it isnt lovley any more as all the decorations have been taken down.
> ....
> there was absolutely no problem with the winterval site on a laptop or a desktop, nor was there with the guardian site.


Which decorations have been taken down? 
We changed the Green Xmas Tree for the winner of the banner competition, but that's all.

There's still snow falling and hats on the avatars etc....


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## ska invita (Dec 18, 2014)

Fez909 said:


> --However, I reckon the bit I've bolded is completely wrong. Complexity is something that should be avoided wherever possible. Simplicity is the goal, and by building simple things we can combine them to do difficult actions. Difficult is often a result of complexity, so by simplifying we avoid difficulty, which is the true aim, surely?


yes agree - good design is always about functionality and ease of use, but what i meant by complexity was the ability to do more things, not less...like have xmas decorations up on our xmas forum <complex shit like that


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## ska invita (Dec 18, 2014)

Lazy Llama said:


> Which decorations have been taken down?
> We changed the Green Xmas Tree for the winner of the banner competition, but that's all.
> 
> There's still snow falling and hats on the avatars etc....


wasnt there other stuff that people complained about making it unusable? 
something looks different 
im doubting myself now


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## Lazy Llama (Dec 18, 2014)

ska invita said:


> wasnt there other stuff that people complained about making it unusable?
> something looks different
> im doubting myself now


Last year there were issues with the snow but the latest version doesn't show snow falling on mobile devices.


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## ska invita (Dec 18, 2014)

i refuse to let facts get in the way on this!
(ah, i was reading last years thread which some bastard bumped! blaming hipipol)


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## weltweit (Dec 18, 2014)

I used to do responsive websites years ago, they responded to the browser width rather like Urban does at the moment, they also featured all A4 (or US Letter) printable pages.


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## FridgeMagnet (Dec 18, 2014)

"Mobile first" is a design principle that's increasingly gaining ground in, say, media and social site design, but... it can mean a lot of things (as can "responsive"). In the end it depends on the skill of the designers and lots of them can't make bloody sites for desktop, let alone incorporate mobile.

Concepts like responsiveness and the awareness of radically different browsing environments are intrinsically good for the web, though. The fact that people are starting to have to pay attention means that they may eventually stop designing sites like they were magazines and starting looking at them as applications that deliver information, paying attention to UX and using more semantic code. It makes it much harder to stick to traditional "move it three pixels to the left" stuff. (This is me as a developer not being at all bitter about being handed JPEGs by web-illiterate "designers" and told "right that's the design all you have to do is implement it".)


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## mod (Dec 18, 2014)

ska invita said:


> id be interested to hear what professional website designers think - are you being increasingly told to build shit websites to placate phone users?



Yes and you start with the mobile design (landscape and portrait) first, then tablet and finally your design for a desktop PC/mac. Website design has become a much much more laborious process now but when its done well it looks good. site designs now tend to be 'very' simple and clear and its harder to get a design that looks individual imo. 

Apple mobile and tablet devices don't support flash either and animations are now done 'in browser' using htlm5/jquery and css3. The industry have really changed in the last few years.


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## Kid_Eternity (Dec 21, 2014)

The new Guardian website is fucking awesome! Very nice rwd!


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## contadino (Dec 22, 2014)

I generally only deal with microbusinesses but the responsiveness of their sites is something I have to drive. Otherwise it's just an afterthought.

Personally I don't think it is small screens that are the issue as they can be dealt with quite easily. It's things like losing hover states on touch screens and poorly implemented standards (by Apple usually nowadays) that mean that I can't do slick stuff on sites.


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## ska invita (Feb 13, 2015)

Having abandoned the Guardian website ive taken to looking elsewhere for morning headlines...desperation has even made me have a look at New Statesman -wont be going back but did have a peak. Boring above all else. Could do with a young dynamic commentator 

Anyhow the top upvoted comment on a story about who was running to be new Guardian editor tickled me:


> ... the architect of the Guardian website's redesign, Wolfgang Blau ...[quoted from the story]
> 
> I was wondering how some nerdy twit took over the design and wrecked it. The Guardian was a superb example of world class design and now it's breaking all the basic tried and trusted rules of webdesign.
> *Which is why I'm here.*
> Let's hope this Blau idiot doesn't get a look in and someone gets in who will clean up the mess.


im not the only one.......


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## Fez909 (Jan 2, 2016)

Great article on the current state of the web (a mess) here: The Website Obesity Crisis


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## bi0boy (Jan 2, 2016)

I was looking at this site yesterday on my PC and noticing how shit it was due to being designed for a phone.

More sites should be like this


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## mauvais (Jan 2, 2016)

bi0boy said:


> I was looking at this site yesterday on my PC and noticing how shit it was due to being designed for a phone.
> 
> More sites should be like this


As far as it goes from a mobile browser perspective, and probably for desktop too, the latter is a terrible piece of design, if you can even call it that, and the former is, err, quite good.


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## weltweit (Jan 2, 2016)

The reason Urban is good for different media is because you can easily resize the text depending on your device / eyesight. Customisation. On a PC I prefer it slightly enlarged as I find it easier to read. I expect mobile users can also adjust size to suit them.


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## weltweit (Jan 2, 2016)

And I was quick to critique the new BBC layout which is predominantly Mobile targeted because on a PC is looks dumbed down. I still don't really like it on a PC and as a result I use it less now.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 2, 2016)

mauvais said:


> As far as it goes from a mobile browser perspective, and probably for desktop too, the latter is a terrible piece of design, if you can even call it that, and the former is, err, quite good.


Plus one. The U of B site is how things should be done, and the second one is basically fucking dreadful; tables, iframes, SHTML ("[an error occurred while processing this directive]" is so retro) etc.


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## two sheds (Jan 2, 2016)

mauvais said:


> As far as it goes from a mobile browser perspective, and probably for desktop too, the latter is a terrible piece of design, if you can even call it that, and the former is, err, quite good.



Not if you want information quickly, though, which I normally do. I hate fucking scrolling down through huge images (like bbc and now itv PlayItAgain menus) to get what I want because some designer thinks it looks like a design classic. 

Agreed the second website looks shite, but a lot of that is the reversed out, too small text. They possibly need one extra level to group similar topics together but that one tells  you exactly what's available and where to get it. 

The first one is what happens when you let designers loose on sites insisting they need to consider what the people they're designing the site for want.


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## Fez909 (Jan 2, 2016)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Plus one. The U of B site is how things should be done, and the second one is basically fucking dreadful; tables, iframes, SHTML ("[an error occurred while processing this directive]" is so retro) etc.


Did you read the article I posted? I'm not sure where I fall on the form vs functionality thing but he's right on page bloat.

That UoB page is 2mb. Granted it loads practically instantly on a modern internet connection, but at 2mb, that's a hefty chunk of someone's 500mb mobile data allowance.

Let's say you look around the site a bit. It's another 1mb after you've click on research, then another 1mb to click on "research areas".

So you're now 5mb in and you're only at a menu of research topics that the university engages in.

Clicking on "Centre for War Studies" takes another 1.5mb and then you're at another menu...with another 0.5mb needed to see what kind of research they do in this department.

7mb to get to where you need to be. If you click the wrong link(s), it's going to be 0.5-1.5mb per page clicked. As well as being a shitload of data, that's gonna take a while, even on 4g. ~20s downloading, and the time navigating between the pages. Not great.


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 2, 2016)

If I was in an interview?

 
okay let's just start here, no

 
the page structure is a table, no, fucking no you 90s rejects

 
no wait not only have you used a nested table you've also used LI tags _without even putting them inside a list_.

...I'm getting too angry. It's web dogshit. Sorry.


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## Teenage Cthulhu (Jan 2, 2016)

What happened to useit.com?


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## FridgeMagnet (Jan 2, 2016)

Fez909 said:


> Did you read the article I posted? I'm not sure where I fall on the form vs functionality thing but he's right on page bloat.
> 
> That UoB page is 2mb. Granted it loads practically instantly on a modern internet connection, but at 2mb, that's a hefty chunk of someone's 500mb mobile data allowance.
> 
> ...


It's all images. Yes, images need to be smaller; I fight people all the time about this. But that's not the major problem; even if that's removed, several meg of irregularly loading advertiser javascript will kill a page, and we all know we have to have that uh huh.


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## Epona (Jan 2, 2016)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Plus one. The U of B site is how things should be done, and the second one is basically fucking dreadful; tables, iframes, SHTML ("[an error occurred while processing this directive]" is so retro) etc.



Actually there is one major flaw in the U of B site - the first thing you see when the page loads is text on top of a photo, with a hard line (formed by where the building meets the ground in the photo) right through the middle of a line of superimposed text - which is utterly fucking dreadful for anyone who has a visual impairment, and should have been spotted and changed for reasons of accessibility.


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## Brainaddict (Jan 2, 2016)

FridgeMagnet said:


> Plus one. The U of B site is how things should be done, and the second one is basically fucking dreadful; tables, iframes, SHTML ("[an error occurred while processing this directive]" is so retro) etc.


I'm not defending that second one, but what's good about the U of B site? As bioboy says, the front page contains almost no information and is unlikely to get you where you want to go. You have to scroll down four screen's worth of images to see a handful of links. It may be in fashion (and haven't I noticed it's in fashion - I see designs like that everywhere, like dogpoo) but I don't see what's good about it. The fashion will change in a year or so and people will laugh at this stuff. It offers a very poor user experience, and hopefully some good A/B testing and user surveys will weed out this info-light dross fairly quickly. Or maybe it is what people want, but they also want The Great British Bake-off. You can't trust people.


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## two sheds (Jan 2, 2016)

Brainaddict said:


> Or maybe it is what people want, but they also want The Great British Bake-off. You can't trust people.



Sites need a setting "I like unnecessary fucking mouse scrolls and clicks Y/N"

I think it's down to designers wanting to give a unique customer experience I don't want a fucking customer experience i want to get to what I want quickly thank you.


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## Epona (Jan 3, 2016)

I have lived in Newham since 2001, but am still trying to fathom out how to find anything I may need to look at on their nicely designed pretty website (yes, it looks great but I can't fucking find anything on it)- and just recently they removed the 'add to basket' facility for payments, so I need to pay 2 bills separately every month.  Idiotic.


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## two sheds (Jan 3, 2016)

Does the site look nice though? I think you may have your priorities wrong.


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## mauvais (Jan 3, 2016)

Fez909 said:


> Did you read the article I posted? I'm not sure where I fall on the form vs functionality thing but he's right on page bloat.
> 
> That UoB page is 2mb. Granted it loads practically instantly on a modern internet connection, but at 2mb, that's a hefty chunk of someone's 500mb mobile data allowance.
> 
> ...


Mobile service providers compress all the images, so whilst this is still a problem, it's not quite of the same magnitude.


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