I love how "mobile friendly" seems to just mean it will waste some space your phone screen can't afford.

Plus, if there is wasted space, you can jam an ad in there.

I permanently use desktop mode on my phone browser

Why on Earth?

Because it's objectively better. I also exclusively use desktop mode, and I can tell when a site's designer can't comprehend this choice.

>site's designer can't comprehend this choice.

I've built responsive sites that work as you'd expect in desktop mode, and I'm not 100% certain how other sites that don't are built.

They seem to degrade into some odd hybrid between desktop and mobile. It's like the worst of both worlds.

So, for example, you get hamburger menus, instead of the full desktop nav. And you get a different layout with an increased PPI, but it's not quite mobile and not quite desktop.

I can only assume that they are looking at the agent string in addition to implementing media queries / breakpoints. But there's also something weird going on with the PPI.

Whatever it is, seems like it takes more effort to create a poorer design.

I wouldn't do it permanently, but I use the feature sometimes myself.

Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images). Some sites exclude information in mobile view. I'm sure there's other reasons too.

Facebook, Reddit and Amazon all have terribly made mobile versions of their sites, for example.

Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly.

I recently found an option in mobile Chrome "Settings > Accessibility > Force enable zoom" which overrides a website's request to prevent zooming in. Highly recommended

Yes, very useful. You can do the same on Firefox for Android: "Settings > Accessibility > Zoom on all websites."

sure, but all the time? You guys must have ant vision or something :) . Sometimes I use it but it's pretty rare.

I recently hit that 40's age where short sight vision is now stuffed. I foresee a future of phone use frustration.

Amusingly, I use my phone to magnify the labels for food ingredients to make sure myself or my kid aren't eating problem foods.

It is amazing how many years people live after their 40's and so much stuff is now "hard" and yet no one will design for it. Even when they themselves will inevitably suffer from it one day.

Aging and death is an abstract concept to youth, for the most part. Source: I've been there.

There are some apps which you can use to scan labels with and it will tell you which allergens does it have.

I use Opera because it perfectly scales the text when I zoom in, as opposed to other browsers.

> Some sites disabled pinch zooms (massively frustrating for images).

Best are the blogs that have embedded images of graphs or something and they are as large as you can make them (edge to edge). Try pinch to zoom... nope. Tap on image... Here is a smaller version of the image (not edge to edge). Oooookay... Can I zoom now? Hahahhahah....nope!

> Some sites disabled pinch zooms

I've always wondered why sites do this. What's the point of it? What does the web designer get from it?

double tap zoom is annoying. it is easy to imagine inexperienced users getting lost because of it.

> I wouldn't do it permanently, but I use the feature sometimes myself.

Exactly my thought. I too use it sometimes, but "always" is a bit too much.

> Reddit's is comically bad, like they hired interns to make it who tried trendy stuff but didn't understand how to implement any of it properly.

I think it's intentionally bad. They just want to force you to use the app instead. Hence the 5 times a minute "Reddit is better in the app" popups too. Unfortunately the real reason of course is "Reddit can collect much more information about you if you use the app". It's not about "being better". That's a choice, if they wanted to provide a phenomenal web app experience they could easily do so.

same here. also your username is amusing :)

  Every "mobile friendly" menu site is able to show maybe 5 items on the page at once

This is due to accessibility regulations. Apple design guidelines and Material guidelines explicitly state how small font can and should be. Ask any designer you know.

My phone has a text size setting, and if I needed bigger text for readability I could set it - why can't we have that conveyed as a user preference somehow?

You just said it yourself. Your phone provides that preference. But a good default is essential, and given to us based on Apple and Googles research, which was probably actually done by Nielsen Norman Group

I'm glad my betters dictate what can be done.

The "good default" should be the default size that the browser uses, in my opinion. The designer of the website is not in a position to know what the best font size is.

But is it right to punish everyone else because of accessibility reasons?

Is it right that I was downvoted heavily for stating a fact?

No, that is not right at all.

Not necessarily; WCAG doesn’t actually mandate a minimum font size, only that your fonts respect the user zoom and font size settings.

No, there are physical limits, and those are the ones determining mobile screens.

Best are the mobile friendly pages that don't allow you to pinch-zoom while the desktop version does.

I'm disproportionately enraged by this.

Yea I still don't get how little the mobile web takes advantage of pinch to zoom.

Some sites even hijack the gesture to disable it, which is super frustrating.

Definitely understand the tradeoffs here but you could set your default text size in your OS settings to be smaller to get more volume on your screen.

One reason I personally prefer proper, physical menus is because they are always physically bigger than my phone or the tableside tablet if a restaurant uses those.

Why the sincere fuck must I peck around on a screen for ants when I am paying money to be served?

Because you're not paying enough to get that service?

Indeed. Unless you're some kind of VIP, the relationship between you and the restaurant is that serving you is the necessary dance required to get money from you, to be done as cheaply as possible. You don't pay enough for the business to actually care about responding to your individual preferences; it's cheaper to let you go and for a less preferential customer to take your place.

This is the usual race to the bottom on the market.

Spoken like someone that has never run a business

Spoken like someone that has just started to run a business and has not yet gotten burned out from asshole patrons/users/clients that absolutely ruin the experience. In my experience, it is the middle of the spectrum of users to shoot for. The upper to top end expecting so much stuff to be given to them and expect way too much babysitting and pampering at the expense of other customers and give lots of attitude. The middle segment just wants the service at a fair price and to be treated with respect and are typically polite about it. Then the lower end wants the same services at the lower price tiers and complains that there are other things not included at the base price. There's no way to make everyone happy all the time.

I think this attitude is true for many businesses, but not restaurants.

Restaurants are one of the few areas of the market where local businesses that are deeply connected to their communities still thrive.

There are plenty of restaurants & pubs near me who recognise me as a regular customer by name. The people at those places genuinely enjoy making their customers happy. It's much easier to care when your customers are living, breathing human beings with names you know whom you see frequently. The same can't be said for McDonald's, but there are places that aren't so soulless.

This is actually a very valid point. The whole world works on equilibrium points between cost and annoyance. For the majority of things that point is closer to annoyance. Micro-annoyances usually go unnoticed.

I am paying enough, the prices are no different from restaurants with proper menus and wait staff. Again: Why must I peck around on a screen for ants and receive the bare minimum of service, at full market price?

On a similar vein: Why do I not get a small discount, say 1%, if I go and use a self-checkout instead of going to a manned checkout? The cashier isn't serving me, so why am I paying for his wages?

I am, of course, fine with receiving less service if I am expected to pay less accordingly.

why? Because as a society we value maximizing profit over anything else. The money that's saved by making you do a server/cashier's job is meant to make more money faster, at lower cost to line owners/shareholder pockets with more dividends, not to give you a fairer price or pay staff. Besides, why give clients a 1% discount to do work they'll do anyway for free instead of paying an employee to do it? How is a company supposed to accumulate capital if they redistribute the benefits of technological progress to all involved in the transaction? /s

Even brand new restaurants do this, and it's maddening. I also go straight to Google Maps for the menu. The best restaurant websites have the straight PDF of their menu, and automatically visible from the landing page of the site. Don't make me interact with a burger menu and then several clicks later finally get the menu, grr.

A PDF isn’t a great UX when viewed on a mobile screen. You’re going to be tapping and pinching and zooming to see different parts of the menu, and probably switching tabs back and forth to actually place the order.

There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around. Nice clear typography, easily scroll through items by category, one tap to add to order or to get more details (and often photos) of the dish.

It’s just not an art that every restaurant (and restaurant software vendor) seems to have mastered yet, unfortunately.

I strongly disagree. Pinching and zooming a locally cached file that contains all the information the user wants is O(n) to perhaps O(log n), while navigating menus is O(n^2).

I would settle for a single, zoomable html page.

What is n here?

Vertical scrolling is a much less tedious interaction than pinching and zooming back and forth to different sections of a 2D plane.

On the other hand, the spatial benefits to such a plane helps people remember where to look if they want to return to a section, whereas with endless scrolling, it's nearly impossible to find something you saw before until you happen upon it again scrolling back up for an indeterminate amount of time.

This makes me think it would be useful for mobile browsers to allow adding temporary scroll bookmarks while using a page. It'd be useful for browsing lots of items, restaurant menus, on a single page, etc.

("that looks good" [bookmark scroll position] ... [keep scrolling] ... [tap icon to return to the previously saved position])

I genuinely think scrolling is more tedious. Have you visited any of apple's product pages lately? Makes me yarf.

EDIT: At least restaurant menu sites aren't that bad yet. Can you imagine? "Hamburger. Redefined." <SCROLLS> Hamburger slowly pieces together across the screen tied to your scrolling. "We think you're gonna love it." <SCROLLS> Pickles slowly fade in and out to demonstrate the difference between Hamburger and Hamburger Pro

Scrolling itself isn't tedious compared to panning and zooming a PDF. The information density is what's important. If you have to do a bunch of scrolling to see just a few items then, yes, they failed.

It depends what the PDF is. Reading a PDF book is tedious because you're endlessly panning back and forth at every line. But you don't read a restaurant menu from start to finish like that so it makes sense to have a less linear way of navigating than scrolling.

> Scrolling itself isn't tedious compared to panning and zooming a PDF.

I simply disagree, and think the EXACT opposite.

Panning and Zooming a two-dimensional, immutable file itself isn't tedious compared to scrolling.

(You're straw-manning PDFs, though it could be any 2D image or mutable document file)

> "it would be useful for mobile browsers to allow adding temporary scroll bookmarks while using a page"

This shouldn't be necessary with a well-designed menu interface. Firstly the whole thing should be indexed anyway, allowing easy jumping between categories. And if something looks good you should be able to favourite it with a single tap, or at least add it to your order with a single tap. (If you end up with too many items in you order, consider it a short-list, reviewing the items and narrowing it down from the final order review page).

Indexing is INHERENT to a 2D document/file. It doesn't need to be indexed or categories. It can hold ALL the information you want to peruse and compare in a given moment. You just, simply look around and view it! - willy wonka

I'm thinking more in terms of browsing, not just selectable items in a menu, but any scrollable content.

A real-world analog would be adhesive color tabs people stick to the sides of books or printed documents to mark a paragraph non-destructively, so they can return to that point later more easily.

Think anchor headings, except user-driven, because many websites don't even use anchors to enable linking to page sections by URL hashes, and without inspecting headings for anchors (by tapping or long-pressing on them), nobody would ever know it's a feature.

I wish I could just mark my current scroll position and return to it later by navigating back + forth between the ones I've saved for a page. I've lost count how many times I've made mental notes saying "This is interesting, I'll return to this bit later" only to struggle finding it again because it's lost in a sea of text. Browsers have no way to temporarily bookmark bits of content without developers (or CMS'es) being smart enough to anchor headings and sections.

> There’s plenty of good mobile-friendly menus around.

I can honestly say that I've never seen a good mobile-friendly menu anywhere. I'm not saying that they don't exist somewhere, of course, just that I've never seen them.

pinch and zoom is an excellent navigation mode to quickly scan an overview and zoom into what you care about.

I wish more mobile interfaces make good use of that. Instead we have a various versions of drilldowns and poorly implemented search.

Half the time I can't even tell what the full list of items are on a mobile menu.

I agree. It's a difference of O(n^2) or worse for drill-downs, and O(log n) for a pinch and zoom.

Menus should have more intelligence built in. Maybe a prompt or two to get a feel for what a person may want to eat. Or even just listing in order of most popular.

This, instead of presenting a bunch of items, or only segmenting by category.

In general, the need to navigate the entire menu is reflective of a bigger problem, which is that nobody ever knows what they want to eat for a given meal.

If somebody can algorithmically solve this in a personalized way, that would be a quality of life improvement beyond fixing mobile menu formats.

Matter of fact, give me an app that spans multiple restaurant menus, understands my preferences over time, and keeps track of what I've recently eaten, then suggests my next meal.

As a very first step, offer a "must contain/exclude meat" option which would give us an average saving that trends towards 50%. Then identify the most common allergies/preferences and many people could have a typical menu trimmed down enough so that it fits one page on their mobile screen.

That's the thinking. I don't eat red meat or pork, so, for the average restaurant, my option set generally trends towards 20% to 25%. But, I generally have to browse the burger section to ensure they didn't bury a turkey burger in it.

I like menus for finding stuff I have not eaten and could be curious about. Taking my past preferences into consideration would be an antifeature.

Yeah, I like to experiment too sometimes, and the option to browse could still be available. It's pretty easy to pull off and is the standard now.

But even with that, your experimentation could be guided. And, man, most times I find myself just needing to eat something versus embarking on some great culinary quest. So, more often than not, it's just one more thing to solve.

Even if you have the full menu on your phone, you still have to zoom into the menu to read it and pan the view. I don't see how that's any different from scrolling through a categorized menu in a website on your phone.

The difference for me is when the menu gets large then it becomes laborious to scroll through a long linear menu vs a rectangular representation of that same data - which allows for much shorter scrolls. Imagine the menu on a restaurant was handed to you on a 4ft long receipt, you’d get pretty fed up of moving it up and down.

zooming and panning is often easier, particularly if a website is hijacking scrolls and slowing them down, doing scroll snapping, etc.

Zooming allows you to narrow in on the content you desire from a big picture point of view while vertically scrolling you just must hope that you get lucky to find what you are looking for.

not only that but it's significantly easier to do family-style group ordering with a physical menu.

doing that with a digital menu is maddening. "where's X?" "below Y, no you've scrolled too far", ad nauseam.

Dining with a group where only one person speaks the local language fluently dials this up to 11. Lots of that pain will now start already while trying to figure out what everyone wants. Scrolling back and forth to help translate.

> This explains exactly why physical restaurant menus are so much better vs mobile site menus.

It also explains why trading UI for pros haven't changed at all compared to these Bloomberg Terminal screenshots.

Sometimes a dense UI is precisely what you need. And the one thing that matters for people trading "manually", clicking on things, is latency: there should be no room for "wait, did the server get my order or not!?".

In a way TFA explains why a restaurant isn't a trading floor.

Dense and functional looking UIs are also prime for any sort of B2B software. It facilitates giving buyers the impression that the software is more functional than something super polished.

To be clear, by super polished I mean that something that looks like a modern consumer app is sometimes discounted.

For bonus points, some menu web sites also do that on their desktop web sites. I have seen many of them that show like 10 items on a 27″ 1440p desktop monitor.

More than "some". I truly think it's time we lose all the whitespace.

I still think it should be offered as a preference to people. Pages and content requiring high cognitive load is difficult for a lot of people, so packing information too densely can feel overwhelming, making people lose their place as they're browsing through content.

It's the same reason we have paragraphs in writing, rather than walls of text. We need tools that help us spatially recognize + remember content so we have a relative frame of reference to quickly get back to something we're looking for.

It's the same reason we have pages in a book -- not just that it's easier to carry a book versus a long scroll of paper, but it's objectively easier for our minds to handle the limited amount of content each page provides, as we get ready to flip to the next. The amount of pages we've read in a book also give us a natural indication of progress.

In a similar way, UIs that are split up a little better give those of us who do get overwhelmed a better way to organize the content we're looking for. This is why the majority of web apps have distinct views dealing with different content and reachable utility dealing with that content.

Paragraphs are a small split and 98% of dense web pages still have the equivalent. That's not a defense for sparse design trends.

And pages are pages because that's convenient to make.

And to bring up restaurant menus in another spot, look at that density! If twenty pages was better I feel like we would know.

"compact mode" is what JetBrains calls this option.

I think you're missing an important demographic, people with even minor motoric or visual impairments, who'd face great friction when accessing information, if it weren't for technologies that let us adapt UIs to various physical circumstances of their usage.

A phone screen becomes a well sized and flexible canvas, given sufficient dexterity and eye sight.

It can easily be a comparatively tiny medium as well.

Yes. Mobile friendly sites tend to suck because they take us back to WAP and the 90:ies. Even desktop sites suffer from a weird movement recently where all text is unbearably HUGE.

I usually see a huge menu as a red flag that the food will probably suck. Lots of items or lots of unrelated types of food.