I don't know if others do this, I only just now noticed - I saw a mildly interesting link, thought about it for a second, and then clicked the comments instead of reading the article.
Then I asked myself "why did you do that? Why aren't you visiting the website that provided the interesting content? Why do you rarely click website links anymore?"
At first I figured that I'm just too ADD to read a whole article, when the headline is enough. But then I asked "ok then why aren't you just reading the headline and moving on?"...I realized I'm actually interested in reading more, but I really don't want to visit ANY mobile website to do it. Because mobile websites are 97% fucking awful.
This is what I get when I read the comments link -
• Any interesting bits will either be directly quoted or summarized, and at a glance I'm reading other people's reactions to these bits. So I'm getting the meat of the article, plus some hopefully interesting commentary, very quickly.
• The simple design of the RIF app is great. Plain white text on a dim gray background, ideal font size using up all the screen real estate, etc.
• It's loading text only, with no images, so it's very fast, even with nothing but weak 3G signal.
This is what I'm gambling on if I click through to the article -
• Wait for the browser to load, wait for the page to load, and if I'm unlucky the page has tons of images or even streaming video that I never asked for, so if I have a poor connection, I might wait forever for the text to appear and then give up.
• Most websites do not take into account content shifting... where new elements are loaded and then positioned before existing elements, causing blocks of text to jump around like some visual game of whack-a-mole. I can't keep reading once this starts happening, it's too irritating, I just go back.
• Many sites don't take into account the limited processing power of mobile devices and load all sorts of extraneous shit that bog things down to the point where your back button becomes unresponsive. See: the streaming video I never asked for, that plays without my permission.
• Even if the article loads ok, often I start to read the first sentence, and suddenly a big overlay pops up and covers all the text, with some stupid subscription begging that I instantly close. Sometimes I leave the site on general principle, because how does any site designer still do this when it's universally hated?
• It's pretty clear some mobile sites are being tested on some huge tablet screen or something. If I view them on a very common Galaxy phone, the menu bar at the top breaks in an ugly way causing two layers of menu when they clearly intended one... with text overlapping other text. It's just ugly.
• Still some half-screen flashing ads, even in 2017.
• I'm in public or at work... if I click a reddit comment page I know there's going to be no sound. I visit some unknown website, I might get some talking head from TV news start blasting from the phone speakers.
I guess this reads more like a rant than a revelation but it DOES interest me, as a designer, to know that a lot of websites are probably losing clicks despite the extra exposure they're supposed to get when they get mentioned on reddit. I wonder if they're aware of the potential lost views/revenue?
It's like, imagine if you made a website, and in addition to half the visitors blocking ads, someone else made a website that simply summarizes your content and puts it on a plain, better-designed page, and people just go to that better page instead of to your site. Shouldn't that prompt some sort of action from the site designers?
Great design resource
100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (Voices That Matter)
Submitted December 28, 2017 at 03:05PM by CreeDorofl http://ift.tt/2DsmAJY
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