Possibly the worst user interface I've seen all year
This is a webpage for a courier company. This screengrab is the whole page as served to me. If I want to track my parcel I have to enter the details into the pretend phone on the right and pretend to use it like a phone, complete with tiny screen and fiddly controls.
I get that they would like me to install their app but this is almost offensively user-hostile design, and pretty much ensures I'll never install anything of the sort. I might consider installing the app of a company who deliver to me regularly and have a good track record of being good at their jobs, if that app offers useful functionality which can't be offered via a web page - but even that's unlikely. But these guys who I have never heard of until today and are pulling this nonsense? No way.
That's "mobile first" eating itself alive. Ironically, it's also why phones are getting bigger. And you can no longer reach the opposite end of your phone with one hand.
At one point we just gotta go back to acknowledging that bigger/desktop screens exist for a reason and won't go away. Even Apple, who has more to gain than anyone from forcing everyone on smart devices, acknowledges that the Mac ecosystem has to do separate things with UI (not that they don't manage to make it infuriating for entirely different reasons). We must have reached peak idiocy, recently.
I have pretty big hands. The Galaxy 21 is too damn big for them.
The Pixel 3 and its contemporaries of similiar size were nearly perfect. I would like more phones like that please.
At the rate we're going they'll be calling 10 inch tablets phones by 2025.
I want the old Razer 3 flip phone, but with a wifi hotspot and a universally accepted two-factor app. So I can talk to people when needed and do all my real stuff on another device.
So they only made a phone app, and then someone pointed out that computers were a thing, so they just put their app on their website? That's hilarious and terrible.
It's been a little while since I was doing much in the web dev game but that sounds like more work than just making a basic tracking service. I could be wrong about that.
But yeah, stupid as hell.
I'm going to guess they used the cheapest dev they could find and specced "iOS, Android, and web" without any further constraints and/or only supplied the dev team with one set of designs and basically said "handle it". Dev knocks together a quick and dirty Cordova app (basically just bundled HTML/JS running in a webview), quite possibly filled with janky hardcoded layout assumptions, and just whacks the wrapper around the browser version to save doing any actual fixes. It's like the monkey's paw version of write once run anywhere.
The UI screenshots on the Play Store and the 1.3 star rating seem to back this theory up...
And yes, I'll absolutely second that stupid as hell.
Can you go to that site on your phone browser, and force it to load the desktop page? I'm just curious.
Thanks, I hate it even more
I didn't even have to force the issue, that's just how the page loaded.
Yo dawg, I heard you like smartphones!
📱📱📱📱📱📱📱📱📱📱
W
O
W
Wow. I need to see this on a desktop later so I can pick apart the page. This is a great lesson in hateful UX.
I guess it could have been worse? What if they went "IoT-first" instead of "mobile-first"?
What’s IoT first? A JSON API password protected with the password “password”?
Oh but only.. Its probably a GET call to an endpoint with no parameters..
😈
I was thinking "buy our tracker, which is a rooted Kindle Fire", but that works too.