> When you load up a site I do it is as well designed as a mobile app. Surely people don't complain about the inability to zoom in their iOS settings app, or in the clocks app. Why would my site be any different?
They have that ability (at least on iOS. Don't know about Android, but I assume it has similar settings). It's under the Accessibility options.
Why don't you allow users the ability to zoom your sites?
I do allow zoom when it's appropriate: usually when I'm either targeting desktop users and don't plan (or don't have budget) to specifically target mobile users with their own experience, or when user scaling of the viewport makes sense to the project.
It's FAR better to pan and zoom around a working desktop layout than to have a broken responsive layout, so I only disable user-scaling on sites with a specifically targeted mobile experience where I can deliver a better experience by disabling user scaling than leaving it on.
Here's an example where disabling user zoom vastly improves user experience: a tool I built for myself with the purpose of allowing me to test other websites responsively at different widths while using a device with a fixed-width screen.
I.E. this tool lets me test websites at different browser widths while on a phone with a fixed-width.
Now, if I were to have had user scaling enabled do you think the experience on that site would be better?
Clearly not! But on the other hand, here's a chart with all of the values in hexadecimal plotted in a grid so I can understand and visualize the relationships between values in hexadecimal colour notation (like #1166aa). This page is an illustration, and though I do have some crude responsive styles to help it fit on narrower screens, I intentionally left user-scaling on to make a better user-experience, until/unless I decide to go in and give it a better mobile-specific experience:
Now, if I were to have had user scaling enabled do you think the experience on that site would be better?
Clearly not! There's no right or wrong answer for every. single. website. You have to look at how it will be used, who will use it, on which hardware, and what will provide the most value to them. That decision happens case-by-case and there's always a trade-off happening.
I wonder if the group of people that can't manage to browse with user-scaling turned off on their modern, high-end mobile phones are the same who can't seem to load any website posted to HN that uses JavaScript because not everybody uses a browser with JS enabled…
Thank you for proving the point that you can't design to meet everyones need in a way that removes the need for zoom.
Yes, your examples absolutely need zoom, or they will be totally unusable for a large number of people.
I have close to perfect sight, but big fingers, and even on my 5.5" phone the buttons in the first ones were annoyingly small.
In the second one, the text was annoying small. Again on a 5.5" phone. A lot of people wouldn't be able to read it at all without zoom.
> I wonder if the group of people that can't manage to browse with user-scaling turned off on their modern, high-end mobile phones are the same who can't seem to load any website posted to HN that uses JavaScript because not everybody uses a browser with JS enabled…
No, they are people who far to often run into designers who assumes everyone has perfect eye-sight and dainty little fingers and so thinks it's ok to disable zoom.
The only time it is acceptable to disable zoom is if you provide your own, context-aware zooming mechanism and make very, very sure it does a better job than the generic browser zoom.
Yes, both of those sites benefit from zoomability. The first one, I just tested (by visiting "water.com" in your tool). When I tested #5 (500 x 477), the viewport disappears off the end of the right edge of my screen. I can't see the whole thing at once, no matter what I do. I have to scroll, and that's confusing because my scroll swipe will move the content inside the viewport before moving the site itself, and thus the viewport itself. If I could pinch out on it, I'd see the whole thing at once.
As an aside, the Android I used to test this allowed me to turn on Force Zoom, and that allowed me to use the site better.
The second site (grid.html) can appear very small. I think you intended to say it should be zoomable, as I was able to zoom in and out on that one.
My point is, even when you yourself cannot conceive of a reason a user would like to zoom the site, trust me, there probably is one. In another reply, you mentioned the 300ms delay that turning on zoom control introduces. I hadn't thought of that before, and that is a good point for disabling zoom control. Maybe Apple can follow Google's lead, and give their users the option to override it. That would allow the majority of your users the faster touch-responsiveness that you're trying to give them, while still letting the rest of us have the control we'd like over our browsers.
I can say for a fact that zooming on the grid would have been a better experience. As-is it is currently only usable if I use my phone as landscape rather than portrait as there is no space between each item. For most sites I don't bother rotating my phone - scrolling down is worse than zooming in/out. Especially when trying to read a grid or chart reliant on seeing all the information at once and not 4 rows at a time.
They have that ability (at least on iOS. Don't know about Android, but I assume it has similar settings). It's under the Accessibility options.
Why don't you allow users the ability to zoom your sites?