Fat fingers strike again!

November 4, 2014 6:37 PM

In mobile styles, can a link to "add a favourite" be included at the top of the page that comes when you accidentally click on the comment count in mobile, rather than the + sign? I keep going to the list of people who have favourited a comment, then having to go back and zoom in to correctly hit the +, and my stubby fingers have put me in a loop at times. Possibly this is just me, but a line at the top of the (http://​www.metafilter.com​/favorited) page that I could reliably hit would be very nice.
posted by viggorlijah to Feature Requests at 6:37 PM (21 comments total)

i thought we had already basically solved this one by changing the mobile site and making only the number of favorites, and the + links so that clicking the "favorites" text did nothing? it seems to have worked great. i thought they bumped the + over a bit too.

i stopped having this problem a while ago on my phone after those changes were implemented.
posted by emptythought at 7:15 PM on November 4, 2014

Yes, the word "favorite" should not be linked in mobile. That should put at least 10 characters of unlinked space between the favorite count and the +. This used to be a common complaint but since we made that change it hasn't really come up. Is the word "favorite" linked for you, viggorlijah?
posted by pb (staff) at 7:24 PM on November 4, 2014

Hah, I know what it is, a very specific subset of metafilter users - I turned on the feature that lets you see if a post has favourites, not the specific count of favourites (which makes for much happier browsing, thank you for making that an easy feature) and so it's not formatting with the break.

Screengrab of what that looks like on a mobile.
posted by viggorlijah at 9:02 PM on November 4, 2014

Part of it is just that the + is simply too damn small — Apple's interface guidelines say something like 48x48 points minimum size for touch targets, and that's because that works out to about 1/4" on each side, which is about the smallest thing that can be accurately aimed for with a finger instead of a stylus. If you just made the [+] bigger on mobile, it'd be a huge help overall (especially since swipe to favorite seems to be gone)
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:12 PM on November 4, 2014 [5 favorites]

The "+" is too small for me, too. Maybe change it to [+] or something else that would provide a larger target?
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:30 PM on November 4, 2014 [4 favorites]

Chiming in with the same problem on my iPad and iPhone. Every time I think I've hit the "+" sign, I end up seeing the list of people who favorited said comment/thread, etc. (Nothing against that; you are all quite lovely.)
posted by Kitteh at 7:25 AM on November 5, 2014 [3 favorites]

Matt mentioned in the monster new theme thread that we're planning to overhaul the flag and favorite controls:

Yeah, a redo of the flag/favorite controls on mobile is in the works. I would like it to be as easy to use as the official Twitter client on iOS, those targets are smaller, but relatively easy to hit, and tell you about number of faves, etc in a very small space. That's the goal with a redo for this.

I don't have a timeline for that but it's on our list.
posted by pb (staff) at 8:04 AM on November 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

I will plaintively ask for "swipe to favorite" to be added to the new design.

Swipe to Favorite is the best pony.
posted by GenjiandProust at 9:17 AM on November 5, 2014 [4 favorites]

Sorry, we probably won't be adding swipe to favorite to the new design. We want to fix the underlying problem—the favorite and flagging controls are too small. Swipe to favorite is a fine stop-gap solution for some. We couldn't get it working across all devices reliably. We need a solution to this fat-finger problem that's going to be very visible and work everywhere.
posted by pb (staff) at 9:24 AM on November 5, 2014 [2 favorites]

Switch back to the old design and use swipe-to-favo(u)rite. I don't use the new design precisely for this reason.
posted by desjardins at 9:36 AM on November 5, 2014 [1 favorite]

You can have my new design when you pry it from my fat, fat fingers.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:36 AM on November 5, 2014

I do use the old design for this very reason. It just makes me feel like a fogy, out of touch with the newfangled design elements that all those hip kids are digging.

(I do understand the problems pb, and I appreciate the decisions you have had to make. I'd just rather swipe than switch.)
posted by GenjiandProust at 10:37 AM on November 5, 2014

Can we have a link to favourite (a "+ add your favourite" on a solitary line ) added then above the list of people who have favourited a comment so that at least when we fumble over, we don't have to then go back, fumble again and be caught in a finger-mashing spiral of trying to favourite and zoom and then giving up in despair?
posted by viggorlijah at 9:17 PM on November 5, 2014

I think an easy fix is simply to make the line under the comment read:

[4 favorites] [add a favorite] [flag comment]

That way our grotesquely distended sausage-fingers have nice fat targets as they paw clumsily toward the screen.
posted by yoink at 9:33 AM on November 6, 2014 [2 favorites]

My fat-finger fear is accidentally logging-out when trying to get to Recent Activity on my phone.
posted by carsonb at 2:13 PM on November 6, 2014

By the way, mobiles styles don't work at all for me anymore. In Safari and Chrome on iOS8 - on both iPhone and iPad – it is actually impossible to comment on Metafilter at all now. I can click down to the text box, but when I attempt to type, there is a huge delay (about 4-5 seconds per letter) and then gradually typing grinds to a halt entirely.

I guess maybe this is just with the white background on iOS8? That's where I'm experiencing it. I'll try a different background.

But this has been a problem for about the past week and a half. I assumed it had something to do with the new default style on Metafilter, but I wasn't sure. I just know that I've stopped using Metafilter on mobile entirely because of it.
posted by koeselitz at 5:35 PM on November 6, 2014

Nope, looks like this problem is on the Classic style, too.

And this is particularly a problem if you click away from the textbox and highlight and copy some text – which I do a lot on Metafilter. It's often actually impossible to click back into the text box; when you can get back in, text is super-slow and delayed, to the point of grinding to a halt.

I haven't seen anything in Metatalk, so I assumed it must just be me, but at this point I figured I'd mention it, since restarts don't seem to do anything.
posted by koeselitz at 5:38 PM on November 6, 2014 [1 favorite]

Koeslitz: I had that problem a while ago too. I think it went away though. I have no idea why. Even when I had it, it seemed to be thread-specific.
posted by Joe in Australia at 7:03 PM on November 6, 2014

It's weird - it is not thread-specific for me. I've spent a few minutes clicking into threads and trying it. The thing is that in new threads, with no comments yet, or even threads with only a few comments, I have to enter the text box, type a little, and then tap away; then it starts to break.
posted by koeselitz at 8:04 PM on November 6, 2014

Do you have the most recent version of iOS 8, koeselitz? I think it's at 8.1 now. A lot of people reported problems but we couldn't find anything we were doing on our end to cause them. The most recent OS updates have seemed to fix a lot of those reported problems.
posted by pb (staff) at 7:59 AM on November 7, 2014

We added an "Add to Favorites" link at the top of the favorited page for mobile devices today. Until we improve the favoriting controls on the page it should help make those accidental taps a little less painful.
posted by pb (staff) at 2:06 PM on November 11, 2014 [1 favorite]