UX Fail #6: I'm not blind.

Believe it or not, there are still people who use desktop websites. Simply "bringing up" text-rich and visually stunning pages designed for the phone on the desktop does not fit the context of use or a serious mobile-first approach.

What exactly is the problem?

• In recent years, the so-called mobile-first approach has become established. This means that the website is first developed for the mobile view, the design for large devices is done afterwards.
• Advantage: This ensures that websites with all content can also be used on the mobile device. Images, texts etc. are optimally adapted to small devices.
• Disadvantage: For many websites the existing design is simply enlarged for the desktop version. This results in very large images and fonts.
• By scaling from the phone's portrait format to the desktop's landscape format, pictures of the homepage, for example, take up the entire desktop screen.
• While on the mobile version texts could still be displayed in the visible area below the stage set, this is no longer possible on the desktop.
• A frequent side effect that we observe in tests: Users do not scroll because they do not expect any further information below the full-screen image.
• As a result, the overview is curiously often worse on the large device than on the small device.
• Due to the scaling of the font, it is now also very large. The resulting line breaks unnecessarily impair readability.
• Although the trend for mobile use of websites will continue or even increase, websites are still used on large devices for which a suitable design is also expected.

Recommendations from usability research:

• Adjust the size of the individual contents to the desktop view as well.
• Optimize images for large displays: Select the appropriate image section and scale images to an appropriate format so that other important content is within the directly visible area.
• Use suitable font sizes, line spacing and line breaks for the desktop view and pay attention to readability.