Mobile view (Android Chrome) is kind of messed up

[jolmg]

[mcnuttandrew]

Unfortunately forum explorer isn't really designed for mobile. This is mostly because tapping a tiny circle is pretty cumbersome on mobile. I'd really like to figure out a holistic UX solution for mobile that makes this type of conversational overview application tractable there, but I think it's kinda out of scope for this app (at least based on the current design).

How would you feel if the site warned you against looking at it on mobile?

[jolmg]

If you mean "warn" as in state what can be clearly seen, I don't think there's a point. If you mean "warn" as in avoid rendering at all on mobile and just display "Sorry, this doesn't work on mobile", I think it's better to have something half-working than not working at all.

You know, if you select "Desktop site" on the browser's menu, then the site seems just as usable as on a desktop. The user might have to zoom around, but I think that's fine. I don't know if it's possible, but maybe you can ask the browser to display as on a desktop via some tag or something. If that's not possible, then maybe you can detect when the user is on mobile and ask them to enable the "Desktop site" option on their mobile browser for a better experience.

[jolmg]

but maybe you can ask the browser to display as on a desktop via some tag or something

Or remove whatever code does mobile detection to have it display uniformly on all platforms.

[jolmg]

Here's how it looks:

[jolmg]

I could select the different nodes without zooming even with my thumb and I have very big hands. It seems pretty usable.