The “pivot to video” like narrative that mobile is the future of news consumption + social media sites being increasingly impossible to use outside a mobile app + the horrible experience trying to READ a single web article on your phone through a kaleidoscope of pops and ads = a truly bad situation.
Like truly have you tried reading something from a news site on your phone recently? It is nearly impossible. I keep trying to scroll (because ads take up half the screen) and accidentally clicking on some pop up that consumes the entire screen but also doesn’t actually work so I can’t x out of it.
I really don’t think this is a “get off my lawn” thing! I am a savvy technology user! These mobile sites are horrifically hard to navigate and actively discourage me from reading articles I want to read!!!
I don’t need tips on how to use Read Mode or a Reader app thanks all. My point is that we are asking people to actually check sources and be savvy about misinformation while also making it really fucking hard to actually read anything!
I recently went on a site to read an article and once I had scrolled to the end (trying to get past a full-screen ad, but not yet finished reading) the site decided I didn’t want to read the article anymore. It sent me to a “what to read next” section and the article was hidden even when I reloaded
Perhaps if you gently pet the phone screen and murmur "oh what a darling little article we love you so" into the microphone, it will come back. No, wait, that's for the cat.
Firefox has a "reader view" feature, shows just the web page's text and relevant graphics e-book style, no ads and no distractions. They also have Pocket for the same reason.
Tech companies seem to just be making products and apps just to provide ad space or sell data to advertisers. They could care less about what people want these days. Their CEOs have lost their minds with greed I swear.
And if you want me to decide that your publication is worth subscribing to, not letting me actually read it due to poor UI is unlikely to decide it in that publication’s favor.
"Why didn't you read the article?"
"Sorry I tried but ended up buying some new running shoes and then the site sent me to a page showing me how 1990s TV stars now look old because they're old"
The ads themselves are also sources of misinformation. The cold war with internet advertising has been underappreciated for two decades. Ublock Origin helps, but we'll never read anything clearly again without running a private ad block microserver like pihole.
I'm a UX designer by trade. Absolutely agree that it's not you - most news sites are incredibly user hostile at this point.
You can tell they're built to serve advertisers over readers - but simultaneously they're not serving advertisers very well because they pretend they're serving readers.
And you can't share sites with aging parents because you know they're going to have trouble and get in trouble because everyone is intentionally skirting the edge of unusability.
I subscribed for extra live game feeds rather than the articles, but it has been almost a year since I have actually been able to READ an ESPN+ exclusive article on their web site. If I had subscribed for their analysis rather than so that we could watch more ACC basketball I would be REALLY pissed.
I noticed something for SEC basketball that may help. For a particular given game, there are at least 3 likely identical feeds. One of them is an ESPN+ feed they try to get me to pay money for. Another is an SEC Network+ feed that's free through my cable login, which their site/apps hide a little.
Definitely not a get off the lawn thing.
My recommendation is to use a mobile browser that has a reader mode. Safari and Firefox have it. I’m sure there are others available too. In Safari mobile you can go into website settings and tell it to open a particular site in Reader View automatically.
A few years ago I was interviewed for a job at an ad tech company. The CEO explained to me that mobile advertising is annoying by its nature and on purpose: it’s too easy to skip it if they don’t get in your way. Advertisers pay more if they know you had to engage the ad to read the article.
I wayback machine most articles and then put the link into reader mode on safari iOS. Like 8 extra steps but it usually works 🥴.
UX has been beaten down by the money ad men in the C Suite and it sucks.
Just more enshittification of the web. 😔
It's absolutely not.
A more tortured analogy would be a park ranger giving underfunded PSAs while some corporation builds a combo Zipline/watermark/laser tag arena to fawning press coverage.
idlewords.com/talks/websit...
Shout-out to 404, defector, and all the other folks who figure out that the biz side of media are a source of all manner of stupidity that can be sloughed off.
You are 100% correct. The navigation is awful, they're slathered in intrusive and difficult to manage ads, and efficient or creative design feels like an afterthought.
which is wild given how much manpower and money is purportedly dedicated to achieving the opposite
Isn’t this linked to the death of AMP and that kind of mobile page optimisation that favored efficient, fast-loading mobile pages as part of a search play? Wasn’t long ago that mobile was the BEST version of an article to read
I'm visually impaired, I use Android, & I have found an app solution to this problem. The app is called Reading Mode. With it, you get just the text on the page, and you can set all the colors... including to Dark Mode if needed.
play.google.com/store/apps/d...
Reading Mode is built into Firefox and Microsoft Edge. Makes the internet a thousand times more pleasant.
Not a feature in Chrome, probably because Google are serving most of those ads.
Reading mode is built into Firefox?? Please tell me where cos I been cursing the fact it doesn't have it whereas Safari *does* give me that option. Halp. 🙏🙏
