My phone is too small.
So is my iPad.
They’re a 12 mini and a mini 6, respectively, and they’re real and they’re spectacular. And they’re becoming too small for the internet.
I was the product owner begging our UX designers to create sufficiently narrow versions of our mobile pages that they’d load correctly on the tiniest Google phones. If memory serves we were 40 pixels too big. 40px! I bet even I could UX that (don’t worry, I never did).
So now, I know my machines are too small because maybe 30% of the sites I visit on my phone render almost correctly. I don’t even notice until I pinch-zoom all the way back out (I’m a big zoomer-inner), and all of a sudden most page content is tiny and only the nav takes up the full width of my screen. As for my iPad mini, it’s loading more and more mobile sites. It’s too small to trigger tablet UX.
Maybe I buried the lede: I like having a virtual keyboard that’s small enough for my thumbs to easily reach every letter! I like reading ebooks on a tablet that’s roughly the same size as a paperback book! I want to keep my tiny devices as long as the internet will let me, because they’re good at the jobs I use them for. And isn’t that what all of our devices are supposed to do?
Liz Welsh 