Now that’s something that should be fixed. (Though as @drtall says, not in the current fashion of mobile-like sub-par experience on all platforms.) But there are some commonly used pages that it’d be nice if they were ever-so-slightly more mobile-friendly.
A good first step in that direction would be to make it easy to go from app to website without having to actually log in. Single sign on / trusted redirection is not beyond our technical ability. One of the pain points for me (on iOS) is being in the app and then having to:
open safari
launch the website
log in (often I’ve been forgotten and logged out)
remember what I was doing
locate the goal in the gallery
open the goal’s page
do the thing
It’s painful enough doing the last step on a small screen, but we make it so much worse by requiring all the previous steps…
Not to start a holy war, but I’d rather have all the features somewhere than fewer features everywhere. I’ve seen other companies make statements of the form “We can’t do feature X on our website because phones don’t do Y which X needs.” and it drives me batty. I spend 99% of my time on a real computer and about 1% on mobile. So having the entire experience dumbed down to accommodate mobile is frustrating.
YNAB is an example of a great product that is clearly intended as a desktop experience with a mobile companion for data entry. The mobile app can’t edit budget, import bank statements, or display analytics, but it is nicely polished for the subset of features it offers.
That quote was in the context of the android app being a nice experience on my phone.
I dont know if it should be a high priority, given there are apps for android and IOS.
I don’t use the website on my phone because the app is nice.
I do prefer to use the website on my computer if I’m doing anything other than entering goal data or checking what’s red today.
I don’t care about magical single sign on I don’t mind typing in my password occasionally, longer cookie persistence would be nice though.
A counterpoint to this perspective is that designing a website to be mobile friendly forces you to focus on what’s important, and in many cases can lead to usability improvements in the desktop version, as well.
For example, say in order to make the goals page more usable on mobile, Beeminder added a search or filter box to the top of the dashboard. That would be a usability win for those of us with a lot of goals for the desktop version as well.
I agree that YNAB probably did the right thing in foregoing a truly responsive website, but I don’t think Beeminder necessarily fits in that category of web apps.
EDIT: Just realized how incredibly old this topic is! Oops.
