To the IH team: UX feedback
Courtland and Channing,
First of all - love IndieHackers - both the podcast and the website (and the newsletter too!)
Any chance you guys could change how the website's navigation works, especially on mobile? When I hit Back (or rather swipe back) on an article, it shows a blank page for a moment, then the old page again and a little invisible reload indicator, at the bottom right. I know it looks cool, but the UX suffers greatly as the result. Plus, history (navigation stack) almost always gets screwed, and instead of getting back to the main page from a post page I get back straight to Chrome's start page. Having the default web navigation would be a great improvement.
Another minor issue is that the comment upvote tick is very hard to hit on mobile.
I'n using the latest Chrome on iOS 12.
Thanks for you consideration.
Vasyl
Tbh these (I presume ssr) issues have been on since a long time. If the page isn't loading for me, I always refresh instead of waiting for it to load.
Thanks for the feedback!
I couldn't reproduce the pressing-back-on-an-article issue on my iPhone, but let me upgrade it to iOS 12 and try again. Anyone else seeing that issue?
Similarly, I couldn't reproduce the issue you're having with the navigation stack, where you press back from a post and it doesn't take you to the main list of posts. Could you give me the set of steps you'd use to reproduce that issue?
Will look into upvote button size. 👍
EDIT: From what everyone's saying, the nav issue seems like it's (a) sporadic, (b) tied specifically to Chrome on iOS 12, and (c) only happens when swiping to go back vs pressing the back button. I'll start using the site this way for a while and see if I can eventually start hitting the bug and learn to reproduce it, but in the meantime if anyone learns how to reproduce it consistently, let me know!
Indeed, it's not always reproducible from the start, but if you start torturing it, i.e. clicking posts, swiping back, going forward, etc, eventually it becomes broken. Right now I have an existing post page open; if I go back, it's the same page; back, and it's Chrome's start page.
Right now I'm on a pretty bad WiFi network, perhaps that makes the problem more pronounced, but I think it always appears after enough heavy usage, regardless of network quality.
It happens very often when swiping back on iOS 12 (ie swipe right from the left edge).
+1 I experience this almost every day. iOS 12 and Chrome, always swiping. Definitely does not happen every time (or maybe ever on the first swipe back?).
Hmm, just upgraded, opened Chrome, visited IH, navigated to an article, and tried swiping back like you described. It seemed to work fine?
Specifically: It shows a white page with an arrow pointing left, then that page disappears to briefly reveal the page you were already on, which quickly gets replaced with the page you're going back to. I tried this out on HN, too, and the experience was the same, except faster. (IH is still pretty slow, but getting better.)
Just to give more info, I use Safari w/ iOS 12. Doesn't happen every time, but it does happen quite often. IIRC, it's an Ember issue, because I also see this issue on other Ember apps.