Sliding menus on mobile reducing usability for some users

Apologies for a topic that will be a little scattergun, but it’s hard to know if it’s worth splitting this up. On the Drowned in Sound forum a number of users have issues with the new ‘slide-in’ menus and the issues do not seem to be specific to a given phone or browser - iPhone SE, Samsung Galaxy J3 and S6 and Google Pixel 1, 2 and 3.

The issue is that the menus are sliding out when the users are trying to do other things on the site.

One user tends to use swipe back to go back a web page and in the last couple of weeks they’ve found this keeps pulling out the menu instead, so I wondered if someone has tweaked the ‘hot area’? This is on iPhone which I presume means it’s a standard iPhone gesture as I can’t seem to do this at all on my Android.

Other users find they are calling in the left swipe menu when they attempt to like posts. I don’t have this issue and it seems like for many users it can be when they are using the phone one-handed so I guess there is an effect.

Trying to hit the quote post button has also ended up pulling it in.


I don’t know if others have seen this. I just wondered if there is any possibility of offering the chance to use the old system. Part of the above makes me wonder if this sliding menu system might impact accessibility more which is why I wondered if it is a consideration?

TIA

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Swiping to go back is an iPhone specific feature, and the action of swiping to display a menu should be disabled on iPhones so it doesn’t interfere (once the menu is open you can swipe to hide it though).

I haven’t run into this myself, but since the like button can be really close to the edge of the screen I can see how this would happen.

@featheredtoast was planning to make some adjustments to the swipe feature that might help make it less of an issue. Thanks for letting us know.

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Thanks a lot.

So to clarify, on an iPhone you shouldn’t be able to swipe the menus out? Only swipe them back in?

The other way around, you can’t swipe the menus in because it would interfere with the browser’s back/forward behavior. Once the menus are open, you can swipe them out.

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Right… actually that was what I meant but I guess for me swiping them ‘out’ means making them appear like if you pull a drawer out, but you’re saying swiping out as in removing them? :upside_down_face: Sorry.

In that case there’s a bug on that iPhone SE. I’ll find out the iOS version.

Thanks
Theo

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Okay, specifics on the iPhone swipe issue:

But weirdly not 100% of the time. I’ve been trying to figure out what makes the menu appear and what doesn’t but can’t see a pattern.
iOS version 11.4.1
It only started 2 days ago out of the blue.

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That’s so strange that I was never able to get it to both pull out and trigger the back until you pointed out that it was possible… there is a very hard to hit zone for this, but I’m able to see what’s going on now - thanks for the report

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More evidence the side menu velocity threshold is set wrong, sorry @falco but this needs to be turned down.

Swiping in on the right works for sure, left still triggers the back action.

Windows Mobile here (has a clumsy swipe for back and forward feature).

The new animated right side menu used to appear when I wanted to click the post time to get permalink.
But now it seems fixed.

Are you sure you mean windows mobile? The last release of WM was 6.5.5 on Feb 2, 2010, over nine years ago, and it should be completely unsupported at this point.

OTOH if you mean Windows Phone that was discontinued almost four years ago.

IE Mobile racks up 0.01% browser market share as of Jan 2019.

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It is indeed almost abandoned although it still gets regularly updated but my 100€ Lumia 640 is running Windows 10 Mobile which is quite recent.
And browser is not called IE Mobile but Edge.

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Windows Mobile is not Windows 10 Mobile. They’re totally different things. Windows Mobile started out as PocketPC 2000 which in itself was an extension to Windows CE. Windows Phone succeeded it, Windows 10 Mobile was a branding tie-in and upgrade to certain Windows Phone devices.

Either way, Edge as a mobile browser is now totally irrelevant. Over the last 90 days it accounted for only one half of one tenth of one percent of mobile traffic.:

Source: NMS

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And I use Vivaldi on Windows XP 3 when (rarely) I use a PC at home (Windows 7 at work).
BTW the browsers I have been using (at least Opera presto and now Vivaldi) are often seen as something else by stats.
Sorry for being irrelevant.
I don’t really know what was your intent.
Maybe that I should not report any Discourse behaviour with my setups?

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iOS was helpfully responding to both events, which made it look really, really weird to have both a menu sliding in, and the back/forward event swiping in the navigation.

iOS and windows phones no longer should have any issue here as the swipe in events are android only now as of here:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/c3cbff55be527a95b016b6057fa04dbf8804dbcc

re: accidental swipe in, it looks like 30px for the swipe space was a little too large as a swipe target. I’ve shrunk it to 20px, and am unable to reproduce accidentally opening a menu when liking, or clicking on like numbers or – what I’m assuming is happening with quoting – tapping and holding on a post, and dragging the finger horizontally to select text (I never actually knew you could select text that way – I’ve always doubletapped to get the selection pins). Anyway, that should be better here :wind_chime:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/d997b01a24456cbeaa98db9fc0315e2d7ea33141

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Fantastic, thanks a lot Jeff.

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