Zooming prohibited – the mystery of the immobile email

You know that feeling? You're sitting comfortably on the couch with your smartphone, open an email, and immediately the eye yoga begins.

The font is tiny, the buttons are microscopic and you instinctively want to enlarge the screen with two fingers.

But in the app Nothing happens. No zoom, no swipe, no double tap. Just retina-level stillness.

View fixed

What's going wrong? Quite simply: Somewhere in the marketing or design team, someone decided that layout is more important than readability of the E-mails.

To ensure the company logo remains perfectly centered, the view is "fixed." The text can then look as if it were written for ants. The main thing is that the branding is right.

The same applies to numerous websites. There, the "mobile first" approach sometimes seems to have turned into "mobile frustration."

Mobile frustration

Instead of user-friendly flexibility, you get rigid designs that behave as if they were set in stone.

Zooming is prohibited! As if someone was afraid to spoil the carefully coordinated design of the Website could be thrown off balance by your finger movement.

But let's be honest: nobody wants to have to decipher 10-point font on a 6-inch display – especially not in a café on sunny days.

Simply delete

And while designers are still thinking about perfect pixels, you might already be considering whether to grab your reading glasses or just tap "delete."

The solution would be so simple: A checkmark in the HTML code, a little consideration for real people with real eyes – and the problem would be solved. But no, that would be too user-friendly.

Some emails and websites are like works of art in a museum: Please don't touch them, just look. And if you don't recognize them, well, that was probably the way they were intended. Just delete them...

Sierks Media / © Photo: Pongsawat Pasom, Unsplash