A user told me my app's 'save' button was invisible on their phone in Phoenix

They sent a screenshot showing the button was the same gray as the background on their Samsung Galaxy screen. I had only tested on my iPhone in daylight. I changed the button color to a solid blue with a 2 pixel border, and error reports from Arizona dropped by half in a month. Anyone else get caught by assuming their screen looks like everyone else's?

3 comments

3 Comments

dixon.nathan2mo ago

Testing on a bunch of different screens sounds like a huge waste of time and money. Most people have pretty normal phones now, so the differences are tiny. You can't chase every single weird display setting out there, that's a losing game. Just design for the most common setup and move on. Fixing it for one person in Arizona is a distraction from building new stuff.

quinn_kim451mo ago

Honestly I used to agree with that, just focus on the common stuff and ignore the edge cases. But then I saw our app completely break on a friend's old tablet, colors were all wrong and text was overlapping. Tbh it looked terrible and I was embarrassed I'd signed off on it. That one weird screen showed me how bad it can get for real people trying to use your thing. Now I get why checking a few different setups matters, it's not about chasing every single one, it's about not totally failing for a chunk of your users.

logan_schmidt2mo ago

Yeah, screen differences are a real trap... had a similar thing happen with font weights looking totally bold on some monitors but thin on others. Always gotta check on a few different devices now.