My grandpa told me back in 2018 that large dropdown menus on mobile were lazy design, and now I finally get why after struggling to pick a flight time on my phone at 2 AM.

He was a retired web designer from Chicago and after fighting that stupid dropdown for 10 minutes I remembered his exact words, has anyone else had an older relative predict a UX trend before it became obvious?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant_torres14d ago

Jumped into this exact situation with my buddy last year when he was trying to book concert tickets on his phone. He spent a solid 8 minutes scrolling through a dropdown menu for the date picker, and I thought of your grandpa the whole time. He finally gave up and used his laptop instead, muting his TV to un-mute it by mistake 3 times before that. @kellymurphy you're right that bigger touch targets help, but that dropdown for time zones was still a nightmare for him. Has anyone else noticed how airline sites are the worst offenders with this stuff?

kellymurphy14d ago

Hear me out but dropdowns actually work fine if websites just made them bigger and added proper touch padding. The real problem is designers squeezing desktop menus into mobile instead of rebuilding the layout from scratch. Your grandpa was onto something about lazy mobile design but the dropdown itself isn't the enemy here.