Investigate removing double mouse click to get from Composer file to desktop preview #154
Description
At the moment, when you preview an article from composer, you have to tick a checkbox that says “Mobile checked & verified” before you can click the Desktop button to see a desktop-size preview (rather than the mobile-size preview, which is shown initially). This has been flagged as annoying and apparently pointless, for example when Emily shadowed Catriona O’Shaughnessy, and we’d like to remove it.
It appears to have been added when the new preview view was designed, and we believe this was to emphasise to users that most readers will see articles on mobile, and so we should prioritise that view of the article.
We don’t think that it’s a particularly good way to emphasise the importance of the mobile view to users, and we suspect most people ignore it. There is code in the app to measure how long it takes people to switch to desktop view, but since google analytics was removed this is not being recorded: we suspect getting this working again would give us good evidence that this is not useful.
We wonder instead about displaying a side-by-side mobile and desktop preview (inspired by a similar feature in fronts), which @liamness has looked into a bit in 10% time. This would hopefully get users to keep the mobile view in mind without getting in the way of their objective, which we think is frequently to specifically check the desktop preview.
We also wonder whether we should be encouraging users to focus on how the article looks on a specific platform at all: as @paperboyo has pointed out, there are many possible (current and future) platforms that users may read an article on, and we should consider focusing instead on ensuring that articles are well represented in composer, with making them look good on a specific platform being the job of the tooling.
However, we don’t plan to focus on this for now. We anticipate it will take some effort to convince stakeholders to let us change this (as we think some people still feel this is important, though we’re not sure who), and we think the benefit is too small to be worth it.