It appears there has been an update to the inat mobile website, and the login button seems to be gone, or at least hidden somewhere I was unable to find. Is this intentional? If so, why? I can still get to the login page by searching “inat login,” but it seems it ought to be easily accessible from the home page
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Looks like it might be hidden for smaller screen devices. This is how it looks on Pixel 9 in Chrome with my normal display size.
And when I set display sizes larger in my phone settings.
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Strange. My phone isn’t that small, and I use default display size…
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looks unintentional to me. it seems things get wonky at different zoom / magnification levels. maybe it just wasn’t tested on setups where folks have larger magnification settings.
of the 3 buttons on the top right, log in disappears first, followed by sign up, and the donate button shrinks to just a green heart before finally disappearing. i guess that accurately reflects priorities?
in my mind, when things disappear from the top right, that is probably ok, but they should move into the menu on the top left so that they don’t get lost. (it probably wouldn’t make sense to add a second drop-down menu on the top right.)
it should also be possible to force the screen to wide enough to display all three buttons, at the cost of forcing the user to scroll to the right to see the other buttons. (i think that’s a less desirable design than moving the lost buttons into the menu.)
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Hey, thanks for sharing this! With limited space in the mobile header, we made the decision to prioritize Sign Up and Donate buttons before the Log In button — the hope is that this makes it easier for people discovering iNaturalist for the first time to jump right in. And for now, you can find a “Log In” option at the bottom of the sign-up page.
Couldn’t you shrink the big Donate button first? I would think that being able to actually use the site would take priority (and lead to more donations in the long run).
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Agreed. I guarantee you, newcomers to the site aren’t immediately jumping in to fork over money. That would be established users who already have a personal investment in the site
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maybe the thought is that it doesn’t matter since the rest of the site doesn’t automatically scale for mobile-sized screens?
maybe someone who actually wants to use the site would really have to use it with their mobile device in landscape mode anyway? (if in landscape mode, you’d be able to get the login button.)
(i still think the best design is to move buttons that disappear into the top-left menu.)
Personally, I am really not a fan of this change. I expect a login button to always display on the homepage of any account-based website I use and don’t think this is a big ask. Having to pretend to signup, scroll to the bottom, and then click login seems needlessly convoluted (especially as iNat seems to love to log me out of my account about once a month!) and user unfriendly. You’re only ever going to sign up for iNat once, but you could easily log in hundreds of times.
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Exactly. I would argue the login button is the most important button on the page, and the one that people will want to use most often when visiting. Especially as the new app is basically nonfunctional for me, I rely on the website to see any notifications other than ID’s on my observations
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I use default display settings and regularly log out and log back in using the browser page.. I have few annoyances with the site on mobile but this is certainly a new one.
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I can think of zero cases where I or anyone I know have ever donated to a social or interactive site before even signing up for an account. there is no obvious a priori reason for “Donate” to appear as the very first option if getting users to jump right in is the goal, as others have said.
of course, if iNat staff have done market (nonprofit?) research that shows otherwise, that people will donate before they ever start using the platform, I’d be intrigued to see it and will restructure my own website to put a donation button front and centre.
(I’m not being sarcastic – that could be great.)
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actually, the homepage looks bad in landscape orientation:
the page doesn’t stretch to fill the width of the screen (except for one of the footer blocks) and aligns to the left, leaving a strip of empty space on the right side of the page.
and actually the hamburger menu disappears in landscape mode, and the community and more dropdowns are a little harder to activate via touch (compared to activating the hamburger menu). also, the search link in the hamburger menu doesn’t seem to show up anywhere on the top bar in landscape mode.
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Tell me more (in another thread)
Putting Donate first, is similar to website with a popup demanding that you … subscribe … whatever … before you can read / do what you came for. Very offputting. Unless your readers are determined. Let a newbie, or an established iNatter use the site a bit - then popup (now you have been here a while, donate ?)
Apart from - how many iNatters do you lose, because they cannot find the login button ?
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It’s surprising that iNaturalist would launch such an unpolished new home page only a week before City Nature Challenge! I hope they can get it fixed before then.
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I guess that users never see this page. Translations are buggy, cause AI does not see the context. Had been better to publish it after the CNC, cause I do not see new functionality..
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I’m a software developer who has worked on small teams with product managers, designers, and engineers. I think prioritizing a donate button over a sign in button is bad design. There should have been a process in place where someone on the iNat team pointed out potential problems with new button layout, done some user testing to get feedback, and come up with alternate button layouts that tests well with users. All that work should have been done before the revised home page was launched.
I saw the iNat job listing for someone with a background in user research. I hope that is a sign that iNat will develop better processes in the future that prioritizes the needs of the users.
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Update to this, the app had been freezing up and getting stuck on infinite loading screens every time I tried to use it, I ended up deleting it recently, but tried downloading it again yesterday. And now it works. So the problem seems to be gone for now, fingers crossed. I’ll make a new thread if it comes back. There may have been an issue with my phone not automatically updating the app
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I’ve had quite a few problems with it, and I know some people planning to post further threads. A sampling of the issues I’ve noticed:
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