I'm a designer by trade and I think Lichess is really well done. They've managed to pack a ton of features and have a game that works well for me on both mobile and web.
Certainly there are ways that it could be improved, but calling it "terrible" seems like a huge exaggeration to me and does practically warrant an illustrative alternative that would better suit the OP.
I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.
Agreed. It's a pretty good UI considering the complexity. My 7 year old frequents there and gets around without any problems or asking how to use the site.
> I'm a designer by trade and I think Lichess is really well done.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. If you asked designers about the state of mobile UIs about 12 years ago I think many would have praised them, then it came the iPhone and they vanished completely.
I've only mentioned very clear examples in my post, would you, as a designer, put 2 completely different menus (with basically the same functionalities), whose buttons are visible at the same time, on an app? Would you want to have the app scrollable if needed or not?
> I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.
Of course, currently lichess.org is doing the opposite by the way.
My complain was about the mobile app being a _completely_ different experience. i.e. there isn't the lobby, the first thing you see after you go to lichess' homepage.
That's just silly. One can have valid criticisms yet not know how to apply them. If I find a car's human interface intuitive, would you expect me to know how to manufacture a car's dashboard?
I'm not trying to make a different front-end for lichess but rather something similar to playok.com, from scratch, so it takes quite a bit of time. I haven't been working on the project for more than a year unfortunately, but so far:
- I've got the core UI framework mostly ready, unfortunately still undocumented but most components should be ready for production [1]
- Some core structures, like a Hierarchical State Machine implementation I made, should be good enough [2]
- I've implemented some games like tic-tac-toe and chess, but focusing mostly on the logic of the game rather than the UI or anything else really for now. I have a usable chessboard component but it's not really any good for production use.
- Database-wise pretty much everything still needs to be developed.
- The server/cloud infrastructure still needs to be developed.
- I still haven't quite figured out what the best way to push updates to the app is, given that you don't want to disrupt current games almost at all but you still want to push bug fixes to everyone.
Certainly there are ways that it could be improved, but calling it "terrible" seems like a huge exaggeration to me and does practically warrant an illustrative alternative that would better suit the OP.
I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.