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by robbedpeter 1738 days ago
The ui is hot garbage on mobile. No zoom, no visible or hinted access to menus, tiny ass font. It's not clever or attractive. It's a nasty bait and switch - presenting a lure of interesting information, then making it inaccessible in a way that forces the user to waste time trying to figure out how the hell to get at it.

Why do people need to constantly reinvent presentation formats? Literally nobody wants this, it only makes the information harder to view.

This is like a bad flashback to flash Nature is going into the dns blackhole.

4 comments

One explanation I can think is the person is not good at making a website. I have my own domain it just has some personal but public to the world stuff about me. It’s a mess of a WordPress site. Some things don’t work on mobile and I’m sure no one wants it lol. I just don’t know how to do it any better. But what I have done was a learning experience for sure. Maybe one day it will be better.
This is the journals pdf viewer not a personal website. Awful design contributes to why more and more academics use Sci-hub out out sheer convenience.
Yes all those journals are using readcube or a derivative which is a nightmare. They just don't want people to see the pdf as a first option. On many journals you need at least 3 clicks and 2 loading pages to get a pdf (unless you use a citation manager like zotero that would catch the pdf from the article page).
It took me a few seconds to find the download button though. I actually found it much more convenient than most of other scientific websites.