Damn you mobile UX

As someone who has been developing interactive web-stuff for quite a while, I find it incredibly frustrating that I’m still shooting in the dark when it comes to design for mobile interaction. With the explosion of random every-day users getting into mobile computing and starting to test the bounds of pseudo-technical voodoo, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find information about “that annoying thing your mobile browser is doing”.

For me, today’s “that annoying thing your mobile browser is doing” is a lovely accessibility item on mobile chrome: when you tap an interactive element (in this case a div I’ve bound with a touchstart handler), the browser will fire the event, then do an annoying zoom-in overlay. I assume that’s because the browser is under the assumption that you couldn’t click on one element without accidentally tapping another element.

Oh look, this was useful

It frustrates me as I always ensure that there’s plenty of interaction and gutter space around these things. I’m now trying to dig up the magical CSS an/or javascript events to call and squash this particular behavior. The best I can find are people on stackoverflow encouraging voodoo rituals of unknown potency (each of which is naturally accompanied by years of anecdotal “this worked on that device” or “this doesn’t ever work, try this other thing that’s 4 years old and completely fake too [link]“).

Dear Google, please get me to what I need when I type in “fix the annoying zoom thing when I tap something on a mobile browser.”

Thanks!

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