I've noticed that e-commerce sites don't use quick view on mobile. Some sites have quick view as a hover treatment, which obviously doesn't work on mobile, but J.Crew has a "quick shop" button always visible on desktop, and suppresses it on mobile. Is this purely because users don't like lightboxes on mobile?
1 Answer
There are several reasons for decisions like this:
Mobile apps tend to favor simplicity over efficiency. The quick view is a convenience feature that can potentially make the app more confusing/cluttered without helping deliver on the core functionality. Features like the quick view make it faster to use the app, but end up being more confusing for users. Also let's not forget that it's harder to develop, and so it gets left out.
Light boxes tend to have too many borders and take too much space, leaving very little space for the content. When you click on an image in your gallery app in Android/iOS you get something that is the closest to a lightbox (but for mobile). As long as users know what happened (single image popped up), and how to get back to the gallery you'll be fine.
