[HN Gopher] Front end developers: stop moving things that I'm ab...
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Front end developers: stop moving things that I'm about to click on
Author : ingve
Score : 458 points
Date : 2022-11-27 18:47 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medium.com)
| verelo wrote:
| Couldn't agree more with this. Search results that auto complete
| but pull from two sources that get unioned in the UI are my major
| gripe. Initial return is great, i go to click but then boom the
| second dataset comes in and i click the wrong click by accident.
|
| Drives me insane.
| bobthegrower wrote:
| You mean product managers. UI devs just implement what we are
| told to implement. The notion that we have a say in UX is
| laughable
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| And until devs stop enabling them, it'll continue happening.
|
| "Just doing what we're told" isn't an excuse, and doesn't
| obviate you of responsibility in perpetuating it.
|
| "They'll just get someone else to do it", but if we
| collectively put our feet down about not implementing dark-
| patterns, that threat can no longer hold water, and we all have
| a bit less user-hostile software in the world.
| oraphalous wrote:
| Aww bless - OP thinks FE devs get to choose what they implement.
| cloudking wrote:
| Twitter does this too on the algorithm timeline, open the mobile
| app, try to tap a tweet and it gets replaced after network
| update.
| pulvinar wrote:
| This is also a problem with seemingly stationary UIs, where a
| button is only shown when the pointer gets close to it.
| Especially when that button is within a clickable area, such as a
| thumbnail image.
|
| The ideal solution to all of these would be for the UI to keep
| track of drawing events and disable any click that occurs in
| proximity to a just-redrawn area, and beep instead.
| ptx wrote:
| The recently redesigned Gmail UI is a good example of this:
| Chats now show up as minimized icons, and moving the mouse
| pointer over the icon to click it causes a close button to
| materialize under the pointer.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| This. Some of us still remember Punch the Monkey.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| Here's the problem: developers cut their teeth on twitch video
| games and so they have no compunction about forcing users to play
| a video game at every app and every web page we encounter.
|
| It's funny, I frequent a government-owned website for people with
| disabilities and receiving public benefits, and one of their UI
| elements is a marquee message "You have a message!" which scrolls
| from right to left. If you are deft enough to click on it, you
| will discover that your password expires soon! (Your password
| always expires soon) That is actually not the important message
| section of the site but the system notifications that don't tell
| you anything about your benefits status or applications. It's a
| laugh riot every time I see one of those message marquees. I've
| quit clicking on them because I've figured out they are worse
| than meaningless.
| neeh0 wrote:
| Why developers? In most cases I know this is responsibility of
| product people who explicitly want that.
| saberworks wrote:
| Apple maps enrages me for doing this. When you first open the app
| it like shows a screenshot of what you were looking at last time
| while it loads. Sometimes that screenshot is retained as the
| active view (for example if I have a search up), but other times
| after a couple of seconds the whole app just resets. This causes
| me to hit the "dictation" button quite often instead of the X
| button that was on screen when I start tapping (X button to close
| previous search result is replaced with a view reset and now the
| dictation button is under my thumb).
|
| A screenshot of the app shouldn't be a loading screen!! It seems
| to depend on how long it's been since the app was last opened
| and/or how the internet connection is at the time. Bank apps show
| a proper loading screen.
| techsupporter wrote:
| > Apple maps enrages me for doing this. When you first open the
| app it like shows a screenshot of what you were looking at last
| time while it loads.
|
| This has started to really irritate me since it feels like
| _every_ application in Apple 's mobile ecosystem does this. My
| device has SIX GIGABYTES OF MEMORY[0]. Why do you need to swap
| everything out of RAM almost instantaneously?
|
| What grinds my gears the most is that state isn't preserved.
| Apple Maps and Music are the absolute worst for this. Music
| will show the same screenshot and then just unceremoniously
| dump me to the "Listen Now" or "Browse" screen (it seems random
| which) and completely disregard whatever playlist or album I
| was in. The last song I played and track position are kept but
| good damn luck getting back to the spot I was in--particularly
| which playlist--before the app got put on ice.
|
| That screenshot is just a point of "hahaha nope" frustration.
|
| 0 - Yes, I mean actual Random Access Memory, not "storage
| capacity."
| zinckiwi wrote:
| I don't know how they did it -- probably a highly sophisticated
| combination of machine learning and focus groups -- but YouTube
| will reliably dismiss the video controls brought up by a tap
| pricely 60ms before I reach the moment in the video that I wanted
| to pause on.
| s-xyz wrote:
| Hear hear. I am always amazed by this. Often linked to Cookies
| popups as well.
| smitty1e wrote:
| How many times have I tapped the lower-left icon in Android and
| then have the recently-used apps shuffle themselves ahead of
| opening the desired app?
|
| Copious times.
| nathias wrote:
| that's more a concern for UX designers, where the chief value
| should be consistency
| [deleted]
| jdswain wrote:
| You know what would help with this, if the click rectangle
| updates were delayed, maybe by 1 second, after the UI updates.
| Then if you were already aiming for a button when it moves, you'd
| still tap it.
| joezydeco wrote:
| And stop asking me to do a survey on your website when I've only
| been there for 5 seconds.
| smeej wrote:
| Or sign up for your email list.
|
| I don't know if I want to hear from you ever again yet!
| bee_rider wrote:
| Would you like to subscribe to this substack before you
| finish reading literally the first article you've ever seen
| by this author?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| What if we made the subscribe nag appear on screen at 8fps,
| would that entice you further?
| pmontra wrote:
| It's not only buttons, sometimes the whole UI moves. Many mobile
| websites use sticky headers and footers that stick or unstick,
| appear or hide according to the position of the users in the
| document, how long since they touched the screen, scrolled, etc.
| I either switch to reader mode or savagely use uBO's element
| picker to select and permanently hide those elements. At the end
| of the treatment either the header displays only when I scroll to
| the top and the footer when I scroll to the end or they never
| display. I really don't care because what I want to read is the
| content in between.
| Cameri wrote:
| ProtonMail does this a lot on mobile. It's so infuriating.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Instagram's search screen is the worst for this
|
| You start typing and at first it shows you best matched accounts
| - things you recently visited or you follow - and _then_ it loads
| in search suggestions on top of them, pushing the whole layout
| down
|
| when in reality you already saw the thing you were going to click
| on and now you misclicked on one of the suggestions
| etothet wrote:
| The current version of the Amazon Prime Video app (and maybe also
| the HBO Max app?) on Apple TV has one of the worst examples of
| this I've ever experienced. In their featured listings, they
| should cards of shows/movies in what is basically a portrait
| view. When one of the cards becomes active, after a second or two
| it becomes wider and its content and background image changes and
| the cards to its right are pushed out further to the right. So as
| you're looking at a card and you begin to read it, its entire
| contents is modified! It's so maddening.
| bombcar wrote:
| I HATE all the video apps I use - the one that drives me up the
| wall the most is that I _know_ they have a horizontal UI - I
| can see it on my TV - but on the phone you HAVE to browse in
| vertical, and play videos in horizontal.
|
| WHYYYYYYYYY
| kevmo314 wrote:
| The one that aggravated me the most was https://cloud.google.com/
|
| The "Console" button on the top right shifts just at the right
| point in time for me to see it but miss clicking it.
|
| I trained myself to start typing con to autocomplete
| console.cloud.google.com instead.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I always assumed it was done deliberately to trick users into
| clicking on ads...
| AdvancedSimian wrote:
| It happens so often that I, too, assume it is done for
| precisely the same reason.
| vlad wrote:
| A commercial app is just a blend of software bugs that
| encourages profitability (not too many bugs, not too few).
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| The gold standard for the web should be: Craigslist
|
| Fast, functional, responsive.
| Oxidation wrote:
| Or McMaster Carr. RS, with it's laggy backend (I assume, as
| their recent UI shinification didn't change it: it was bad
| before) could learn a lot from them.
|
| Then again, McMaster Carr want you to use an app on mobile and
| the new RS site works on mobile quite well, with the lag more
| hidden by the inefficiencies of mobile browsing in general.
| rjbwork wrote:
| McMaster Carr is one of the greatest websites there is. It's
| incredibly easy to find just about any kind of hardware.
| Oxidation wrote:
| One of the greatest features: when you download a 3D model
| file, you get the file, not a zip file containing the
| (single) file.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Ah, yes. Another classic.
| ianai wrote:
| And as far as we know no tracking/propping up anything for
| attention regardless of ramifications.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| I meant in terms of how the frontend is constructed.
| hnick wrote:
| whirlpool.net.au is so fast here in AU sometimes I refresh and
| I'm not sure it did anything.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I agree. This is the greatest sin of the modern web development
| sphere. So so irritating.
| fleddr wrote:
| All the examples are a case of unfortunate timing: asynchronous
| things doing late UI replacement that happen to conflict with the
| time window in which you click.
|
| That's amateur stuff. Our car does this intentionally. As your
| finger is in mid-air, on its way to hit something on the touch
| screen, it's detecting this motion and then shows a context bar
| in the top and bottom by the time you land your finger. Which
| often overlays whatever you were going to touch.
|
| It's so comically bad that I think a team of engineers is
| laughing back at the factory: "look! he's trying to touch
| something again!".
|
| The other prank they included is traffic alerts. You're sitting
| in a traffic jam for 10 minutes already and then my music stops,
| only to hear: slow traffic ahead.
| WaxProlix wrote:
| Some phones are great at this - if you're on a call and want to
| look up your account number to give to a service rep, getting
| close enough to tap an app button turns off your screen, even
| in speakerphone mode. Pull back your hand to tap the power
| button to turn on the screen? Well the screen detected your
| finger left and turned on just as you were hitting it. Now
| you're in a third state, intentionally off screen, and just
| moving your finger around the sensors won't change that. You
| have to tap the same power button again, and then start the
| process all over.
|
| Don't forget you've been talking to a service rep this whole
| time, or more likely sitting going "uhhhhhhmmm..." like a
| dipshit.
| Normille wrote:
| Way back when I first started learning to build web pages [when
| HTML4 was just a glint in Tim Berners-Lees eye], it was conidered
| bad form not to prvide a 'width' and 'height' attribute for an
| image you were placing on the page.
|
| Because if you provided these, the browser would know how much
| space to leave for the image to occupy after it had downloaded
| [this was back in the dial-up modem days. So images usually
| loaded gradually after the rest of the page] and so the layout of
| the page would not change. Conversely, if you didn't provide
| 'width' and 'height' attributes, the browser would only leave a
| default small icon sized space for the image and then you'd have
| the page content move and shuffle about as each image downloaded
| and the rest of the page content got elbowed out of the way, to
| accommodate it.
|
| It's funny how such basic concepts of usability seem to have
| fallen by the wayside in our new modern Web3 [or whatever version
| buzzword we're on now] in favour of moving content, modal
| overlays and the like. And, since so many sites these days just
| aggregate content from countless other external sources, even
| that basic notion of pre-defining your image sizes is often
| neglected too.
| xeonmc wrote:
| Every time I'm reminded of this:
|
| https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/333/130/835...
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| One of my first jobs as a front-end dev, I was told repeatedly
| if you released a site and had forgotten to put height, width
| on images, it was seen as a defect and would affect your year
| end metrics.
|
| By my second or third job, nobody seemed to care about it and
| when I brought it up, it was brushed aside as a "browser issue"
| and not something we devs needed to worry about.
|
| You make a great point, and something I'm seeing a lot more of
| now that I'm in accessibility.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > basic concepts of usability seem to have fallen by the
| wayside
|
| Sadly, the tech may have changed but both our ideas on
| usability and the incentives at play have remained the same.
| Which is to say, the devs I know of all know that popup videos,
| banners, modals, etc. are all trash much like the popup ad
| banners of 1997. But we do them anyway because the people that
| pay us have financial incentives that have been proven via
| misguided A/B testing that they work. And by misguided I
| mean... we're talking about manipulation, right? That's the
| whole shell game of A/B testing. You're testing your way to
| what works best for _you_ and not your _users_. It 's Tinder
| knowing the perfect match for you but not showing you that
| person because you'll quit the app if you ever met them.
|
| I can't even take a11y or people that advocate a11y seriously
| today. You built modals and carousels with frustrating timeouts
| that slide content before I'm done looking at it! You're a
| circus clown.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > That's the whole shell game of A/B testing. You're testing
| your way to what works best for you and not your users.
|
| A/B testing is a tool. Any tool can be misused.
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| On one hand: If a tool is being constantly and egregiously
| misused at large scale, might it not be reasonable to
| assign a degree of blame to the tool (e.g. tool has a "pit
| of success" that encourages/permits misuse.
|
| On the other hand: marketing and execs could misuse and
| abuse an empty room if they do desired, so I wonder why we
| bother giving them tools in the first place.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > If a tool is being constantly and egregiously misused
| at large scale
|
| That's quite the claim.
| chiph wrote:
| I would suggest that the enormous size of today's pages have
| taken us back to the behavior seen in the dial-up days.
|
| Then: Page was slow because the delivery was via a 56k analog
| modem.
|
| Today: Page is slow because the average page size is 2.2mb.
| Plus JavaScript parsing + execution time. Plus asynchronous
| calls to go load more stuff. Plus time to re-layout around
| the new stuff.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Anecdotal evidence to support what you're saying.
|
| I work for a large health care company. They got on the JS
| bandwagon a while ago. We used to have huge sites that
| loaded fairly quickly (under 2 seconds) and cleanly. Now?
| The last two years doing accessibility work - a lot of
| these same sites which have been converted to Angular or
| React? They're taking in excess of 15-20+ seconds to load.
| nicoburns wrote:
| 15-20+ seconds!!! What on earth are they doing to make it
| take that long? The React app at my last job was taking
| 2-4 seconds to load I joined the company (which I
| considered incredibly slow) and I had it at under a
| second by the time I left.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Page is slow because the average page size is 2.2mb. Plus
| JavaScript parsing + execution time. Plus asynchronous
| calls to go load more stuff. Plus time to re-layout around
| the new stuff.
|
| I think it's mostly blocking chains of multiple networks
| requests that execute in sequence (taking a network round-
| trip each time). I inherited a slow ~2mb frontend app at
| work, which seemed horrendously bloated to me. It turned
| out to be not that easy to reduce to the size (due to large
| amounts of code depending on large libraries), but it also
| turned out to be possible to make it load fast without
| reducing the payload size.
| frereubu wrote:
| This - "Cumulative Layout Shift" - is part of Google's Core Web
| Vitals -
| https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9205520?hl=en - so
| if people are doing that, they're going to be penalised by
| Google. (Although probably only a bit, given the number of
| other factors that go into search rankings).
| Beldin wrote:
| Meuh - google does this with youtube. Load video: video
| centered. Oh there's a side bar, let's shift the video. Oh
| the contents needs a smaller dimension, let's shift again.
| Rather annoying if you're used to watching videos at more
| than default speed - the control for that shifts 2-3 times.
| solardev wrote:
| I don't think Google's other products have to play by the
| same rules.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| A great one lately is Wikipedia's new search with suggestions. If
| I'm typing in the search bar, I may type a complete query and
| then press "Enter". Well, if my mouse happened to be hovering
| over a suggestion, then "Enter" will choose that suggestion
| instead of completing my chosen query instead.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Related to this, here's a pet peeves of mine. When YouTube is
| buffering a video, it shows a spinner and you can't press play or
| pause. Usually if something is buffering a lot I'm in a place
| with spotty internet, so I'd like to pause until I'm somewhere
| with better Internet. If I say pause, you should not continue
| playing the video under any condition. I have made my intent
| clear.
| thewebcount wrote:
| Oh man, so many video-related websites do this shit. It's even
| worse in some cases where if you hit pause, then drag the
| playhead back to the beginning (say because you want to wait
| and show the whole thing to someone), it starts playing again
| as soon as you let up on the playhead. Like, I want to pause,
| put the playhead somewhere and still be paused. Is that so
| fucking hard to understand?
| aendruk wrote:
| Reminds me of my Dell monitor. Years old muscle memory is:
| 1. Unplug laptop from monitor 2. Power off monitor
|
| but step one triggers some automatic input detection mode for
| about 10 seconds during which the monitor _ignores its power
| button_.
| userbinator wrote:
| I have my monitors set to always use the same input, but the
| reponsiveness of the buttons/OSD on some of the newer
| monitors is noticeably laggy for some reason. At least 100ms
| if not more between pressing a button and seeing the
| response. Ironically, I also have some Samsung LCD monitors
| from around 2 decades ago (they still work, but are rather
| small) where the OSD response is instantaneous.
| colanderman wrote:
| Similarly, my car (Subaru) won't let me turn off the radio
| for 10 seconds when I start it because it needs to display
| some ridiculous warning.
| wtallis wrote:
| My Samsung monitor has the same kind of problem. It's often
| quicker to hold down the button for several seconds and force
| a shutdown of the monitor, than to wait for the monitor to
| recover enough to be able to display the menu that has the
| power-off entry.
| [deleted]
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's so annoying. I'd be tempted to get a power strip or
| smart plug and so I could revert to: unplug laptop, cut power
| to device.
|
| Actually -- they make those "green" plugs, where power is cut
| from the majority of the plugs if none if flowing through the
| control plug. Maybe check those out.
| pull_my_finger wrote:
| Honestly, everyone knows this. If you're creating sites that do
| this in 202X you're just being willfully ignorant/lazy. There are
| plenty of component libraries for rendering placeholder
| components in the popular frameworks, react has the suspense API
| etc etc for exactly problems like this.
| layer8 wrote:
| Still delay-inserted content like the Wikipedia donation
| banners are a regular occurrence.
| Tiddles-the2nd wrote:
| When it comes to ad links I've always wondered if it's
| ignorance or done deliberately to make you click on the ad.
| frereubu wrote:
| It could well be naive A/B testing. "Oh, this configuration
| has really increased our click-through rates", not realising
| that it's because people are trying to click on something,
| and an ad jumps into the space that they're just about to
| click.
| keltex wrote:
| It also has to do with the ad networks. For example with
| Google adsense, they really encourage you to use responsive
| ads:
|
| "You can use responsive ads to provide a great user
| experience on your pages. They look good on desktop, tablet,
| and mobile devices. "
|
| But when you use a responsive ad, google can dynamically
| decide the height of the ad. They don't want you use use a
| fixed height container:
|
| "The parent container has fixed or limited height. Responsive
| ads should not be placed inside containers with a fixed or
| limited height, as they may be taller on some devices or
| browsers. If you need to limit the height of your responsive
| ads, you'll need to modify your code and use CSS media
| queries to set the height of the parent container."
|
| https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9183362?hl=en&ref_.
| ..
|
| https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/9183362?visit_id=6.
| ..
| pc86 wrote:
| Which is strange since Google will also penalize your site
| for shifting all the content after the initial paint. So
| they won't let you define a maximum width or height, but
| will also penalize you for having dynamic width and height
| elements.
| draw_down wrote:
| jtode wrote:
| Of all the things web designers do, this is the one that makes me
| want to reach through the wires and ju
| ldjb wrote:
| Something that really frustrates me is when an alert pops up on
| my screen just as I'm about to tap something, so my tapping then
| dismisses the alert before I've had a chance to read what it
| said.
|
| Hopefully the contents of said alert weren't important, but in
| most cases I'll never know...
| kadoban wrote:
| If this is for Android, there's a notification history you can
| look in. You may have to turn it on first, can't remember if it
| defaults on or off.
| colanderman wrote:
| In addition to this, macOS has the following bizarre behavior
| with notifications.
|
| If any one application emits multiple notifications (say,
| several new calendar items), they pop up in a group -- but this
| is hard to see, since they're all stacked on top of one
| another. There is an X at the top-left corner, just like all
| other notifications. When you go to click the X, the group
| suddenly expands, and _the X changes into a "Clear All"
| button_!! 80% of the time this results in me closing a large
| stack of notifications without realizing they even existed.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Yes; I've long wished there'd be a 500ms or so "no interaction"
| delay on these.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| I have googled the letter "n" countless times just trying to
| visit news.ycombinator on firefox android...
| zinckiwi wrote:
| There's probably a bit of the algorithm that is dutifully
| noting your long-time, consistent interest in n, and making
| sure to reward you for your dependability by canonising it
| ever-stronger in your profile.
| bombcar wrote:
| And now you're the world's leading expert on n
| delecti wrote:
| I've likewise googled "i" countless times trying to go to imgur
| on firefox windows for the same reason.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| * open instagram
|
| * see cool photo
|
| * go to interact with it
|
| * photo is gone, replaced with something else
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| Latest one to catch me out on is when receiving calls on my Pixel
| phone it will pop up "screen call" as an option where the "accept
| call" button had been half a second earlier, and not let you
| override it to actually accept the call.
| derekp7 wrote:
| That one caught me the other day (shortly after an Android OS
| update). I only saw it once, with the button down at the bottom
| of the screen. I can't seem to get it to do that again when I
| try calling my phone from another phone.
|
| Also, your report is the only instance I've seen to confirm
| that this happens -- for whatever reason no one believes me
| when I post something about this to any Android group. Just
| like I seem to be alone in trying to figure out how to get the
| Contacts (when launched from the dialer) to show only specific
| groups (such as contacts with phone numbers). I can do this
| from the Contacts app, but not the Contacts tab inside the call
| dialer app.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| How many times I haven't called the wrong number on iPhone. It
| somehow rearranges last called list exactly as my finger travels
| down to touch the screen.
| [deleted]
| nilslindemann wrote:
| I doubt that the reason for the suddenly appearing banner in the
| first example is a slow internet connection. The app checks if
| the mouse is near the button and then the banner is loaded. A
| form of clickjacking.
| lnauta wrote:
| Google with its 'related searches' that pops up because I clicked
| on a link and I am almost never interested in this extra
| information. When trying to filter the relevant javascript it
| breaks some other stuff on the page (last time I tried a few
| years ago). Grrmbl
| boosteri wrote:
| Related, on Android the Mobile wallet seem to went through an A/B
| testing of some sort, alternating between 'Google Pay' and
| 'Wallet' app couple of times. The icons would automatically
| disappear, replaced by the other option. Que me standing in front
| of the POS desperately scrabbling around my mobile screen,
| feeling like an idiot the first time it happened.
| drewbeck wrote:
| Instagram search is my daily frustration. 100% of the time I
| search I'm looking for a user's account. Type type type, see the
| user come up in results, go to tap but now they've loaded in 10
| possible autocomplete options for my search, pushing the thing I
| want off the screen. And of course now I'm in the "explore" page
| with a search term I don't want, taking a bunch more taps to get
| where I need to go.
|
| I agree with others that I think the incentives are against the
| user here. In the IG case they don't care if I find my friend
| quickly. It does not help them in any way. But hey they got a
| click on the autocomplete suggestions (win for that PM) AND
| another view on the explore page. Clearly I love these features!
| lame-robot-hoax wrote:
| This pisses me off more than it should. I've slowly gotten
| better at not immediately clicking on the account (which ends
| up with me clicking on the search result that shows there
| instead) but every time I forget I get unreasonably mad.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Anyone else try peeping the chat in Zoom?
| low_key wrote:
| It's awful. I absolutely hate it. First click: show chat.
| Second click: record meeting.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| I'm glad I'm not alone
| togaen wrote:
| jfc yes
| timnetworks wrote:
| Microsoft Teams is terrible with this. People are _constantly_
| responding with accidental and unrelated emoji reactions when
| trying to interact with a post.
|
| Nothing better than trying to reply to a death in the family of a
| coworker with a LMAO smiley.
|
| [edit] Microsoft Teams is just generally terrible. It's likely
| the worst piece of 'competent' software I have ever ever used.
| [/edit]
| itronitron wrote:
| It would also be nice to have functional scrollbars again,
| instead of the 3 pixel wide ones we have now which have removed
| support for clicking to scroll.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| I swear some of these are intentional results of bad A/B testing
| (or active maliciousness) - especially as it often seems that
| what you want to click moves out of the way for an ad.
| shitloadofbooks wrote:
| Steam does this when you're going through the discovery queue and
| land on page with a "stream" or whatever going. You're about to
| click Next and then the Stream element loads and shifts the whole
| page down ~500px and then you click on something else.
|
| It's absolutely infuriating!
| etothepii wrote:
| VSCode LiveShare
| sli wrote:
| I would, if I had literally any agency in these decisions. I can
| explain the problem, it will get nods, and I'll get told to do it
| anyway. Folks need to really adjust the focus of their criticism
| where it belongs.
| exabrial wrote:
| While we're at it... Front end developers: stop using JavaScript
| for _fucking everything _.
| mcv wrote:
| My biggest frustration for this is the typing completion on
| Android. I'm typing, and while I'm typing another character for
| the word, I see the word I want listed above the keyboard. But
| just as I hit the word, the suggestions update and my word is
| replaced by another. And often my word is still listed, but in a
| different place, which js incredibly annoying. Or sometimes the
| word disappears, despite it still being a valid completion for
| the word I'm typing. Why suggest it and then remove it?
| linsomniac wrote:
| A lot of the responses are talking about how apps should fix
| this, which I agree with, but I'd also like to see it at a higher
| level...
|
| I'd like to see frontends (browsers, Android, iOS?) remember
| their widget hit points for ~400ms, and if you've touched
| somewhere that had a different widget hit point within that time,
| use the old widget.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Or at a minimum don't go to the new widget but just have a UI
| indication that you registered the touch/click.
| a1371 wrote:
| AliExpress had this annoying thing that an ad bar would appear at
| the top of the screen about a second after page load. The ad bar
| would shift down the search bar just as you wanted to click to
| search something. So you'd accidentally click on the ad instead.
|
| This was (is?) the issue for quite some time. I always wondered
| if the analytics people knew about it or they thought that ad
| just gets a lot of hits. It was always some AliExpress promotion.
| neilv wrote:
| This problem first occurred in the mid-'90s, and people saw it
| was a problem, and that's why we specified the image dimensions
| in HTML (before the GIF or JPEG header was loaded), so the layout
| wouldn't shift during load, when people were already reading and
| navigating.
|
| Since almost the beginning, graphic designers were trying to
| layout Web pages like an advertising brochure, lots of bad ways,
| rather than as hypertext. When, in a sense, they finally did take
| control of the Web, HCI (usability in service of user) had
| evolved into "UX" (advertising-like graphic design in service of
| non-users).
|
| There's often disincentive for things like "user can understand
| what the controls are and what the state is", "user can focus on
| the information they want", etc. UX won't care about these things
| until some time after users are so aware of the problems that it
| affects engagement metrics and eventually A/B testing figures out
| why.
|
| I'm imagining a eureka moment, during which a UX researcher,
| trying to find a new, improved dark pattern, to screw over
| hapless users harder, accidentally lets slip in some old-school
| good usability, which wasn't even supposed to be in the test
| sets, but discovers that this strangely resonates with users.
| solardev wrote:
| In my experience, it was usually higher-ups and not the UX
| people who wanted to implement dark patterns. The UX people and
| devs wanted to make the enduser experience better (believe it
| or not), but were frequently overridden by some higher business
| priority (we NEED this popup as soon as the page loads! opt
| them in to all the newsletters by default! highlight the
| highest-margin products).
|
| Some companies just don't respect their users or customers,
| and/or try to optimize for short-term metrics that make some
| individual or agency or department look good at the expense of
| long-term loyalty. But I've never seen a UX person willingly
| suggest a dark pattern... all the ones I've worked with were
| forced to implement them, despite much protest, because some
| manager wanted it there.
| tartoran wrote:
| Both front end and backend devs are the eqivalent of
| workhorses who implement whatever the business wants. Few can
| afford to keep their record spotless and while I struggle to
| point out my own blemishes I sure as hell worked on things I
| didn't believe in or things I wouldn't do if I didn't have to
| earn a wage.
| seer wrote:
| It's not so hopeless though. Not sure about UX, but for devs
| there are plenty of jobs, so you are free to switch whenever
| you see people doing or worse, demand you to do, dark
| patterns.
|
| I've literally quit a job out of protest, where I started
| reading user emails complaining about the service we were
| building.
|
| Stuff like "put the unsubscribe button at the far end, gray
| on a gray background, so it will be harder to find". People
| were actually closing their bank accounts as they couldn't
| find a way to unsubscribe from the service...
|
| We had a few hard talks about it and when the company kept up
| with it I just up and quit.
|
| And I got a job for a lot more money almost immediately.
| Turned out people who would do that to users, were
| underpaying their employees quite a bit too, who would have
| thought...
| resonious wrote:
| I think this kind of thing is super easy to introduce with the
| modern practice of async everything.
|
| When I visit a modern webpage, it feels like I'm watching a golem
| take form from the debris around it. It starts out as this weird
| ugly contentless frame, and then things start popping in one at a
| time. It's quite hard to know when it's done.
|
| Makes me miss the days when servers would serve me a _full
| webpage_. Browser shows me that it 's loading, and once it's done
| it's done. It's also easier to develop sites like that, as you
| don't have to code your own loading spinners or make those weird
| "empty placeholder content" boxes that kind of show you how the
| site is laid out.
| seer wrote:
| What an apt analogy! I always thought of it as a transformer
| unspooling from its compressed "car" form.
|
| But thats what we get when multiple teams are responsible for
| the same web real estate.
| Jedd wrote:
| Spotify (on Android) is the worst offender for this.
|
| The playlist shortcut shows six playlists, but 2-5 seconds after
| rendering these, about the same time it takes you scan over them
| and see if the playlist you want is offered in this set and get
| your finger into position, it re-renders them with different
| content & different order.
|
| The full playlist selection does the same thing, using some
| hybrid and opaque MFU / MRU algorithm -- I'd be delighted with a
| pure alphabetical ordering, rather than having to visually scan
| down an unsorted list _that 's re-ordering itself as I read_.
|
| Mind, the Spotify UI can be held up as a shining example for
| basically every user-hostile anti-pattern, so I guess there's
| _some_ consistency in their design.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Interesting, I've encountered a lot of problems with Spotify on
| Android, but not that one.
|
| I did have to do some work to track down the alphabetical
| ordering feature for my playlist listing, after they unset it
| and moved it, but it is possible to set it, at least for the
| main listing (I find the MRU thing helpful for the "Add to
| playlist" menu, so I don't mind that I don't know if it's
| possible to set it there).
| bschwindHN wrote:
| Yep, Spotify immediately came to mind after reading the title.
| Happens on iOS too.
| kichik wrote:
| For me it's Twitter for Android. It keeps loading new tweets to
| replace tweets I'm actively reading in the timeline.
| yonrg wrote:
| Yes, just please ...
| butz wrote:
| My personal favorite is finding a place to put cursor, so
| animations would get stuck into endless hover/normal state.
| graycat wrote:
| I agree and don't like Web pages that are complicated, require
| time, clicks, and effort to _learn_ to use, have page content
| jumping around, cover the page with images requiring the user to
| stop what they are trying to do, change the window size and
| magnification, find a way to get rid of the image and do so,
| return the window size and screen magnification to what they
| were, and get back to the reason they came to the Web site.
|
| In my startup, uh, I'm on good terms with our front end developer
| and we agree on Web page design techniques:
|
| So, no popups, pull downs, overlays. Nothing on the screen jumps
| around or moves. Large, relatively bold fonts and high contrast.
|
| Always have both vertical and horizontal scroll bars.
|
| No warnings or requests to permit the site to use _cookies_ --
| the site makes no use of cookies.
|
| Hmm, maybe someone somewhere, maybe the EU, will make a big stink
| that we have not asked users to let us use cookies. Sounds like a
| good source of publicity until finally we end the stink
| explaining that we use no cookies and are not required to get
| approval for NOT using cookies!
|
| The site HTML makes nearly no use of JavaScript.
|
| Users don't login.
|
| Users are not asked to spend money or _up click_ on some
| popularity counter.
|
| The server cores generate each Web page quickly, and each page
| sends for only about 40,000 bytes. When we convert the storage
| for our SQL database from rotating disk to solid state memory,
| the page generation will be significantly faster. Net, the site
| is _responsive_.
|
| The pages and _user interface_ are based on just the HTML
| _controls_ with one line text boxes, push buttons, links where
| each link is a single word in the Roman alphabet in English with
| a simple meaning -- page design techniques very familiar to
| likely 2+ billion people.
|
| Ah, we don't expect 2 billion devoted users right away and will
| be pleased with 1+ billion!
| InCityDreams wrote:
| You're doing everything right regarding cookies, but have
| somehow managed to either not understand how the EU would
| regard your non-use of them, or your site does not exist.
| graycat wrote:
| What I wrote is just a guess and partly a joke: Cookies and
| requests to permit them are now so pervasive on the Internet
| that NOT making such a request might cause some people to
| assume the site WAS using cookies WITHOUT permission and make
| a "stink". I still suspect that there might be some such
| "stink".
|
| For the EU, I was poking fun at what appears to be some
| _heavy_ bureaucracy in the EU. Also I was referring to the EU
| as a geographic region and not necessarily a government. I
| was guessing a "stink" might come from some person, maybe in
| the media or some small organization; I didn't say or believe
| that my site would actually be violating some EU law.
|
| No request to permit cookies is one more way to save the
| users from _botheration_ and more quickly get to the purpose
| of the Web site.
|
| > your site does not exist
|
| The code runs as intended, and site exists and is on the way
| to being available to the public.
|
| The site seems to be by a wide margin the best solution for a
| problem.
|
| The problem the site solves is one part of a quite general
| problem. There should be opportunities for more startups to
| solve other parts of the general problem. The general problem
| should be good for 2 billion users, but the part being solved
| by my startup might be 1% to 5% of that, that is, 20 million
| to 100 million. That is the site has a _focused_ audience.
| The _focus_ stands to make the audience smaller but easier to
| please.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _Hmm, maybe someone somewhere, maybe the EU, will make a
| big stink that we have not asked users to let us use cookies.
| Sounds like a good source of publicity until finally we end the
| stink explaining that we use no cookies and are not required to
| get approval for NOT using cookies!_ "
|
| The EU does not require you to ask permission to use cookies if
| you do not use cookies. Encouraging web developers to not use
| cookies, and as a consequence have no banners, is one of the
| positive incentives of the cookie legislation.
| amelius wrote:
| In any case, when the browser decides that it has to move
| something and you click, then the browser should remember the
| state of the screen say 100ms ago, and use _that_ to determine
| what you wanted to click on.
| romellem wrote:
| I agree with [this][1] idea:
|
| > an autocomplete has one chance to reorder per keystroke. if you
| got it wrong and you have a better ordering a bit later you must
| "swallow the sadness" (as per the original author of this wisdom)
| but never change already displayed items
|
| [1]: https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1470751551568363530
| devnullbrain wrote:
| I want foo.
|
| - Type 'f'
|
| - foo appears in the search.
|
| - Type 'o', because I type with 10 appendages and getting them
| to work together requires pipelining.
|
| - foo disappears from the search
|
| This should never happen.
| colanderman wrote:
| +1000. I forget which search -- it's probably macOS Spotlight
| -- drives me batty with this daily.
|
| Firefox has a related misdesign. If you type a word which
| matches both a search keyword and a history item, the search
| keyword takes precedence -- which is nonsensical, since I've
| typed nothing (not even a space) _following_ the search
| keyword. So e.g. I have a `cpp` keyword to search
| `en.cppreference.com`; typing `cp`+Enter brings up
| `en.cppreference.com`, as does `cppr`+Enter, but `cpp`+Enter
| does a search for an empty string.
| yxwvut wrote:
| Just wanted to comment in agreement and confirm that this
| exact scenario drives me insane. Adding more information that
| agrees with the existing top suggestion should never change
| that top suggestion.
| [deleted]
| layer8 wrote:
| This happens all the time on iOS with the "predictive text"
| feature, it's maddening.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Can someone please tell the Windows Start Menu designers? Have
| completely ruined the experience as it constantly juggles items
| as its heuristics are seemingly updated. I especially enjoy how
| Bing results get prioritized over local applications and files.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| You're the product. I'm not sure they care what you think.
| layer8 wrote:
| The sane alternative is to use OpenShell.
| bombcar wrote:
| I cannot figure out how "upd" shows Windows Update but
| "update" does not.
| neogodless wrote:
| I realized the other day "stor" brings up Photos as the
| first result. I'm dumbfounded.
| cm2187 wrote:
| But most of all it doesn't seem to be deterministic. Very
| often I get a different behavior on the second attempt.
|
| Search in windows puzzles me. Like I don't get why it takes
| so long to search files in explorer, while traversing the
| same folder structure programmatically takes milliseconds.
| Hard computer science problem!
| hnick wrote:
| Users are spending more time in the Start Menu, and visit
| Bing more often: engagement metrics are up!
| krick wrote:
| Oh, it gets better. On Android (at least, LG-flavored one --
| never used any other android phone) I have an issue with inter-
| app "Share" button popup. It somehow manages to re-shuffle all
| the suggestions (apps/recipients) _exactly_ in the same amount of
| time that is natural for me to spend before clicking on the
| desired contact. Which several times made me send something to a
| wrong person, which resulted in extremely awkward situations. I
| don 't know how common that is, since it was never fixed after
| all the updates, but I still have to be very careful and to make
| an unnatural pause waiting for UI to update every time I use this
| feature.
| [deleted]
| brokenmachine wrote:
| The inconsistency of the UI is ridiculous too.
|
| There's countless examples, but the one that really annoys me
| every day is when the alarms go off.
|
| I have alarms to wake up in the morning, and on the alarm
| screen you have to swipe to dismiss, but to snooze you have to
| _tap_ the other button.
|
| Sleepy me has a lot of trouble remembering which one's which,
| even though I've done it probably a thousand times at this
| stage.
|
| And even though it's a big 6.7" or whatever it is screen, they
| make the buttons absolutely microscopic.
| meibo wrote:
| This still happens and it's the absolute worst, it gets worse
| the more apps you have. It's also just incredibly strange how
| it choose who to show in the share menu and there's no way to
| exclude apps.
|
| No, I never want to share anything ever at all to #company-all
| on Slack. Do not show it in my YouTube share menu when I want
| to send a dog video to my partner.
| macawfish wrote:
| This is so so so so bad. It's such a high stakes situation too.
| The instant-send shortcuts pop up right as I'm about to tap
| something else, causing me to send something directly to the
| wrong person with no intermediate step. What if I'm sharing
| something confidential or sensitive? Way too much room for
| error.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| I'm on Samsung and it doesn't re-shuffle as you're looking at
| it, but it's in a different order every time.
|
| It's so irritating if you're doing the same operation many
| times, ie sending the same picture to multiple people
| separately.
|
| Also the share menu has a different layout according to what
| app you're using. I understand that it's up to the app
| developer to get fancy with it, but it would be really nice if
| you could have a setting for "use standard share menus", or
| something like that. Or even better if there was some way you
| could make it be the same every time, like choose your favorite
| apps to share to.
|
| It's unbelievable that these billion dollar companies can be
| satisfied letting this garbage represent their product.
|
| I'd make sure to fix these if it was my hobby project, let
| alone a "finished" product that's on sale by a giant
| multinational.
| bavell wrote:
| Same here, every time I share something from YouTube -->
| NewPipe, the icon is in a different place, even when I'm
| adding multiple videos to my queue one after another. Every.
| Damn. Time. So frustrating.
| brokenmachine wrote:
| Yes, it seems to be random order. Not even "most recently
| used" or "most used", or anything.
|
| Just completely random - "fuck you, user - hunt though this
| random list".
|
| It boggles the mind who would ever think that would be a
| good idea.
| ajjenkins wrote:
| I agree that this is extremely annoying. It happens to me all the
| time with the iOS keyboard suggestions.
|
| For websites, Google calls the Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) and
| it's one of the Core Web Vitals they use for measuring website
| performance.
|
| https://web.dev/cls/
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Which is ironic considering Google search results do exactly
| this with suggestions after the page finishes loading.
| zikohh wrote:
| I came here to check that someone had mentioned this and I'm
| not the only one. No clue how the article didn't mention this
| because I get burned by it daily
| heavyset_go wrote:
| It drives me absolutely nuts to the point where I run a
| UserScript to disable it.
| wkjagt wrote:
| Same thing happens when error messages push the whole form down.
| This is annoying when for example I log in to my bank account
| using 1Password. When 1Password gets focus (and the login form
| loses focus), the login form immediately complains with an error
| message saying the fields are required and pushes the form down.
| When I select my bank login from the 1Password dropdown, I always
| immediately try to click on the "Sign in" button, which at that
| point moves up because the error disappears.
| NikkiA wrote:
| A particular bane of mine is the self-oscillating UIs, youtube is
| particularly bad at it these days - if the mouse pointer is in
| 'just the right place' (which is bigger than it sounds) then you
| get the seek-bar preview frames popup, which moves things just
| enough that the mouse pointer is no longer over the area that
| triggers it, so it vanishes, and the whole thing starts again.
| Oxidation wrote:
| This can happen in native UIs as well. I've had to add
| hysteretic behaviours to prevent the appearance of a scroll bar
| somehow obviating the need for the scroll bar, so it vanishes
| and now it needs a scroll bar, repeat as fast as the toolkit
| event loop allows.
| bchris4 wrote:
| Happens to me quite often with searching for apps on iOS, it
| almost seems perfectly timed to switch the icon you're
| tapping on right as you're tapping it
| esprehn wrote:
| This is why everyone switched to overlay scroll bars. It's
| also better for performance because you don't need to do
| layout on a screen worth of content only to realize you need
| to reserve 16px and do layout again.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Yep, another vote for always scroll bar here.
|
| And an additional complaint about those tiny-thin scroll
| bars that some idiot-designer though were slick because
| they so minimally interfere with the rest of 1920px-width
| display, which also makes them a giant pain-in-the-wrist to
| click on because the width to make it appear is so thin,
| and then clicking on the scroller is another challenge
| whereby it's much easier to accidentally make the scroll
| bar disappear. Rinse and repeat.
|
| I used to be half-decent at railgun in Q3A, but I now
| struggle to hit scroll bars. That's a fucking design
| problem.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| No the solution is to always show the scroll bar.
|
| Then I don't have to guess if there is anything to scroll.
| leetbulb wrote:
| I've always wondered, but figured that there must be, others
| who find this type of UI quirk (and find it humorous). "Self-
| oscillating" I like it. Thanks.
| devmor wrote:
| Twitter has an issue like this with its video player - clicking
| on the vertical volume bar to adjust it and moving past the
| seek bar that it intersects with causes the volume interaction
| to drop off in favor of the seek interaction.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| A general golden UX rule is to never cause layout shifts on
| hover events, preventing this sort of thrashing.
|
| Unfortunately, Google/YouTube and others have lost the plot and
| no longer employ good UX professionals in their flagship
| products.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I really wish UIs would stop doing things on hover events
| altogether. Just because I stop my mouse doesn't mean I
| intend to do anything, let alone auto-play a video or have
| some pop-up explain something to me. Let me rest my goddamn
| hand for a second!
| racked wrote:
| They probably employ large teams of both good and bad UX
| designers, constantly deploying and A/B testing UI changes.
| If the A/B test says the change wins, it stays.
|
| Sites like Booking.com do this to the umpteenth degree.
| zinckiwi wrote:
| At least they have the precisely correct blue, though.
| https://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-
| google.htm...
| vidanay wrote:
| YouTube also has the problem that there is almost no dead space
| to "park" your cursor. You have to carefully place it in
| between autoplaying previews.
| ksherlock wrote:
| There is a youtube setting to disable that. Settings ->
| Playback and Performance -> inline playback.
| thewebcount wrote:
| AppleNews on the iPad is like this. I literally can't touch
| anything on the screen when reading news on it or I'll
| accidentally "subscribe" to something, or open a new article,
| or worse, put an article into some weird 1/3rd size window
| that can't be gotten rid of and sticks to the side of the
| screen. It's fucking maddening.
| racked wrote:
| Netflix is the worst at this. Nearly every time I use it, the
| UI will piss me right off.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| I've noticed this with JIRA, there is not much space to click
| 'safely' to focus on the window
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Azure DevOps is the same if not worse. I'm forever
| expanding or contracting the Description and Acceptance
| Criteria as there are no colour shades differentiating the
| sections - you have to watch the cursor change.
|
| Then I wonder where the Description and Acceptance Criteria
| are for the next User Story, because it remembers that you
| (accidentally) contracted the Description for User Story X
| therefore you obviously don't want to see it for any
| others...
| FridgeSeal wrote:
| Even the blank spaces in jira can cause things to happen!
|
| Accidentally click on some white space? Well too bad, we've
| closed whatever you're looking at, even though you're not
| in a modal. Oh and also, you'll need to wait 30-seconds for
| this new page to load, and you can't just bail out and go
| back a page, because your browser can't hold the previous
| page in cache/memory properly because it's some overly-
| complicated JS app.
| solardev wrote:
| Jira is basically a UX anti-goldmine... a single place to
| go to learn all the things NOT to do.
| rendaw wrote:
| And the autoplaying is them wallpapering over the issue that
| thumbnails are user chosen and now have no relevance to the
| actual video, right?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Since Office apps started putting an increasing number things
| in the title-bar (search, autosave, username, filename)
| there's limited dead space to use for traditional things like
| dragging and maximise / restore. I'm never sure where to
| 'grab' or double click - I don't know if I'm going to start a
| click-failure cascade if I do it in the arbitrarily, non-
| obviously 'wrong' place.
| plorg wrote:
| Relatedly, many websites have nowhere to tap that doesn't do
| anything. If you try to select some text then want to tap
| away (to clear the copy/select all/etc popup) you can't do so
| without navigating away from the page or causing something
| else unwanted to happen.
|
| This gets doubly frustrating when navigational elements don't
| contain actual anchor links. If you long-tap on mobile to
| open in a new tab, the browser decides you are selecting text
| and there is almost no way to dismiss the resulting copy/etc
| popup without tapping elsewhere on the page - which you
| cannot do without navigating elsewhere or otherwise causing
| an unwanted action.
| ianai wrote:
| That sort of stuff is outright user abuse.
| pc86 wrote:
| No, it's just a bug.
| toast0 wrote:
| Google cloud console does this kind of thing without even
| needing to have the mouse anywhere in particular. I just close
| my eyes and click on where I hope the target will remain.
| ptato wrote:
| Where is that spot? That has never happened to me, but I'm
| curious to see what it looks like.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| Slightly unrelated, but all these media streaming apps and
| services like Netflix/Prime Video/Youtube etc. are so horrible
| by automatically playing whatever the fuck I am currently
| focused on, although I am just scrolling to somewhere to find
| my content. There is no way for users to focus "out" of the
| thumbnails, other than focusing on a different thumbnail, and
| it keeps playing the nonsense. All I would do is go back all
| the way to main menu or where I started
| chillfox wrote:
| As someone who usually keep the mouse away from what I am
| looking at (I find it distracting) It's super annoying for
| random shit that I am not looking at to be activating.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| At least on YouTube you can turn that off.
| atahanacar wrote:
| ...only if you have an account.
| X-Cubed wrote:
| You can turn it off on Netflix too:
| https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102
| jamiek88 wrote:
| You can?! Investigation time!
| climb_stealth wrote:
| Holy cow, I had no idea. This is how to do it: when on
| the youtube page, click on the profile button in the top
| right -> settings -> playback and performance on the left
| -> disable inline playback.
|
| /edit: It still plays videos on hover after changing it.
| Only now there is no player popup anymore.
| hnick wrote:
| Following the same theme of liminal UI areas, another thing
| that peeves me is touch screens like my local supermarket self-
| checkout which respond with a beep (indicating they know I hit
| the button) but do nothing, because apparently the beep-region
| and action-region and not the same. Or maybe I dragged my
| finger, in which case, please don't beep.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| I spent half an hour last night resolving this exact class of
| bug on a padded clickable widget I was making.
|
| No one told me it had to be perfect, but I care about the
| user and don't ever want the user to be surprised.
|
| That's the difference you get with outsourcing your
| engineering team vs developing in-house. If you choose a good
| team, your developers feel directly responsible for the user
| experience, go beyond stated requirements, and aren't just
| doing the bare minimum in order to make a paycheck. A good UX
| professional is constantly testing their work with unexpected
| input.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| I disagree that this is an invariant of outsourcing; I have
| worked plenty of places where the contractors/vendors cared
| more than the FTEs. Conversely, the pressure for dark
| patterns has generally come from the inside.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| This isn't a dark pattern, it's a combination of
| incompetent designer-developers and a lack of robust
| specification (on account of assuming competence in your
| designer-developers)
| hnick wrote:
| I personally think that was a decent use of time - 30
| minutes vs a product-lifetime of not pissing off users that
| little bit will give a lot of goodwill payoff. But I have
| worked at a place with in-house developers where they
| probably wouldn't have showed the initiative to do it
| themselves, and if brought up later as an annoyance I'd be
| asked for a "business case" which is a complete non-
| starter, because how do you even begin to quantify this in
| a way everyone can agree on?
|
| I value polish for its own sake highly as I think you do
| too, a well made tool is more rewarding to use. But the
| ones forecasting developer effort need a concrete
| justification. So it's best to just sneak this in if you
| can and hope other people you work with feel the same,
| after all it's much quicker to do it up front than to lose
| context and revisit it later. Asking permission will cost
| far more than your 30 minutes.
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Agreed. Just make the best product you can, minding
| deadlines. If you think your deadlines are too short for
| the level of polish you prefer, discuss it with your
| manager and/or decide what is more important to you:
| polish, or pay. Whether that means putting up with it,
| finding a better-aligned organization, or starting your
| own product.
| rounakdatta wrote:
| Even the most UX-sensitive apps like Google Dialer (Phone) does
| this bad behaviour. The Speaker button moves as soon as the call
| gets connected.
| teawrecks wrote:
| Steam does this to me. Some games use an Invite button to open a
| special steam invite menu. This shows all my friends with an
| invite button next to them. It also insists on dynamically
| sorting the list based on the person's current status (ex.
| Starting/stopping a game). So if I hover over the invite button
| for someone, and someone higher than them in the list moves lower
| (or vice versa) right before I click, suddenly I'm inviting
| whoever happened to be adjacent to them in the list. This has
| only led to an awkward "actually I didn't mean to invite you"
| conversation once.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| All the product teams think your accidental clicks on their
| broken UI are "engagement", validating the continued use of that
| layout
|
| And they also think your frustration is "longer engagement",
| validating their KPI and job security and companies ability to
| sell shares
| naveen99 wrote:
| gmail does this annoyingly also
| cm2187 wrote:
| The signal desktop app does that. I often open it to read a
| message I just received. But by the time I click on the top
| contact it is replaced by an update signal button. Very
| frustrating.
| userbinator wrote:
| Front end developers: Stop making SPAs.
|
| 99% of the time I'm forced to use a site that turns out to be a
| horribly bloated SPA that I only get to see after enabling JS,
| and which will do irritating things like what is described in the
| article, among others, it's to do something that could've easily
| been done with a simple HTML form and perhaps a bit of JS
| enhancement.
| zikohh wrote:
| Google search result suggestions beneath hyperlinks is one of the
| worst at this. Was happy to see this article
| postalrat wrote:
| OS developers: stop opening a window I didn't open on top of the
| window I was just interacting with.
| hnick wrote:
| Would it be possible on the rendering engine side to detect if an
| item re-flowed and discard the user event if it happened within
| some time e.g. ~200ms ago? Something sites could opt out of for
| HTML games or things where it is intended behaviour. It's
| probably a bad idea, but it might help.
|
| Side note about the first example, I wonder if Lyft is having
| chats about "Users really want to set up group rides, but always
| back out of the funnel - we have to make it easier for them!"
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| I thought this would be about frontend websites with ads, to me
| that is much worse problem than these mobile apps. At least
| mobile apps (native ones) provide a unified UI and framework,
| front end sites insult the user by ads which move the html around
| on the fly.
|
| Anyone know what I mean? Can anyone relate to my frustration?
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