This really grinds my gears: I was just on pluralsight but seems like 90% of websites have this problem where existing members are treated as 2nd class citizens. I executed a search for "UX" and found a class I waned to see. After clicking int it I was given 2 options "sign up" and "cancel". So as an existing paid customer my only options are "login" on upper right which then puts me on main member screen so I can perform that search again. or go through login process, and then hit the back button exact # of times to put me back a that search results page. Then if they didn't fuck that up i'd be able to go to that course and see it. And believe me, some websites manage to fuck that up too.
Other versions of this UX antipattern is where you try to get to the content and 99% of the screen is about signing up while 1% is the tiny "sign in" hyperlink. It causes much anxiety to actually locate it.
The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
41–50 of 89 posts
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#42This really grinds my gears: I was just on pluralsight but seems like 90% of websites have this problem where existing members are treated as 2nd class citizens. I executed a search for "UX" and found a class I waned to see. After clicking int it I was given 2 options "sign up" and "cancel". So as an existing paid customer my only options are "login" on upper right which then puts me on main member screen so I can pe…
close cousin to this problem is lack of clear login area. Take Evernote for example, home screen has all of it's homepage taken with big photo, plan explanations, sign up form. But for existing users ? there's a tiny hamburger icon up top which you have to click to reveal the "sign in" link which will then finally give you the login form. This is so frustrating my only possible understanding is "f existing users since we already have their money"
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#43The most annoying "focus stealing" for me is what (some?) browsers do when actions initiated earlier on (like clicking on a bookmark that doesn't appear to load) finish while I'm typing in the address bar: they just overwrite what I typed with the new URL, or cause focus loss on the address bar so I suddenly type "nowhere". So frustrating...
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#44The most annoying "focus stealing" for me is what (some?) browsers do when actions initiated earlier on (like clicking on a bookmark that doesn't appear to load) finish while I'm typing in the address bar: they just overwrite what I typed with the new URL, or cause focus loss on the address bar so I suddenly type "nowhere". So frustrating...
IM clients that steal focus when a new conversation begins are fantastic about this. More than a few times a coworker has gotten half a line of random code as a response when they try to ask me a question over Sametime.
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century. A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."
I highly recommend The Design of Everyday Things to everyone I know who is designing any kind of user interface, whether machinery, houses, or software. I believe that until there is some effective, easy, and universally-accepted metric of UI quality, there will be little to differentiate good designers from poor. ("Our UI meets UIQC Class 1 Standards", or in a specification, "All user screens must score level 96 or…
There is the multi-part ISO-9241 that covers the ergonomics of human-computer interaction. It even provides a definition of usability.
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#46Can we talk about search dialogs that are not actually dialog boxes ? I first saw it at netflix - instead of a search box in the upper right, there is a picture of the word search and if you click on that picture of the word search it becomes a textbox[1] that you can type into. As if that's not bad enough, the word "search" can turn into a textbox faster than it takes to fully load the control, which means you get t…
That's what Netflix got from using Reactjs. Facebook people search on mobile page version uses React too. It worked very well as a traditional AJAX search. Then they changed to to use React and now it takes a second or two to initialize and load the page (even it is in cache). And the search textbox doesn't feel like a native textbox, it's very laggy and shows inputs way too many milliseconds later. And on top of this the search result adds another delay. So searching for "Joe doe" means a laggy delay for every character as you try to type it in. Why? It tries to guess the person after every keyboard change event. Something that worked fine with the original AJAX version (Facebook optimized that version a lot an blogged about it / wrote a paper). Sadly with the React rewrite the forgot to read their own blog and probably React is an overkill for such a type of page and consumes to much CPU cycles on mobile devices. If you have to refresh 90% of the search results page anyway, why use React? Building and diffing a VirtualDOM isn't cheap (and ShadowDOM isn't supported), and it would be a lot faster to simply overwrite the DIV with innerHTML and traditional vanilla Javascript AJAX. Use the right tool, don't use a hammer for everything.
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#47Request to all designers - please stop building nested scroll and drag interactions. Common pet peeve for me recently is embedded map widgets in web pages. A user scrolling the page will find at some point that their mouse has come over a map which is now eating the scroll events and they are now scrolling the map instead. Only choice at that point is to move the mouse over and start scrolling over. Bonus annoyance -…
Courseware MOOC platform nests things it's so amazingly bad. I forgot how bad it was.
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#48Does anyone have enough experience with Tk and REBOL why these should be exemplar as far as UI and layout is concerned?
I implemented a gui for SimCity in Tk, and at the time (~1993) it was the best user interface toolkit for X11 available, but only because the competition was Motif and its ilk. The reason it was relatively good in that context is that it had a built-in scripting language: TCL. (So did WINTERP, but that was XLisp + Motif, so Motif made it suck a hell of a lot more than XLisp made it win.) As a scripting language, TCL…
Thanks again for your incredible work on SimCity.
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#49I always thought "Don't make me think" was a bit of a UI reference that everyone should read.
I got a lot of grief from fellow software developers at Progeny (RIP Ian) for having that book lying around.
May I ask why? Is there anything wrong with that book from a developer's point of view?
Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over
#50If you decide to study how to build bridges, you will start out with calculus, build a background in science of materials and then a guided tour of approaches to structure-building. In addition, you have to learn typical environmental factors. And, of course, there are workflow patterns and human factors involved in actually constructing a typical bridge. Oh, and sure, there will be a bit of CAD. Let's apply this met…
Where/how do I learn good design? I'm an iOS developer with just under a year of full-time experience. I have never had to design anything at work, and I'm painfully aware that my design skills are horrible.