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Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

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Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#24
post #7

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

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.

Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#25
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.

Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#26
post #3

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 loade…

> 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.

Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#27
post #21

The gold standard for the web should be: Craigslist Fast, functional, responsive.

And as far as we know no tracking/propping up anything for attention regardless of ramifications.

I meant in terms of how the frontend is constructed.

Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#28
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.

Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#29
post #25

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 / M…

For me it's Twitter for Android. It keeps loading new tweets to replace tweets I'm actively reading in the timeline.

Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on

#30
post #28

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 awk…

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