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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

#91
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!"

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

#92
post #15

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.

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.

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

#93
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've noticed this with JIRA, there is not much space to click 'safely' to focus on the window

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.

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

#95
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coul…

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.

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.

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

#97
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 prove…

> 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.

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.

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

#98
post #68
post #15

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.

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.

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.

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

#99
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…

Yep, Spotify immediately came to mind after reading the title. Happens on iOS too.

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

#100
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 prove…

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.

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