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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

#111

Post by at-fates-hands »

chiph wrote: post #100
deckard1 wrote: post #26

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…

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.

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.

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

#112

Post by solardev »

Beldin wrote: post #89
frereubu wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

I don't think Google's other products have to play by the same rules.

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

#114

Post by lame-robot-hoax »

drewbeck wrote: post #74

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 ot…

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.

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

#115

Post by esprehn »

Oxidation wrote: post #33
NikkiA wrote: 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.

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.

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.

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

#116

Post by aendruk »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #20

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.

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.

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

#117

Post by nicoburns »

chiph wrote: post #100
deckard1 wrote: post #26

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…

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.

> 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.

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

#118

Post by nicoburns »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #111
chiph wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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

#119

Post by princevegeta89 »

NikkiA wrote: 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.

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

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

#120

Post by bee_rider »

aendruk wrote: post #116
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #20

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.

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 .

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.

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