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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#152
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.

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.

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

#154
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.

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

#155
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.

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

#156
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.

And the autoplaying is them wallpapering over the issue that thumbnails are user chosen and now have no relevance to the actual video, right?

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

#159
post #71

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…

Yes; I've long wished there'd be a 500ms or so "no interaction" delay on these.

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

#160
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.

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.
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