Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 365 posts

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

#161

Post by wtallis »

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 .

My Samsung monitor has the same kind of problem. It's often quicker to hold down the button for several seconds and force a shutdown of the monitor, than to wait for the monitor to recover enough to be able to display the menu that has the power-off entry.

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

#162

Post by zinckiwi »

soulofmischief wrote: post #128
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.

A general golden UX rule is to never cause layout shifts on hover events, preventing this sort of thrashing. Unfortunately, Google/YouTube and others have lost the plot and no longer employ good UX professionals in their flagship products.

At least they have the precisely correct blue, though. https://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.htm...

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

#163

Post by jamiek88 »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #138
princevegeta89 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

At least on YouTube you can turn that off.

You can?! Investigation time!

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

#164

Post by zinckiwi »

bondarchuk wrote: post #45

I have googled the letter "n" countless times just trying to visit news.ycombinator on firefox android...

There's probably a bit of the algorithm that is dutifully noting your long-time, consistent interest in n, and making sure to reward you for your dependability by canonising it ever-stronger in your profile.

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

#165

Post by zinckiwi »

I don't know how they did it -- probably a highly sophisticated combination of machine learning and focus groups -- but YouTube will reliably dismiss the video controls brought up by a tap pricely 60ms before I reach the moment in the video that I wanted to pause on.

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

#166

Post by dpkirchner »

bee_rider wrote: post #122
smeej wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or sign up for your email list. I don't know if I want to hear from you ever again yet!

Would you like to subscribe to this substack before you finish reading literally the first article you’ve ever seen by this author?

What if we made the subscribe nag appear on screen at 8fps, would that entice you further?

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

#168

Post by andrewflnr »

Jedd wrote: 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…

Interesting, I've encountered a lot of problems with Spotify on Android, but not that one.

I did have to do some work to track down the alphabetical ordering feature for my playlist listing, after they unset it and moved it, but it is possible to set it, at least for the main listing (I find the MRU thing helpful for the "Add to playlist" menu, so I don't mind that I don't know if it's possible to set it there).

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

#169

Post by racked »

soulofmischief wrote: post #128
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.

A general golden UX rule is to never cause layout shifts on hover events, preventing this sort of thrashing. Unfortunately, Google/YouTube and others have lost the plot and no longer employ good UX professionals in their flagship products.

They probably employ large teams of both good and bad UX designers, constantly deploying and A/B testing UI changes. If the A/B test says the change wins, it stays.

Sites like Booking.com do this to the umpteenth degree.

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

#170

Post by racked »

vidanay wrote: post #68
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.

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.

Netflix is the worst at this. Nearly every time I use it, the UI will piss me right off.
Post reply on HN