My favorite hate in this field is youtube.com. You go to the site, it loads the nonsense background with the items outlined, that they claimed is important for transitions, pop effects and other buzzwords that they don't understand. Proof, when the page finishes loading some hero garbage pops up and pushes all the crap down 1/3 of the page.
Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
341–350 of 365 posts
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience, it was usually higher-ups and not the UX people who wanted to implement dark patterns. The UX people and devs wanted to make the enduser experience better (believe it or not), but were frequently overridden by some higher business priority (we NEED this popup as soon as the page loads! opt them in to all the newsletters by default! highlight the highest-margin products). Some companies just don't re…
It’s not so hopeless though. Not sure about UX, but for devs there are plenty of jobs, so you are free to switch whenever you see people doing or worse, demand you to do, dark patterns. I’ve literally quit a job out of protest, where I started reading user emails complaining about the service we were building. Stuff like “put the unsubscribe button at the far end, gray on a gray background, so it will be harder to fi…
Realistically, not being so young anymore, I think it's a matter of picking my battles. I'm plenty vocal at work, and have resigned jobs in the past for serious human rights transgressions (such as one startup trying to sell their filtering technology to China to censor dissidents).
An annoying popup message would warrant a direct complaint from me. A pattern of bad UX might cause me to jump the ladder and try to get somebody to pay attention and change things. But quitting in protest isn't something I can always afford to do, and it isn't always the best strategy for change anyway. If you come across as unreasonable or explosively reactive, they'll just replace you with someone they deem more level-headed or compliant and do the thing they were going to do anyway. But if you have an opportunity to use persuasion/diplomacy instead of force, sometimes that can work.
Anecdotally: I don't typically work in "pure" tech, instead getting jobs in nonprofits and/or the energy sector. In these industries, concepts like UX aren't always familiar to management or marketing (it's not even 100% prevalent in tech proper either). Bad UX is just as often a result of ignorance, not malice, and a chance to discuss things and educate other stakeholders without hostility.
An example of the newsletter popup situation... we held a short meeting to discuss the pros and cons. It was important to the business to get these leads, but they also listened to the UX side of it. We arrived at a compromise: Instead of showing the popup front and center at page load, we would wait for some time (30 sec?) plus some scroll percentage (at least half the page length), then slide it up in a corner, make the close button highly visible (big and black instead of tiny and light gray), and set a cookie to not re-show the popup if they dismissed it once. Is it as good as not having a popup altogether? No, but it started a discussion and (hopefully) met both user and business needs halfway.
FWIW I was also the one who pushed for clearer organization-wide unsubscriptions (so you don't have to manually unsubscribe from every single dept's newsletter using a separate link), did a privacy audit (unfortunately to little effect), etc.
There is definitely a time to quit in protest, but there are still small changes one can effect from within an organization -- if they're open to listening and acting in good faith, which is thankfully the usual case in my fields. If you have an evil cult-of-personality CEO, on the other hand...
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was no tracking or ad code except error reporting to bugsnag. Most of it was the firebase SDK. Which we did work towards removing, but which was a long term project because: - Every single database read depended on it - Many of them were subscriptions rather than simple reads, and so couldn’t be trivially replaced by an API call. Don’t use firebase guys.
You can see the size of each bundle in here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/web/sdk-metrics
That's a lot better than it used to be. IIRC, at the time I was working on the mentioned app the Firestore SDK was 700kb minimum just by itself, and with Auth and Firebase Realtime Database as well I believe we were over a megabyte just for firebase! For comparison, our API abstraction layer for functionality not using Firebase was under a kilobyte.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#344A 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.
I've recently come across a perfect example of just that: [1]. Just try to slowly move the mouse over any of the round red year marks at the center of the page.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#345Related 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.
This has always bugged me too.
The _desired state_ (playing or pausing) and the _actual state_ are two different things.
Whenever these two things are different, they should have two separate representations.
The problem is that they are mashed into one ambiguous representation.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#346Oh, 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…
Share is the worst. It is incredibly slow to appear and update.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#347My pet peeve is when the app moves focus after rendering useful content.
On Outlook 365, I'll start typing an email, and then as page load finishes(?) it moves my cursor off the email field and my keystrokes get interpreted as keyboard shortcuts. I've probably never accidentally deleted an email but who knows!
MacOS on login will similarly let me start typing my password, and then decide it's actually done loading the screen and erase the password characters I've typed, and the prompt only gets the last 2/3 of my password.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#348My favourite example of this is bank app I use very often, which comes with a VERY annoying twist. The most used button (one-time payment code) sometimes switches with "Take a loan" button, and after clicking loan button, someone from bank will call you in a near future to talk about it.
There's no confirmation?...
The loan button was sending you to the screen with slider where you were able to choose amount of money to loan. So it wasn't causing you to take loan by accident, but just clicking it was noted somewhere as being interested in taking and loan, and caused bank to call to you about it.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
whirlpool.net.au is so fast here in AU sometimes I refresh and I'm not sure it did anything.
This website also looks very good (subjective of course).
I personally find it very easy to parse visually, font size is ideal, no inline images or post voting or overbearing profile/social BS on the forums, it's peak late 90s design and (without sounding too elitist) probably helps attract the crowd they want due to that.
Re: Front end developers: stop moving things that I’m about to click on
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Concrete example from my firefox url bar - type 'for' - forums.overclockers.co.uk appears, this is where I'm going, I go here once on most days type 'forums', because my fingers didn't get the memo to stop - forums.samygo.tv appears at the top, a site I haven't visited (on purpose) in almost a decade, mostly because I don't have that tv any more. Massively annoying.
Sorting by frequency/recency looks like the culprit. You often type 'for' and select forums.overclockers.co.uk, so the engine takes that into account and prioritizes that candidate, but you haven't done the same when typing 'forums', so it falls back on its normal sorting algorithm. Seems that if a program has frequency/recency sorting, it'd best have an additional layer of intelligence such that it checks what resul…
Or just key the frequency on the item clicked, not the term used to get there. If I use something a lot, it should generally take precedence over other possible matches.