My only problem with YouTube toasts is when the toast to confirm you've enabled closed captions covers up the closed captions you were trying to see.
Reminds me of how changing volume / brightness on macOS hides the damn subtitles.
Toasts are bad UX
281–290 of 401 posts
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
What kind of design choices do you find helpful with using a magnifier like that? It's not something I'd ever considered before, sounds tricky to design for but I'll try to keep it in mind now.
The two main things for me are: - Put cause and effect close to eachother - Don't block my view based on mouse position. I hate video players that ofverlay the pause button when the mouse is over the video, or images that get obscured by some overlay when hovered. My zoom follows the mouse, so I can't move what I'm looking at and where my mouse is pointing independently.
Oh yeah those video players are awful for anyone on mobile too, always ends up somehow getting stuck active and the only way to dismiss it is tap the video, which of course is usually bound to some other disruptive action like pausing or exiting full-screen mode.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#283Strongly disagree with this. Toasts/alerts/etc. are a valid form of feedback in the UI. Inline feedback can be helpful/good (e.g., the copy/paste example in the article), but it can also be confusing if applied incorrectly. A toast is a universal, out of the way confirmation of a user action. They shouldn't just be blindly waved off as "bad UX."
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Re: Toasts are bad UX
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The users almost never saw them and when they did they didn't see them long enough to be able to communicate what the message said, often trying to paraphrase. Theres an art to writing terse copy for the toast, and picking durations that make sense. I think this is likely more a poor application of the pattern rather than the pattern itself being bad.
It’s extremely easy to get the “art” wrong. In my case, I didn’t always know what the errors were because they were returned from 3rd party API’s and many of them the application had never seen before. If there were a proper log somewhere, maybe, but toasts are very easy to use poorly.
Well, its simple to not just toast a string directly from a third party you dont control : D
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#285Counterpoint: toasts offer a great pressure release valve, are easy to have a single standard implementation of for a system, and avoid having to tackle high-level design questions when the feature in question doesn't really ask it.
Youtube has a lot of people on payroll to naval-gaze the problem described. Most systems don't. Having the GUI-equivalent to logging be easily available is a win for system usability.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd add one more scenario: when the UI element that would give feedback, normally, has been removed, yet you still want to show feedback. If I removed a task from a board, I can't show - on the task - how to undo that action. There's a keyboard shortcut to undo it, but how would the user know, visually? I'm not going to replace the task with a note because notes don't belong in task lists - only tasks do. I'm not goi…
A better UX is to show a confirmation in place. When you delete a task from the list - show a module in its place with a short message and the undo button. Showing a toast in a completely different part of the screen is hard to notice and hard to interact with as it's removed after a short delay. Also, if you delete more than 1 task quickly, toasts start stacking, and it becomes even less clear which one you want to…
I'm happy to look at your A/B testing and research on the subject, but I'm less interested in your unsupported opinions about what "better" UX is or how unmanageable multiple toasts become.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#287For me the worse aspect is that they disappear (too quickly), and that they sometimes unnecessarily draw attention to themselves for success messages where you would trivially assume the action to succeed. The combination of the two is particularly vexing: Your attention gets unnecessarily diverted, but you don’t know if it wasn’t actually important because it disappeared too fast. Conversely, there’s also a variatio…
To add to this. Some of them show important information the user needs, but it both disappears too quickly, and is incomplete, due to size limitations of the toast.
I often will click into my notifications to see what I missed (I knew it looked important, but I didn’t have enough time to read it all). When I get there I will click on what looks like a truncated message, with the expectation that it will take me to the full context. Instead, the notification disappears, so I lose it, and it opens an app without deep linking to the issue. I’m then left hunting around to try and find a problem, which may or may not be surfaced, in the app’s standard UI.
This has happened more times than I’d care to count and it always leave me upset with whoever designed these systems.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#288Taking youtube as an example is like taking a dead horse to a race. Youtube is an utter garbage ux-wise, both in bugs and features. Even fringe porn tubes are 10x more competent than youtube ui team. Their latest “addition” was rewinding a video after a long pause. You watch a video, pause it at t=1:24:57 and go to sleep. Next day you start the video again and it goes for a while from t to t+n (depends on the buffere…
I don't think there's any feature there with the video jumping back. That purely seems to be a bug where it fails to resume the connection to the server to continue filling the buffer. It seems to hit the end of what is buffered and then refresh, causing it to jump back to some last saved position.
This doesn’t explain why it does that after you jump elsewhere, why it does that only after several hours and why it started recently. This “some last saved position” doesn’t persist when you refresh and is always exactly -20s from where you paused. It’s not a single event I got my observations from.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bah, you think you were confused? I thought it was about toasting, as in with drinks. (Yeah sure, "Are Bad UX" -- but since when is "Cheers!" a software metaphor? Weird AF.)
Seems like it could live among these: > We currently demand that users internalize several metaphors when interacting with Homebrew. These include: > Formula (how to build a bit of software) > Bottle (pre-built software) > Cask (pre-built software on macOS) > Tap (a collection of software) > Keg (where software installs itself) > Cellar (where all my software install themselves) > As well as an additional number of l…
The Homebrew nouns are one thing. It’s the verbs that trip me up: update/upgrade is different to everything else on the Mac but at least is familiar to me from Debian but then I mix up list, info, show etc.
Re: Toasts are bad UX
#290For me the worse aspect is that they disappear (too quickly), and that they sometimes unnecessarily draw attention to themselves for success messages where you would trivially assume the action to succeed. The combination of the two is particularly vexing: Your attention gets unnecessarily diverted, but you don’t know if it wasn’t actually important because it disappeared too fast. Conversely, there’s also a variatio…
As a thought experiment, how long should a toast remain on the screen? Ideally you want the user to have time to read it, but since you don't know how long it will take for them to glance up, and you don't know their reading speed, there isn't a safe bound.
I ran into this with my son just today, he is working on his reading speed and we were using a new app together. I kept showing toasts and he was struggling to keep up with them and found them to be distracting. I ended up reading them aloud so he could keep up. A more persistent message would have let him succeed without extra support.