I wish to understand what elements or aspects of the design of modern websites the end users are annoyed from. Though you are free to express your personal opinions, it would be even more insightful if you could provide objective criticism and suggestions for alternative implementations so that I may incorporate the same in my current and future projects to make them as user friendly as possible.
Some criticisms I have encountered a while back include:
- Switches being basically checkboxes with more ambiguous active state
- Scrolling animations that prohibit user from linearly scrolling through the page
Make sure that the opinion is not
- Related to business/legal matters e.g. Cookie consent notices, ad banners etc.
- Too vague e.g. Poor website layout
- Highlighting objectively bad practices e.g. Lack of accessibility features
I recognise I could have followed a design system for this question, but I want to understand the situation from the perspective of the end users to see if they have a differing view on what a convenient user experience should be like.
Mouse-over menus that don’t stay open to be able to navigate to the other end of that menu.
This might be out of scope but: Cookie banners. Please just give me one single button to disagree to all unnecessary cookies like intended by law. And stop this “legitimate interest” bullshit where I have to disagree AGAIN but this time MANUALLY for each of your 873 “partners” to actually disagree?? If you give me an option to disagree to all but then there’s also 800+ secret checkboxes to REALLY disagree, that just feels like you’re making fun of me.
Like a lemonade stand that also offers urine and when you don’t want urine in your lemonade, they instead just directly piss in your mouth. Not a great user experience…
Hamburger menus with the button in the top left corner. Bro, my thumb is down here in the bottom right corner. I already try to buy smaller phones and it’s still almost impossible to use these menus. Would it be so hard to at least put them on the right side?
Hijacking ctrl+f or forward slash. I use those to tell my browser to search the text of the current page. When websites steal that from me and make it do a search within the website, I get extremely upset.
The arrogance, the fucking gall it takes to do shit like that. It’s insane.
Another one is unloading content after you’ve scrolled past it, meaning I can no longer get search hits where search hits should definitely be happening.
Auto playing video if I clicked a link that was not indicated beyond any reasonable doubt that it was a video.
Making any sound at all unless instructed to.
pages that move after the initial load without user input should be illegal.
Yeah, but we wanted to load an ad, just at the place you thought was a link you wanted to click on… /infuriating
Does getting ready to click on something count at user input?
Pictures that don’t change size when you pinch zoom the page.
A big plus one to ambiguous switches. Two things I didn’t see already mentioned:
First: if you have content that requires horizontal scrolling, like a big table or report, that horizontal scroll bar needs to be on the screen, not at the bottom of the report. I shouldn’t have to scroll hundreds of rows vertically in order to be able to scroll horizontally. While we’re at it, column headers need to stay on screen when you scroll vertically past them.
Second: if there are two choices, identifying which is active needs to be more than just changing the color. Outline that shit or add a halo, throb, or something. Sometimes a user depends on tabbing and not using a pointing device or touch screen, especially when using assistive technology. This is especially heinous when the content is consumed on a tv using a remote control, such as a streaming service or DVD menu.
Hidden scroll bar. We don’t need that extra half centimeter of content, we need a visible scroll bar I can conveniently grab. Why do I have to try to maneuver the cursor to the right spot to make the scroll bar appear, then find the current position, move the mouse to it hoping the scroll bar doesn’t disappear again, and finally get to scroll.
Both infinite scrolling and excessive paging interfere with me being able to navigate to a spot.
- If you need to do infinite scrolling do it the right way and just display it all on one page. It’s not like the content is ever a significant part of the bandwidth needed. Now you can simplify your buggy JavaScript monstrosity by not implementing paging and I can use <CTRL-F> to more easily find what I need
- and seriously stop with the excessive paging - we all have computers that can manage more than 12 lines of stuff. I’m not even talking about the slideshow websites, at least they have the logical motivation of maximizing ads. For example if I’m reading some dreck ranking the us state on some metric, it’s ok to display all fifty on one page. If I’m reading something with a list of thousands why am I paging through 10-20 at a time with no way to jump to what I’m looking for?
Put a damn selection area around your switches/check boxes so I don’t have to click precisely on the teeny tiny little box with my giant fingers. You know what I want to do, There are no other elements near it. Just put a damn div area around the object that has an onclick so I can toggle the thing without zooming it to the size of my screen to press right on the tiny little button to toggle my setting
Wizards / steppers
They suck and I’m tired of pretending they’re in any way a good design.
Switches and checkboxes that are unclear if they are on or off and which option does what.
I see it a lot in games where it is extremely unclear from the wording and the swith/checkbox if it needs to be on/checked or off to make the thing do as you want.
And when the swith has a light green and slightly grayer light green or similar as ita colours it doesn’t help, because not only doesn’t you know what way the swith need to go to get the outcome you want. You doesn’t know what way the swith is going anyway.
How did you manage to type “swith” so many times?
Looks like autocarrot to me.
Because fewer and a faulty auto correct.
Popups demanding I join newsletters, engage in chats, review your site, etc. Make that stuff available on the menu and I’ll have no problem with it. Shove it in my face as I’m loading your site and I’ll likely just close it straight away. Some pages are just one popup after another with absolutely no thought given to the UX. The users want your content, not your popups. And what if after using your site for a bit I actually do decide to join the newsletter when the only reference to it is the popup that I already dismissed?
Divs sliding into position as I scroll through the page annoy me intensely. When I see a page doing that I’ll autorepeat PageDown to the end, then go back to the top. What is even more irritating and page-close-worthy is when those divs still insist on sliding into position after they’ve already done that.
Sound effects. Just NO NO NO NO NO. Sound effects are not the answer. Sound effects are the question. The answer is NO. I can see the point of sound effects in a chat, IF AND ONLY IF YOUR PAGE DOESN’T CURRENTLY HAVE FOCUS. But please don’t bleep ping bing and bong every time someone presses Return. And test your sfx on decent speaker systems, not all of use have tinny 1" speakers; I have a decent hifi woofer and some of those bass drops really shake my room and I can only imagine that they were tested on crappy little speakers.
Spamming my screen with ads, obviously. You can have a single static ad that doesn’t bounce around the screen, demand I punch some stupid monkey, vibrate, flash etc. And of course that ad has to be legit. There are still far too many ads that lead to scams and other malware. Stack Exchange is one of the few pages that get on my whitelist because of their advertising policy.
Give new fads time to settle down before you spam your site with the latest whizz bang animation. Yeah sorry that means you aren’t going to be able to play with all the new toys. But your users will thank you. If you must use the latest CSS tricks then use it judiciously on one or two gadgets instead of applying it to “*”.
And of course as you’ve already alluded make sure you use standard user interface gadgets correctly. Checkboxes are checkboxes and radiobuttons are radiobuttons. They are not the same as each other. They are also on/off. If you need tristate or more then you need something else.
I have to mention consent popovers anyway, because many of them don’t even comply to law. They should be better. None should ask for sharing data to over 50 or over 100 “partners”.
I hate what I would label marketing or design websites with huge banners and non-telling marketing-speak text. I want information, and in a reasonable form and density. A huge banner [of happy people] with no relation to the product is wasted space. I want concise information, not evasive and positive-only speak.
Article webpage where the next article follows. Even worse when there is no clear visual content separation to indicate it’s something different now.
Auto-playing videos. Despite browser blocking them, evading that, or popover videos when scrolling, or videos embedded that have nothing to do with the article. They are atrocious.
Overly verbose text. Overly verbose intro text and context descriptions. Not getting to the point. Not linking sources.
Too small text. I have a web-browser setting for default font size. Don’t make it 40% of that for no reason.
No dark mode. In the evenings, flashing me is always irritating, and I have to manually enable a dark mode hack.
Wasted space for layout spacing. Looking pretty over usability or dense information.
Zoom can be implemented good or bad - depending on what you increase in terms of font size, spacing, component spacing, etc.
Contact - support or otherwise - only via shitty chatbot or web forms with too much required details. Give me a simple email address.
Newsletter or subscribe requests. I’ll do it if I want to, never upon request. Worst when they show up before you consumed their content; could not even assess quality or interest.
Shit DOM design, lack of selectors. Programmatically interfacing with a website through DOM can be very helpful. For CSS hacks, or content extraction. Like tracking Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, or customizing or fixing layouts. Lack of speaking DOM element classes or ids breaks those interfaces.
Hey that’s a great idea for the euros with actual consumer protection - as a next step to the consent popups, you should limit how many things you can consent to at once. For example, if users had yet another pop up for the next ten “necessary partners” they would quickly abandon sites that made them do that
Arguably, that’s already covered. Informed consent is required.
If the consent popover leads you to accept all in an unbalanced way, the consent to share to 150 partners is neither informed nor given (no knowledge of it).
A conforming popup would ask: Can we share your personal data with 150 partners? [Yes] [No]. I don’t think many people would press [Yes].
Shit DOM design, lack of selectors. Programmatically interfacing with a website through DOM can be very helpful. For CSS hacks, or content extraction. Like tracking Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, or customizing or fixing layouts. Lack of speaking DOM element classes or ids breaks those interfaces.
Sounds like a feature.
Not providing any indication that clicking/touching a UI element will trigger an action. Especially on a touch screen.
I have to assume that everything is a button that will do something stupid on every website now.
