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.

  • letsgo@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    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.