1) Require adblock
2) Banner saying the website doesn't use cookies, which goes away if you mouseover
3) If you're on mobile, show a banner saying the website doesn't have an app
4) A signup form, but when you try to focus it, it turns into a banner saying "jk this website doesn't have signup"
1) Not complain about adblock (ie. silently allow it instead of moaning).
2) Simply don't use cookies.
3) Don't mention app (which is often just an Electron frontend anyway) in any way.
4) Allow the website to be used without signing up.
These 4 examples used to be the default back in the early days of the WWW.
otherwise:
5) works better with Javascript disabled
6) works better in Firefox than Chrome
7) doesn't work if it can read your referer
Ironically, I find there's (broadly) two sorts of JS-enabled website:
- completely broken without (often just a blank canvas) - works better without than with
The most entertaining 'works better' example I've had is a site that gave me a free upgrade, because I was blocking client-side price manipulation.
Google Maps however: block canvas fingerprinting, and it's Goodbye CPU!
I sign up only once, yet every website makes it hard to find the login dialog which I use way more often.
It's genius. It's got a little "online services" icon with a friendly smiley face with a microphone and headphones.
You click on it, expecting an interactive chat but what you actually get is a photo of someone smiling hugely with headphones on and a laptop open, and a sidebar where you can search their inadequate help documents.
I'm glad it's a parody or it would be really insulting.
I still don't get why people want chatbots as they're terrible UI, so frustrating to use even when they're made properly.
I'm working with a successful ecommerce company who have hugely improved conversions on their (high touch, bespoke but sold online) product by introducing a chatbot.
For some use cases, customers like them very much indeed.
I wonder if I'm currently missing some slice of web life by not using any ‘support’ chat interfaces ever.
I hate you.
>Gender and Title don’t match
But you know what the worst part was?
They never bothered informing you about these limitations. The site just returned a generic error.
Not supporting special characters I can kinda understand but silently discarding characters from the password the user has picked is just evil. It took me LOTS of registration attempts and password resets before I figured out what the hell was going on.
Sure enough, different parts of the site had different password requirements, and they enforced them on password change. So you could create an account on a sub-site that wasn't accepted on the main site, which was the only site with the password change page, but you couldn't enter the old password to fix it.
I think password reset did work, but I wound up creating another password that worked in one place but not another...
I saw a screenshot of an error dialogue on Reddit once (so possibly fake, but still hilarious) that said something like:
"You cannot use that password, because it's already in use by user Kegstand360"
IIRC this is mostly done to prevent SQL injection attacks. In a modern system there is 0 reason not to allow any characters in the password (within whatever encoding you support).
It's like how elementary school kids write their "papers" in comic sans (and eight other fonts half-way through) and each word is a different color. Or they make a power point and every-single-dang-thing just HAS to spin into the slide.
HA! I did that! I thought it made the essay more interesting to read, and it was a pain in the ass since I had to transfer the text by hand (ie rewrite it) in Deluxepaint on my Amiga 500, then print on our 9-needle matrix printer. Oh, how I miss the sound of that. Or do I?
Naturally, I was told by my teacher to never do it again.
Edit: I think I found the approx model: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_vXA058EDY
Not really a problem if you're just entering garbage information, but try to find the proper flag if you actually want the correct one. Bonus points if you are one of the many lucky citizens born under a flag that consists of three horizontal or vertical areas of equal size.
edit: Not sure why the downvotes. French Guiana is a region of France (the country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana
> They are the same country
> edit: Not sure why the downvotes. French Guiana is a region of France (the country): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Guiana
Maybe the downvotes (not from me) were because your post initially appears to be correcting your parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346737), but is actually agreeing with it?
I also appreciate how it would reappear and block the interface.
But kind of disappointed it didn't instantly reappear if you moused over it. Or that it didn't randomly bounce for attention in my peripheral vision.
And to the person out there thinking of making a front end framework based on this, just don't do it man!
But if you do, I suppose you could call it BootAss or HateStrap.
Who the fuck is implementing these things and how do they justify this shit as contributing to the user experience? I came to your aite to read an article, not to be bombarded with ridiculously distracting prompts, banners and subscribe prompts - and this completely ignoring the intrusiveness of the ads with autoplaying video and audio.
Shit like this really makes me rethink visiting sites like Wired, though they are by far not the only ones doing this, just the one that happened to me today.
Why do web devs think this a good thing to do? Pull this crap in a desktop, sure as he'll would uninstall.
/rant
A developer being told by management that Optimizely showed this design gives a 20% boost in conversion.
I don't trust this tooling after creating 3 control groups, one A group, one B group and having the three control groups report different values (Control 1 was better than Control 3 but worse than A but better than B)
Intro to PeopleAggregator (turn your volume down first)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYTEf4amE74
Gnomedex 6.0: Marc Canter on People Aggregator (in which Marc explains why he doesn't have blue balls)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6Mesx1oRdo
https://techcrunch.com/2006/06/27/a-look-inside-peopleaggreg...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/9pmqxb/typical_...
1. Checkboxes ambiguously located.
2. Poor instructions in captchas.
3. Text field suggestions that persist when you click on the field.
4. Pointless validation on inputs
...
(Also, clarification: This was my first try.)
I was at 7min, the last part got me. My thoughts were.. Ok, it probably just means light, so I check a few. Fails. Let me try again... Nope.
Five minutes later... what if it's all. No, it can't be that dumb. Bingo. Wow. It was that dumb.
no
If you manage to actually 'sign up' it tells you are a legend and rewards you with a Dancing Carlton gif[0].
The word HERE is a link, with styling and cursor set to look like normal text.
"Oh, it didn't mean whole email, just the first part"
"Hmm tab doesn't work"
"Oh, it didn't mean whole domain, just the first part"
"Where's .com, oh I see"
"Wait 'Next' isn't the big blue button?"
"Oh I see, that big red message means my password is good."
The 'How can we help' arrow just makes it grow slightly taller. Over and over. Heh heh heh.
And that was just the first page! This is fun, had me genuinely chuckling quite a lot.
Choose images that contain a bow, where the images were of bows (archery), bows (ties), bows (hair ties), and bows (gesture).
But then they really got me with the checkboxes for those images. You think they're beneath the images, but they're actually above and the frame was just scrolled down. You don't realize until you get to the bottom row and don't see any checkboxes
I saw that immediately, but it still got me, because I tried to scroll down, thinking the checkboxes were beneath.
Because, they aren't a dark pattern. They aren't a sneaky way to try to juice your engagement numbers. They didn't show up everywhere because growth hackers started getting jealous of the other guy's cookie banner. They are literally required by law, or at least many lawyers interpret the law in that way. The designers at my work really didn't want to make one, and especially didn't want it added to our site.
Nobody likes them. They came from lawyers.
I'd guess the thinking is "Well, I don't really understand those requirements and it's hard to be sure if we meet them, safest just to put the banner on." And "Well, if we don't need it, how come all these OTHER sites have it? You really think they're all wrong and you're right? What, are you a fancy pants lawyer now?"
"Cover your ass" is the main driving force of most of America.
Gave up at the user agreement, where you can't "accept" or dismiss until (presumably) you scroll to the bottom. The scrollbar is screwed up so that (1) wheeling is super slow and (2) you can't grab the elevator and drag it to the bottom of the shaft.
Then you have an actual bow. Like in archery. Next to a bowtie. Ok fine.
"Select all pictures of glasses"
Now you have a glass window. And glasses, as in spectacles.
Holy crap, that triggers me.
I loathe it so much I stopped using it entirely and just book marked my favourite podcasts like a filthy savage.
Maybe I need to drink a verification can to help it along
Still, nothing on this site was as bad as the "security questions" on the United Airlines site. All of their security questions are multiple choice. Here's an actual example:
What is your favorite sport?
Possible answers:
Gymnastics
Soccer
Jai Alai
Archery
Snowboarding
Volleyball
Cycling
Diving
Ice skating
Taekwondo
The worst thing is that when you have to answer the question the answers are presented in a different order than when you set them up, so a simple hack like "just pick the third answer" won't work. It's genuinely more frustrating than anything on the parody site.
document.querySelectorAll(".icon.icon-check.checkbox__check").forEach(span => span.click())there should be a cheat/bypass link on each page so you see everything without having to suffer
"Your password must have at least 1 Numeral."
Please add: Your password must not end with a numeral.
It used to be that commerical activity on the internet was not allowed. This was because, in part, we knew it would ruin the experience. Now, the internet is pretty much 100% commercialized. its a wasteland and it will only get worse.
I have an exit strategy in play to get out of UX and anything to do with working on the internet. UX and UI design will be rolled into "design" and eventually be automated. Same with coding. So, if you think you have a nice career ahead of you as a UX or UI designer or a web developer, think again. Your days are numbered.
Technology is evolving and expanding so quickly that there's exponential need for good design. I'm happy to hear you're getting out of UX though. I wouldn't want to go to a doctor who blatantly calls the whole medical industry a sham.
I got as far as trying to fill in my house number, hit backspace and got dumped at the beginning. Couldn't bring myself to start over.
Things I remember:
- Not being able to enter my correct date of birth. At all. So you enter an incorrect date to get to the next screen, which is "I certify all information to be true and correct"
- Having to list the personal details of every relative living in Russia. Where do you stop?
- Having to list the details of every foreign trip you made in the last 10 years
And if you try to phone in to ask for help: you are advised that the phone is answered on one day of the week, between 9 am and 12 noon. You get that message until 8:59, from 9:00 you get "all the lines are busy, you have been placed in a call queue" which changes back to the original at 12:00.
Reminds me of some old maths software we had to use in school which only ran in 'IE 6 or higher', but if you used IE 8 or above it would report the same 'use IE 6 or higher' message and not let you use the software. That software was also the only way to check whether your answers to the practise questions in the corresponding textbook were correct, which made revision pretty painful.
I've seen websites that show so many that the news article is only visible through a tiny 10% sized crack. So frustrating.
It needs an accompanying IRC channel where the devs shit all over you for not understanding how to use it.
A bad UI will be the end of your business.
It's like a horrible fractal, the closer you look at it, the worse it gets.
I was laughing, but i got ptsd'd hard lol.
I mean, you would not believe how _actually similar to this_ the websites of several, massive, especially state-run companies in my country are
No idea why they’d do that (although now that I think of it I guess one possible reason is someone inside Bitwarden tries to send a subtle message that they cannot be trusted any longer, kind of like raising a flag upside down to signal distress.)
I plan on showing this to family and friends to help them realize how common these anti-patterns are.
Consider adding a bitcoin miner?
Nice idea of hiding the top row of checkboxes for the human-verification step, I respect that evil genius :^)
grin