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Relatedly, I noticed the other day that I'm developing a flick-down reflex in response to seeing those stupid "hero" header images/videos appear on page. It's b

by ashark 11y ago

Relatedly, I noticed the other day that I'm developing a flick-down reflex in response to seeing those stupid "hero" header images/videos appear on page. It's becoming an unconscious action. These headers are the Flash Intro Page of our day. Unnecessary hamburger menus and obscured menu text are our version of Flash Mystery Meat navigation. I blame Apple and iOS 7 for the latter problem. That popularized ultra-thin text-only "buttons" on a background image. It's a bad idea when Apple does it, too, but if you don't follow Apple's aesthetic your stuff looks "dated". A lot of perfectly fine 2007-2010 vintage sites have been mangled by redesigns following this trend, just so they don't "look old". If someone develops a browser extension to somehow recognize and remove these things without damaging page flow and functionality, I'll install it. Bonus for forcing those floating site menus that disappear on scroll-down and reappear on scroll-up (blocking the thing you were scrolling up to see!) to stay at the top of the page where they belong. I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away rather than being in the header and footer.

leppr 11y ago
>I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away [...] The thing is that the user being grateful or not isn't what matters, what matters is that they click on those links and thus increase pageviews (doesn't matter if it was intentional or not).
panglott 11y ago
Yea, as soon as I see a big image header I reflexively start scrolling through the article looking for some actual information. I blame Google/Android for all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality.
- harlanlewis 11y ago
  > all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality. No joke, my favorite part of the general disdain for hamburger menus is all the ways people describe them.
- NoGravitas 11y ago
  I reach for the 'reader' button in Firefox to convert the page to newspaper-style.
rtkwe 11y ago
In a similar vein I hate that existing user log in are so often buried as a tiny text link under a Sign Up section or a tiny link on the edges of a page.
- WorldMaker 11y ago
  An existing user logging in is such a boring metric compared to a new user signing up.~
  - vitd 11y ago
    Well you can shoot yourself in the foot with that thinking. I have a friend who told me she has something like 20 Stack Overflow logins because she can't remember the passwords to any of them so she just keeps creating new ones. I wonder how many other sites run into this issue? Are they signing up as many new users as they think?
    - endymi0n 11y ago
      As startup and also corporate value is often influenced by the amount of "users" (the smarter investors will look at DAUs and MAUs though), this might even be done on purpose...
    - WorldMaker 11y ago
      Right, hence the sarcasm mark in my post. I think it's a weird tendency for people to care more about their overall user count as some success indicator and focus their UX so much on onboarding new users to seeming disinterested in existing users. Things like "User Satisfaction" and "are my users happy with my product" are a lot harder metrics to get right and I think that's part of why they get discounted by investors/shareholders over raw growth numbers which can have a big, easy "wow" factor in a presentation graph...
frik 11y ago
It's especially annoying if you log-in on a SaaS service to find out their redesign makes things worse. Actions that took one click, now take three clicks. As they seperated their single products into different products, removing navigation elements, introducing long animations, don't update their CSS for mobile devices, etc.
- TylerE 11y ago
  Does a redesign ever make things better?
  - mjevans 11y ago
    I can't think of any that come to mind. I've seen a lot that just do something different... but when I think of 'web 2.0' I think of re-designs that make things 'more beautiful' (pretty) but at the cost of actual functionality. Of course I recognize that many think differently than I do; it's possible that previously they had been given too many choices and thus couldn't understand the system. As for re-designs, I think that it depends on the basis for decisions and effort spent in the re-design.
PostThisTooFast 11y ago
AMEN, totally correct. The failure to designate controls as controls instead of static text has driven computer interaction backward decades. So now we're supposed to roll over, click on, or tap every text character on the screen to see if it's a hidden goodie? The G in GUI stands for GRAPHICAL. If there's no graphic, there's no control indication. Period. Apple doesn't even remember that you're supposed to GREY THINGS OUT when they're not applicable; you're not supposed to make them disappear entirely. When they're just missing, the user has no idea the function even exists, and does not learn where to find it for future use. Next article should tell site designers to STOP DISABLING ZOOMING.

by ashark 11y ago

leppr 11y ago

>I've never once been reading something and been grateful that the site menu was a one-line-of-text scroll-up away [...] The thing is that the user being grateful or not isn't what matters, what matters is that they click on those links and thus increase pageviews (doesn't matter if it was intentional or not).

panglott 11y ago

Yea, as soon as I see a big image header I reflexively start scrolling through the article looking for some actual information. I blame Google/Android for all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality.

harlanlewis 11y ago
> all those inscrutable hamburger menus, which are like rooting around in the trash can for essential functionality. No joke, my favorite part of the general disdain for hamburger menus is all the ways people describe them.
NoGravitas 11y ago
I reach for the 'reader' button in Firefox to convert the page to newspaper-style.

rtkwe 11y ago

In a similar vein I hate that existing user log in are so often buried as a tiny text link under a Sign Up section or a tiny link on the edges of a page.

WorldMaker 11y ago
An existing user logging in is such a boring metric compared to a new user signing up.~
- vitd 11y ago
  Well you can shoot yourself in the foot with that thinking. I have a friend who told me she has something like 20 Stack Overflow logins because she can't remember the passwords to any of them so she just keeps creating new ones. I wonder how many other sites run into this issue? Are they signing up as many new users as they think?
  - endymi0n 11y ago
    As startup and also corporate value is often influenced by the amount of "users" (the smarter investors will look at DAUs and MAUs though), this might even be done on purpose...
  - WorldMaker 11y ago
    Right, hence the sarcasm mark in my post. I think it's a weird tendency for people to care more about their overall user count as some success indicator and focus their UX so much on onboarding new users to seeming disinterested in existing users. Things like "User Satisfaction" and "are my users happy with my product" are a lot harder metrics to get right and I think that's part of why they get discounted by investors/shareholders over raw growth numbers which can have a big, easy "wow" factor in a presentation graph...

frik 11y ago

It's especially annoying if you log-in on a SaaS service to find out their redesign makes things worse. Actions that took one click, now take three clicks. As they seperated their single products into different products, removing navigation elements, introducing long animations, don't update their CSS for mobile devices, etc.

TylerE 11y ago
Does a redesign ever make things better?
- mjevans 11y ago
  I can't think of any that come to mind. I've seen a lot that just do something different... but when I think of 'web 2.0' I think of re-designs that make things 'more beautiful' (pretty) but at the cost of actual functionality. Of course I recognize that many think differently than I do; it's possible that previously they had been given too many choices and thus couldn't understand the system. As for re-designs, I think that it depends on the basis for decisions and effort spent in the re-design.

PostThisTooFast 11y ago

AMEN, totally correct. The failure to designate controls as controls instead of static text has driven computer interaction backward decades. So now we're supposed to roll over, click on, or tap every text character on the screen to see if it's a hidden goodie? The G in GUI stands for GRAPHICAL. If there's no graphic, there's no control indication. Period. Apple doesn't even remember that you're supposed to GREY THINGS OUT when they're not applicable; you're not supposed to make them disappear entirely. When they're just missing, the user has no idea the function even exists, and does not learn where to find it for future use. Next article should tell site designers to STOP DISABLING ZOOMING.