4 ms·

This is something that seemingly none of the big platforms or companies get right. Not Twitter, not Microsoft, not Firefox, not Apple, not a single one of them.

This is something that seemingly none of the big platforms or companies get right. Not Twitter, not Microsoft, not Firefox, not Apple, not a single one of them. Seemingly they missed the lesson web developers learned ten years ago that you can't change content that the user is currently looking at without any interaction done, unless that's to be expected from the user. But auto-loading items in a list is somehow still difficult for these companies to get right. Once you're done typing your query in the window's start menu, apple's "quick launcher thing" or twitter's search widget, it takes X seconds for the query to actually finish, so while you're hovering the menu, it changes content from underneath and the thing you wanted to click on, has been switched to something else. I'm starting to wonder if this is on purpose, as seemingly no one is getting this right, but I don't understand what metric they are optimizing for (incorrectly) to believing that this behavior is correct.

klysm 6y ago
> you can't change content that the user is currently looking at without any interaction done, unless that's to be expected from the user I think it’a more realistic to say that there has to be some latency bound in any user interaction. Clearly the result of any action is not instantaneous. Search boxes are tricky because the user isn’t sure what side effect typing an additional character will have - it could not refine the search or get a whole new set of results. If it’s not indicated to the user when the operation completes, then they can assume the former and then click at a bad time.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> Seemingly they missed the lesson web developers learned ten years ago that you can't change content that the user is currently looking at without any interaction done, unless that's to be expected from the user. Did web developers learn this lesson? Because I still see this literally every day on the web.
- wtallis 6y ago
  My guess: the web developers who learned that lesson 10 years ago are now outnumbered and outvoted by the developers and designers who don't have enough experience to do interaction design well. Neophytes will pretty much always outnumber experts, and the neophytes can only be counted on to adhere to a handful of the most popular design guidelines.
johannes1234321 6y ago
> I'm starting to wonder if this is on purpose People click on it, thus metrics tell that users like it, when they changed user interaction went down, so they kept it ... almost sounds plausible.
Viliam1234 6y ago
I am so angry at this behavior on Firefox. I type the first letter. Firefox displays 10 options. I think they are bookmarks and recent google searches containing the letter. The ordering kinda corresponds to how recently or how often I used them, but it is not exactly that, for example the link I choose almost always somehow remains at the 2nd place. Whatever. I type the second letter. Again, Firefox displays 10 options, bookmarks and recent google searches that contain the substring. At that moment, the link I want to click is quite often displayed somewhere. So I move my mouse... ...but a fraction of second later, Firefox loads "things it thinks I might want to search" (probably popular search results by other people that start with those two letters I typed) and inserts them into positions 2 - 5, moving the other search results below them... ...and just as I am pressing my mouse button, the link below my mouse cursor is replaced by google search for something completely irrelevant. Aaaaargh! (I wonder whether it is an accident, or on purpose, that the most frequently used link goes to the 2nd place, not the 1st one, so it gets replaced by an irrelevant google search. I suspect it probably increases some metric somewhere, and is probably interpreted as a good thing.)
- sroussey 6y ago
  I get this on iPhone search. I see what I want and go tap it, but it changes at the last second and I end up opening the wrong thing. And now I’ve trained the AI on the wrong thing just to make things worse.
- BubuIIC 6y ago
  Not sure what I'm doing differently but the search suggestions go below the history suggestions for me.
- kzrdude 6y ago
  Why not disable search suggestions? Having every keypress sent to google doesn't seem great.
  - Viliam1234 6y ago
    Er... yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, I turned it off. I didn't realize this was optional.

klysm 6y ago

> you can't change content that the user is currently looking at without any interaction done, unless that's to be expected from the user I think it’a more realistic to say that there has to be some latency bound in any user interaction. Clearly the result of any action is not instantaneous. Search boxes are tricky because the user isn’t sure what side effect typing an additional character will have - it could not refine the search or get a whole new set of results. If it’s not indicated to the user when the operation completes, then they can assume the former and then click at a bad time.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> Seemingly they missed the lesson web developers learned ten years ago that you can't change content that the user is currently looking at without any interaction done, unless that's to be expected from the user. Did web developers learn this lesson? Because I still see this literally every day on the web.

wtallis 6y ago
My guess: the web developers who learned that lesson 10 years ago are now outnumbered and outvoted by the developers and designers who don't have enough experience to do interaction design well. Neophytes will pretty much always outnumber experts, and the neophytes can only be counted on to adhere to a handful of the most popular design guidelines.

johannes1234321 6y ago

> I'm starting to wonder if this is on purpose People click on it, thus metrics tell that users like it, when they changed user interaction went down, so they kept it ... almost sounds plausible.

Viliam1234 6y ago

I am so angry at this behavior on Firefox. I type the first letter. Firefox displays 10 options. I think they are bookmarks and recent google searches containing the letter. The ordering kinda corresponds to how recently or how often I used them, but it is not exactly that, for example the link I choose almost always somehow remains at the 2nd place. Whatever. I type the second letter. Again, Firefox displays 10 options, bookmarks and recent google searches that contain the substring. At that moment, the link I want to click is quite often displayed somewhere. So I move my mouse... ...but a fraction of second later, Firefox loads "things it thinks I might want to search" (probably popular search results by other people that start with those two letters I typed) and inserts them into positions 2 - 5, moving the other search results below them... ...and just as I am pressing my mouse button, the link below my mouse cursor is replaced by google search for something completely irrelevant. Aaaaargh! (I wonder whether it is an accident, or on purpose, that the most frequently used link goes to the 2nd place, not the 1st one, so it gets replaced by an irrelevant google search. I suspect it probably increases some metric somewhere, and is probably interpreted as a good thing.)

sroussey 6y ago
I get this on iPhone search. I see what I want and go tap it, but it changes at the last second and I end up opening the wrong thing. And now I’ve trained the AI on the wrong thing just to make things worse.
BubuIIC 6y ago
Not sure what I'm doing differently but the search suggestions go below the history suggestions for me.
kzrdude 6y ago
Why not disable search suggestions? Having every keypress sent to google doesn't seem great.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Er... yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, I turned it off. I didn't realize this was optional.