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A particular bane of mine is the self-oscillating UIs, youtube is particularly bad at it these days - if the mouse pointer is in 'just the right place' (which i
by NikkiA 4y ago
A particular bane of mine is the self-oscillating UIs, youtube is particularly bad at it these days - if the mouse pointer is in 'just the right place' (which is bigger than it sounds) then you get the seek-bar preview frames popup, which moves things just enough that the mouse pointer is no longer over the area that triggers it, so it vanishes, and the whole thing starts again.
- leetbulb 4y agoI've always wondered, but figured that there must be, others who find this type of UI quirk (and find it humorous). "Self-oscillating" I like it. Thanks.
- ianai 4y agoThat sort of stuff is outright user abuse.
- pc86 4y agoNo, it's just a bug.
- Oxidation 4y agoThis can happen in native UIs as well. I've had to add hysteretic behaviours to prevent the appearance of a scroll bar somehow obviating the need for the scroll bar, so it vanishes and now it needs a scroll bar, repeat as fast as the toolkit event loop allows.
- esprehn 4y agoThis is why everyone switched to overlay scroll bars. It's also better for performance because you don't need to do layout on a screen worth of content only to realize you need to reserve 16px and do layout again.
- pasc1878 4y agoNo the solution is to always show the scroll bar. Then I don't have to guess if there is anything to scroll.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoYep, another vote for always scroll bar here. And an additional complaint about those tiny-thin scroll bars that some idiot-designer though were slick because they so minimally interfere with the rest of 1920px-width display, which also makes them a giant pain-in-the-wrist to click on because the width to make it appear is so thin, and then clicking on the scroller is another challenge whereby it's much easier to accidentally make the scroll bar disappear. Rinse and repeat. I used to be half-decent at railgun in Q3A, but I now struggle to hit scroll bars. That's a fucking design problem.
- actualwitch 4y agoI think you misread op, they explained why the overlay scrollbars (aka "tiny-thin scroll bars that some idiot-designer though were slick because they so minimally interfere with the rest of 1920px-width display") are used instead of the old ones that cause layout to trigger again.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoHaha, that's because I intended to reply to pasc1878 and hit the wrong reply text. (because I'm an idiot, not because the reply text shifted on the page)
- bchris4 4y agoHappens to me quite often with searching for apps on iOS, it almost seems perfectly timed to switch the icon you’re tapping on right as you’re tapping it
- ptato 4y agoWhere is that spot? That has never happened to me, but I'm curious to see what it looks like.
- vidanay 4y agoYouTube also has the problem that there is almost no dead space to "park" your cursor. You have to carefully place it in between autoplaying previews.
- devnullbrain 4y agoI've noticed this with JIRA, there is not much space to click 'safely' to focus on the window
- FridgeSeal 4y agoEven the blank spaces in jira can cause things to happen! Accidentally click on some white space? Well too bad, we’ve closed whatever you’re looking at, even though you’re not in a modal. Oh and also, you’ll need to wait 30-seconds for this new page to load, and you can’t just bail out and go back a page, because your browser can’t hold the previous page in cache/memory properly because it’s some overly-complicated JS app.
- sublinear 4y agoThe slowness is actually Jira's backend. Look at how long the network requests take.
- solardev 4y agoJira is basically a UX anti-goldmine... a single place to go to learn all the things NOT to do.
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoAzure DevOps is the same if not worse. I'm forever expanding or contracting the Description and Acceptance Criteria as there are no colour shades differentiating the sections - you have to watch the cursor change. Then I wonder where the Description and Acceptance Criteria are for the next User Story, because it remembers that you (accidentally) contracted the Description for User Story X therefore you obviously don't want to see it for any others...
- 4y ago
- hnick 4y agoFollowing the same theme of liminal UI areas, another thing that peeves me is touch screens like my local supermarket self-checkout which respond with a beep (indicating they know I hit the button) but do nothing, because apparently the beep-region and action-region and not the same. Or maybe I dragged my finger, in which case, please don't beep.
- soulofmischief 4y agoI spent half an hour last night resolving this exact class of bug on a padded clickable widget I was making. No one told me it had to be perfect, but I care about the user and don't ever want the user to be surprised. That's the difference you get with outsourcing your engineering team vs developing in-house. If you choose a good team, your developers feel directly responsible for the user experience, go beyond stated requirements, and aren't just doing the bare minimum in order to make a paycheck. A good UX professional is constantly testing their work with unexpected input.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoI disagree that this is an invariant of outsourcing; I have worked plenty of places where the contractors/vendors cared more than the FTEs. Conversely, the pressure for dark patterns has generally come from the inside.
- soulofmischief 4y agoThis isn't a dark pattern, it's a combination of incompetent designer-developers and a lack of robust specification (on account of assuming competence in your designer-developers)
- hnick 4y agoI personally think that was a decent use of time - 30 minutes vs a product-lifetime of not pissing off users that little bit will give a lot of goodwill payoff. But I have worked at a place with in-house developers where they probably wouldn't have showed the initiative to do it themselves, and if brought up later as an annoyance I'd be asked for a "business case" which is a complete non-starter, because how do you even begin to quantify this in a way everyone can agree on? I value polish for its own sake highly as I think you do too, a well made tool is more rewarding to use. But the ones forecasting developer effort need a concrete justification. So it's best to just sneak this in if you can and hope other people you work with feel the same, after all it's much quicker to do it up front than to lose context and revisit it later. Asking permission will cost far more than your 30 minutes.
- princevegeta89 4y agoSlightly unrelated, but all these media streaming apps and services like Netflix/Prime Video/Youtube etc. are so horrible by automatically playing whatever the fuck I am currently focused on, although I am just scrolling to somewhere to find my content. There is no way for users to focus "out" of the thumbnails, other than focusing on a different thumbnail, and it keeps playing the nonsense. All I would do is go back all the way to main menu or where I started
- Godel_unicode 4y agoAt least on YouTube you can turn that off.
- jamiek88 4y agoYou can?! Investigation time!
- climb_stealth 4y agoHoly cow, I had no idea. This is how to do it: when on the youtube page, click on the profile button in the top right -> settings -> playback and performance on the left -> disable inline playback. /edit: It still plays videos on hover after changing it. Only now there is no player popup anymore.
- X-Cubed 4y agoYou can turn it off on Netflix too: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/2102
- atahanacar 4y ago...only if you have an account.
- jiggawatts 4y agoExcept that this config option is broken on the YouTube app that comes with Android TV / Google TV.
- soulofmischief 4y agoA general golden UX rule is to never cause layout shifts on hover events, preventing this sort of thrashing. Unfortunately, Google/YouTube and others have lost the plot and no longer employ good UX professionals in their flagship products.
- zinckiwi 4y agoAt least they have the precisely correct blue, though. https://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html https://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.htm...
- racked 4y agoThey probably employ large teams of both good and bad UX designers, constantly deploying and A/B testing UI changes. If the A/B test says the change wins, it stays. Sites like Booking.com do this to the umpteenth degree.
- ryandrake 4y agoI really wish UIs would stop doing things on hover events altogether. Just because I stop my mouse doesn't mean I intend to do anything, let alone auto-play a video or have some pop-up explain something to me. Let me rest my goddamn hand for a second!
- scubbo 4y agoI'm sorry to inform you that, by hovering over the video, you have Engaged with the Algorithm and thus demonstrated that the auto-play is Good, Actually. Short-sighted optimization for engagement is the cause of an overwhelming majority of the problems on the Internet.
- jiggawatts 4y agoOn an Android TV the YouTube app auto-plays videos if you stop moving the selection cursor for about a second. It feels so fantastically “pushy” to start playing the audio of some random junk that just happened to be under the selection reticle. They helpfully added a configuration option to turn this behaviour off, which is a tacit admission that it’s a misfeature that users want to disable. It does nothing. The videos still play.
- toast0 4y agoGoogle cloud console does this kind of thing without even needing to have the mouse anywhere in particular. I just close my eyes and click on where I hope the target will remain.
- devmor 4y agoTwitter has an issue like this with its video player - clicking on the vertical volume bar to adjust it and moving past the seek bar that it intersects with causes the volume interaction to drop off in favor of the seek interaction.
- krautsourced 4y agoNetflix did that for a long time with the very right item in the suggestion list where I could never see the details because it would instead scroll to the next page, making the item I was interested in disappear to the left :) Seems like they fixed that though
- klazutin 4y agoI've recently come across a perfect example of just that: [1]. Just try to slowly move the mouse over any of the round red year marks at the center of the page. [1]: https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/ai-robotics/ https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/ai-robotics/