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Ask HN: Why is OpenAI and ChatGPT design so bad?
From login ,UI, to ease of actually submitting a query, why is the OpenAI website so bad given it is the hottest startup on earth and ycombinator companies seem to prioritize quality design and UIs (such as ABNB). This company can hire the best designers on the planet and yet the page is horrid. Is this on purpoise bc demand is so extreme they are throttling with a horrid interface or what?
- keiferski 3y agoWhat do you find bad about it? It seems pretty straightforward to me...
- apapapa 3y agoMaybe that the chat box is somewhat hidden
- hodder 3y agogo to the OpenAI website.. where is the actual product? It reads more like a splash page with a bunch of news nonsense no user cares about. Sure they have many products so then lets instead type chatGPT into google and go the link. Now I get to a page where it tells me to login on the side. Now I click login. Now im at an auth page. Next I get in. Now on the left I have about 60 tabs showing "new chat". There is just a ton about the design that makes it inaccessible, difficult to navigate to the actual products and get to results. Im no expert in this matter, but it is much closer to Snapchat level UI intuitiveness than it is to Airbnb.
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y agoThey don't have to. When you are the hottest company on Earth, the customers break down your doors and come to you. Their UI for the landing page and docs has always been atrocious, since day 1. The login locations kept changing and it was difficult to find. But once you have logged in, the developer dashboard and ChatGPT UI are actually pretty standard and boring.
- baryphonic 3y agoHere's one: I have some pretty long chats, but I can't use the "home" key to scroll to the top if I want to view previous messages. I always have to find the scrollbar and drag it all the way up (not so easy on macOS). It's quite annoying.
- zippothrowaway 3y agoNo ability to search previous chats.
- nickthegreek 3y agoI'll add that I want a way to organize my chats. Give me folders!
- sk11001 3y agoIs it? I much prefer the ChatGPT UI over the Gemini one which mangles any code you input. OpenAI need to add text search over your chat history - your chat history becomes hard to manage very quickly.
- tobinfekkes 3y agoAgree 100%. I think the design/layout is actually quite nice. How much better could it be for a simple prompt/response page? But the lack of search is the only obvious missing piece.
- bobbob1921 3y agoSame here, I like the chatGPT web gui and use it on average once a day, I like how it keeps the chat history and auto names each chat session. (I’m on the paid 20$ a mo plan)
- x0x0 3y agoThere's lots of areas for improvement. eg you could create permanent messages re: your level of competence w/ programming. Say I ask for regex help. It will often start by explaining what ruby is or how to use gsub. Whereas I'm just using it to speedrun writing v1. So some way to persist something ala, "I'm a competent dev familiar with languages X, Y, Z; please be terse; you're just writing v1 and do not have to warn me this is just a starting point; etc" would be quite welcome. And search. And categories re: the project that I was working on if you're not going to provide search.
- FranklinMaillot 3y agoThat feature already exists. You can give custom instructions. https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8096356-custom-instructions-for-chatgpt https://help.openai.com/en/articles/8096356-custom-instructi...
- nosefurhairdo 3y agoThis feature exists under "customize chatgpt" menu option in side nav. Can give information up to 1500 characters + instructions for how to respond up to 1500 characters. Search is a good idea; I imagine that might already be on the roadmap.
- aborsy 3y agoIndeed I find it bad, especially for such product.
- rabbits_2002 3y agoI never thought this a single time. The UI is perfectly fine.
- amerkhalid 3y agoOne more vote for ChatGPT’s simple and intuitive UI. I personally find most of modern web design over the top, with bare minimum information, just fluff. I guess it depends on your target market, average consumer probably is easier to influence with certain designs and average technical user probably prefers less clutter on their tools.
- byyoung3 3y agothey are focused on models. If the model is the best, the UX wont matter. If the model is 2nd best, the best UX in the world won't make up for it.
- sfmike 3y agonever asked this because the ui was good enough to hide it's presence in my subconcious
- mgdev 3y agoThey're focusing on what matters.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoCan you give more concrete examples? What would you change from/to?
- jwithington 3y ago"it's a chat app, michael. how much design does it take?"
- nosefurhairdo 3y agoThere's hardly any specific criticism here. I'll give my perspective for why I disagree. They keep me logged in between sessions unless I clear cookies, so when I navigate to chatgpt I go straight to a new chat. There are zero steps for me to get where I want to go. The side nav is simple, shows me a history of chats which is all I care about. Copying code is easy. The layout works well on mobile as well as desktop.
- mgkimsal 3y ago> ycombinator companies seem to prioritize quality design and UIs Any sort of B2C org will need to focus on improving a UX experience. Many B2B orgs don't need to do this. openai certainly doesn't at this stage. What would be the point? Getting even more people signed up and using it? They've got nothing to prove at this point with respect to getting signups and revenue.
- FranklinMaillot 3y agoWhat infuriates me is that it scrolls while generating an answer and the text keeps shifting while I'm trying to read at the same time. Doesn't look like a hard problem to solve, it should just keep the viewport fixed. Am I the only one bothered by that?
- TechRemarker 3y agoInteresting, I've greatly enjoyed it. And often note how for instance Microsoft's implementation is much poorer design as well as Google's implementation of their chat bot. While always room for improvement, haven't heard any previous significant discussions about ChatGPT being poor design. Might be helpful if you elaborated on what about the design you particular do not like?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- CharlesW 3y ago"Bad" and "horrid" are unactionable, and the Airbnb comparison makes no sense. Do you have any useful criticism? It's rudimentary, yes. It sure seems like it'd be easy to enable users to easily copy and save chats, for example.
- irvingprime 3y agoHorrid? It looks fine to me. More importantly, it does what I want (more or less). What do you think is so bad and how would you fix it?
- 0x008 3y agoBecause they are spending all their money on data scientists.