7 ms·
I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But an
by xyst 2y ago
I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there?
You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ.
Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes.
Compare this to big box stores like “Home Depot”, “Lowe’s”. I can spend 10-15 minutes just trying to find the right size of screw, board, or whatever using their bloated sites. On mobile it’s even worse.
- arendtio 2y ago15 years ago, one would have said google.com But I think asking for a UI toolkit/framework is more helpful. Otherwise, you optimize for straightforward use cases, like entering a search box.
- skykooler 2y agoMy biggest issue with mcmaster's website is that it doesn't provide any sort of navigation hierarchy - if you go into, say, the "rounded head screws" subcategory, there's no option to get back to the general "screws" category besides the browser's navigation buttons.
- etrautmann 2y agoYep, this is indeed annoying but infrequently pointed out.
- djhn 2y agoI don’t know - I could argue that the user’s browser should be the preferred way to navigate, duplicating it’s functionality is redundant and adds clutter to the interface. It’s at least a defensible position.
- edflsafoiewq 2y ago"Back" is the not the same thing, since you didn't necessarily come from the "Screws" category page.
- mrWiz 2y agoIMO the biggest issue used to be that it wouldn't tell you the shipping cost until after you ordered. A few years ago they fixed that, but it still only gives you a total cost and doesn't tell you how your ordered is split into different shipments.
- ccakes 2y agoimo GitHub has to be up there. I think some of the recent changes to search and making the code view more IDE-like are steps backward from a “polish” perspective, but still useful features
- masklinn 2y agoCouldn’t disagree more. GitHub has jank from the api to the ui.
- robin_reala 2y agoGitHub specifically has the issue mentioned in this blog post! It annoyed me so much I had to file it with them three years ago, and it’s still not fixed: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7506 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7506
- Aeolun 2y agoI have to love that someone enthusiastically announced there was going to be a fix. Like, nobody, including the original issue author is actually enthusiastic about the fix. It’s just one less papercut. I’m sure if these things were actually seen by devs they’d add a two line change to a random PR and it would be done in a few minutes.
- geysersam 2y agoI like the IDE "defined here/used here" features but I wish the page would be faster. It can be quite painful to read code on GitHub. The code view is also broken and unusably slow in some mobile browsers (Firefox) when scrolling horizontally
- mattlondon 2y agoThis sort of problem (speed) is a much overlooked secondary functionality requirement IMO. You might get amazing UX mocks and wireframes and designs etc from the UX team, and the mockups from Figma or whatever may have user-tested really well, but if there is huge latency in the real implementation then that is a usability-killer IMO, regardless of how polished the UI is.
- donatj 2y agoI can name multiple Facebook features that have been broken for months. Temporary profile pictures most annoyingly of all. They stopped working close to a year ago. They simply never change back. No one's sanding anything there.
- waterproof 2y agoThe incentive structure doesn’t encourage it. Nobody gets a promotion for going back and fixing issues; it’s all about new initiatives and boosting metrics with new ideas.
- qingcharles 2y agoIf you look at the HTML output of FB, IIRC it is about 100 levels deep <divs> that cause me physical pain.
- djhn 2y agoThe thing that gets me is how slow all of it is. And I’ve programmed against facebook APIs, which are ludicrously performant! Hundreds of megabytes of data in single digit milliseconds total roundtrip.
- kristiandupont 2y agoThey do this in an attempt to combat ad blockers. It's an arms race that is sadly bound to create cruft like this.
- egeozcan 2y agoexactly, one example is there are a lot of programatically absolute positioned divs to break ad-blockers or make them very inefficient, while the performance of the app suffers from many tricks like these as well.
- johnisgood 2y agoIt actually is slow, you can see the loading bar load... In 2024 with the hardware we have, it is BAD.
- blovescoffee 2y agomcmaster is the most polished ui/ux you know? To each their own but this is a very hackernews comment - it's very much a site for engineers but I can't agree it's a polished UI or UX. To me: Sense of hierarchy is off, accessibility is meh, there's an enormity of information per page, there's poor use of color and spacing... it could be worse but I can imagine this site giving my designer friends a seizure.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tikhonj 2y agoI've listened through some of the developer commentary on Half Life 2 and Half Life Alyx and the amount of user testing coupled with attention to detail really impressed me. The same can't be said for Steam though :/
- duckmysick 2y agoLinear (of linear.app) has a highly polished UI. In fact they had a dedicated period for fixing just usability issues: https://linear.app/changelog/2022-12-01-polishing-season-2022 https://linear.app/changelog/2022-12-01-polishing-season-202... https://web.archive.org/web/20231003205004/https://linear.app/changelog/polishing/2022 https://web.archive.org/web/20231003205004/https://linear.ap...
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoI wish they'd make more apps. I use Linear but with a team of 1, it's not exactly the best fit for me.
- boundlessdreamz 2y agoLinear has the best UI/UX of all the web apps I have used. After Gmail and Google Maps, I don't recall any other web app wowing me as much as Linear.
- TheAceOfHearts 2y agoFastMail has one of the best-feeling web apps I've ever used. It's incredibly snappy and I never encountered any bugs while using it. They raised the bar for what I thought a web app could achieve.
- yawnxyz 2y agorecently switched all our mail to FastMail and that took 1ish hour... I was ready to spend a couple of days to wrestle switching mail providers. Guess they really live up to their promise
- dsissitka 2y agoI think the only thing I really dislike about Fastmail's UI is they've hidden the "Report phishing" and "Report spam" links and they're in two completely different places.
- tombh 2y agoYes! It doesn't make sense. It took me ages to remember where to go for each.
- martinsnow 2y agoThat's an unfortunate decision
- RockRobotRock 2y agoTo clarify: There's a menu bar for the entire email chain, and an "Actions" button for each mail message. Report Spam is only available in the former, and Report Phishing is only available in the latter. I agree, it's annoying! Maybe someone at Fastmail will see this.
- EmilStenstrom 2y agoAgreed. And that you can't mark a folder as read. Everything else is stellar.
- replwoacause 2y ago
- userbinator 2y agoI wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? Windows 2000. Everything newer has been slowly downhill.
- exe34 2y agoamen. and at some point Gmail was perfect, but they kept fixing it, so now it's getting bloated, slow and occasionally just does random things.
- 7bit 2y agoWindows 3.1 was better. Windows 2000 introduced a lot of point and click, which just distracts from what you actually want to do on a computer.
- navjack27 2y agoYes Windows 2000 distracts me from what I want to actually do with a computer, point and click. It absolutely prevents me from hitting the windows key and hitting the up button twice or three times mattering on if logout is there if my memory serves right after shutdown to get to run and then hit enter or just simply use the arrow keys on the desktop to get to my computer and hit enter which are all things I could do on Windows 3.1 by hitting the alt button to open up the menu or tab to switch between icons in the highlighted thing which are actually all things that I could do on Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows server 2003 Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows 8.1 Windows 10 Windows 11 Windows 98 Windows 95
- ahoka 2y agoI would say Project Chicago was maybe one of most consistent UI projects ever executed. Too bad they kept reinventing parts of it, so now we have a mishmash of different UX paradigms, some better, some worse, but certainly inconsistent. At least it’s not macOS though.
- rollcat 2y agoI really wish we had something resembling a "native" UI toolkit, but for the web. Just throw together a couple <button>s or <input type=checkbox>es with absolutely zero additional JS/CSS, but have it actually look & work moderately decent, the way SwiftUI does. CSS is too powerful, OOB HTML is too basic/ugly.
- bosky101 2y agoThat time of the year when everyone can see there is craftsmanship in the tiny details. https://littlebigdetails.com https://littlebigdetails.com is exactly that
- peheje 2y agoIdk. I just visited the site (McMaster) for like 2 minutes and found a few annoying things. I filtered for cotton (o rings). Nothing happens after click for 4 secs. Then it chooses something else to filter on. Next the animation to get the filtering menu is bugging out. And dragging it down triggers a site refresh.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y agoLinear app is quite polished. Stripe is also quite excellent but not entirely bug free. I think they have a bit more surface area though.
- cocoflunchy 2y agoProbably Netflix?
- dgellow 2y agoAs something I’m using on a daily basis, Linear has one of the best product UI I experienced. It is extremely polished and snappy
- SSLy 2y ago> I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? premium iOS apps. Procreate {,Dreams}, Photomator, Overcast, Crouton, Mela, Carrot Weather, Apollo.
- fuzzy2 2y agoMobile games, especially those with microtransactions. They're highly incentivized to offer a satisfying user interface. So as to get more money, of course.
- parpfish 2y agoThey don’t optimize for satisfying interfaces, they optimize for driving engagement. I find the aesthetics of free to play games very stressful and unsatisfying (lots of notifications and popular to distract you), but they ARE effective at getting me to click into menus to make those nuisances go away
- 2024user 2y agoHEY! mail was great when I used it
- jmb99 2y agoRockAuto is my favourite website. Incredibly simple and utilitarian, but also quite powerful. You can easily drill down or search for parts, depending on what is more intuitive to you. Price comparison is automatic, and grouped into useful price/quality categories. You can see year/make/model compatibility for a part number once you’ve found it, as well as a brief description, at least 1 picture (usually more), and determine whether it will be shipped from the same warehouse as other parts in your cart. It does all this with 0 friction, from one page, blazing fast on any platform. I end up ordering almost all my car parts there, not because they necessarily sell the best parts but because it’s just so easy to.
- Cannabat 2y agoI used RockAuto for the first time recently. The site is super dense with info and functionality, but never once did I feel lost or overwhelm. Neither did I feel like anything was missing. Everything I needed to see and do was exactly where it should be. It's so rare for the screen to disappear like that. It's so transparent that I _almost_ can't say it's a joy to use (it's a joy to use!).
- Already__Taken 2y agoThe best UI is no UI. Anyone who tries to design for increased engagement isn't who you're looking for. I'd look to study lots of internal tools that don't get marketed or outside influences. That would be interesting to find out. Where's the crossover from just enough resources to make it exist and enough resources to leave it as "finished"
- dclowd9901 2y agoAs far as app UIs go, I just started using Duolingo and their app seems to be tremendously well polished.
- mrighele 2y ago> You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. There is no point in sanding something that someone else is using hammer and chisel on. FAANGS are the companies of continuously delivered websites, self-updating evergreen software, churners of framework-du-jour that are deprecated sooner than you can say "FAANG". Even if took the time to sand something, it would be replaced by something else the following day.
- shepherdjerred 2y agoI have no idea where you got this idea from. Can you give some examples showing that switching to a new framework is a common at FANGs? Yes, frontend moves quickly and there is a new framework every day. No, most products teams at FANGs are not rewriting frontends in a new framework every year.
- slmjkdbtl 2y agoI like zfs.rent, very small but still it's a functioning business site.
- svieira 2y agoAzure Standard has an incredibly polished experience for shopping. It's not _perfect_ (if you know where to put your hands you can find a place that isn't perfectly sanded) but the sheer level of smoothness across the transaction flow is unmatched by anything else I have ever had the pleasure of using in the "online shopping" category.
- IOT_Apprentice 2y agoJust browsed McMaster. What a clean interface! Very easy to drill in and see what you are looking for. Compare that with the promotion of paid ads on the many major e-commerce platforms.
- xnx 2y agoMoney can't buy taste. I've never met a website designer who cares about how something works even 1/20th as much about how it looks.
- mbonnet 2y agoWindows 95.