It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences? | Hacker News Reader

It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?

troyhunt.com

75 pointsthebent30 comments

A better article could be: "It's 2016 and we still don't know how to monetize a popular website well enough to fund its continued existence".

Even better if it actually provides ideas on how to move forward.

Indeed! Other than examples like back button, scroll hijack, password criteria most degraded user experiences mentioned in the article are side effects of a desperation to monetize. These articles bitch and moan about the bloat and degrading user experiences. I'm sure it feels good to vent. However the real challenge here is coming up with a healthy economic model around content publishing.

I hate the pages that wait a couple seconds for you to scroll down and start reading, then they have a banner ad at the top that auto-expands, which makes the spot you are reading scroll down, then after you have re-scrolled to compensate, the banner ad auto-collapses to make the spot you are reading scroll back up so you have to re-re-scroll to re-compensate.

I auto-pilot CTRL+W those sites, there isn't even a decision process. The only answer is, "Well, this is going away now."

In a similar vein are sites with modals, which pop as soon as you start scrolling, that attempt to extort your e-mail address to continue reading. They don't provide a way to close the modal via a button or the ESC key. Those are rage-inducing to me. Who the fuck thinks that is a good idea? That's a sure-fire way to make sure I will never click a link to the same domain again.

edit/ Editing this to say, I used to just fill in some bogus e-mail address like "gofuck@yourself.com" but have realized that it justifies the behavior more than it sends a message.

The funny thing is, half of the time links to Forbes don't even work. I'll click on a link and it will show me the quote of the day, but then instead of taking me to the intended article, it drops me off at http://forbes.com/.

I'm really surprised they haven't noticed a loss of traffic related to this. Perhaps it's just my setup, but I've been able to repeat it on Firefox and Iceweasel, which are quite popular web browsers.

Forbes is infuriating, I've stopped clicking on their links. I experience the same nonsense on a Mac using Safari.

I'm starting to think that a good approach to much of this would be an auto-learning adblocker. E.g. visit a site once, refresh and if your browser renders something different to the previous render, your adblocker gives you the option to drop it or leave it (and then does the 'right thing' with pulling out those elements of the DOM).

I also think that stable URLs are long overdue.

I have always felt that file extensions make no sense in web pages. Why should I, the visitor, need to be dependent on whether or not you ".asp" or ".php" or ".cgi" or ".flavoroftheweek"? I had a series of bookmarks break entirely because the target site's implementation changed. Fortunately, the site managed to keep all the old root file names so after hacking each bookmarked "/filename.foo" into "/filename.bar", I was able to repair them. (Usually though, that won't work at all. And besides, most people would not even try that, they would assume their bookmarks are lost forever.)

For years at past companies, I put up with corporate E-mails containing literally 12 steps of instructions that say "go to company.net/portal", "click X", "click Y", "click Z", and on and on. Meanwhile I'm thinking: OR, you could invest in a non-crappy content management system that supports URLs of the form "company.net/stable/foobar", allow thousands of employees to click once, go directly to the target and bookmark it forever! Oh, and of course, the pages would change arbitrarily so it didn't even help to save old E-mails with all the instructions.

At the very least, tools should support this. At a previous job, the company overpaid for an "enterprise" bug-tracking system that couldn't even provide "company.net/bugs/123456" for direct-linking to individual bugs, even though this is an obvious case for a stable URL. Returning to any common issue involved an aggravating series of steps every single time.

What I'd appreciate would be if Google would start penalizing them in their search results, because they really degrade the experience. Literally 30 seconds ago I did a generic google search ("small business loans consulting" in particular) and the second hit looked interesting...oops, it was a Forbes link, hit back.

100% agreed on ignoring the EU cookies. It's a dumb law, users hate the messages.

I've never heard of anyone getting fined either. A plain privacy policy link in the footer should be sufficient.

EU's directive requires getting consent from the user[1].

"Consent must involve some form of communication where individuals knowingly indicate their acceptance"

A privacy policy link at the bottom would not suffice.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directiv...

I've heard of people having their Adsense account disabled or Adwords campaign rejected because of it though.

The article missed one. When the page is so densely packed that you can't find any white space to scroll with your mouse wheel for fear of rolling over a pop-up ad.

Twitter website on mobile is like that. I have to log out so I don't accidentally fav or follow someone.

The one that really ruffles my feathers is text highlight bringing up a share modal. That's how I keep track of where I was at; I, in fact, don't want to share this paragraph on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest.

Most of his points, I agree with, but it seems like he's against monetization with his ranting against ads and paywalls. It's how the web makes money.

I also don't feel as strongly as he does about scroll hijacking. Sometimes, it's beautiful and lovely. I see his points with the Macbook Pro page but I don't think it's a huge offender. Perhaps minorly annoying, but sometimes I'm okay with letting go of how I normally experience a website in order to have an experience. I don't think browsers exist to normalize experiences for everybody.

The latest bad: "Please complete this survey to continue reading the article."

Similar, but not so new:

You've been on this website a grand total of 3 seconds. Do you want to do a survey on it's usability?

Or subscribe to a newspaper you're reading for the first time.

Or subscribe to a newspaper you haven't started reading yet.

My favorite is when they pop-up the survey question right in the middle of when I'm entering my credit card number.

Die a fiery death indeed.

The last time that happened to me I decided to actually fill out the survey and tell them they lost a sale because of it. I gave up when I was nowhere close to being able to actually submit the survey several minutes later, which left me wondering how they possibly expected to get any responses at all.

I really dislike this business strategy, too, but if it's not all that bad if it's implemented correctly and cleanly. I'd prefer it over obnoxious ads if I can answer questions very quickly and I don't have to wait for my article to load.

I like those, because it only takes a second to click a random answer. You don't even have to read anything.

I have to wonder how the survey makers think the resulting data could be remotely accurate.

Meh. Disable javascript by default, and call it a day. Seriously, it makes browsing so much more bearable.

IMO, JS-bloat has already ruined so much of the web, that I've just given up on it, unless it's a special case. I'd rather deal with the mis-formatted webpage than your shitty js "features". And that's sad, because it really has potential to make the experience awesome.

What is the author's point? Regulate advertisers? Content providers? Webmasters? The internet itself? Its easy to make a website so lots of people will make poor choices. Either they don't know better or want more advertising money. You can complain all day about it, why not make a browser extension that fixes it instead?

Another one that's sort of touched on is websites which change the scroll rate. For some reason, designers think it's their job to adjust how much the page scrolls for any given spin of the scroll wheel on my mouse.

Just leave it be, please!

The multiple pages are to increase ads.

News flash: you are the product, not the customer.

Eu Cookie law. I think this law passed because it had the word Cookie in it. "Protect people's cookies", no one wants unsafe cookies.

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