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Comment by neogodless | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure what the research shows on this sort of thing, but when I loaded up the landing page on my desktop browser, I saw two buttons, and neither applied to me. "SIGN UP" and "LOG IN". Since I did not yet know what this thing is, beyond my vague knowledge of Kanban and email, I wanted it to explain that to me. Instead, I have to take action.

Oh wait... after a while I look for a UI element - a scroll bar. And this is the only clue I get to tell me how to navigate. Is this a good design choice, to make it appear like your only options are one of two actions, while relying on a native browser control to hint to the user that they can scroll to get down to the information they are going to need to start making decisions?

(I'm not arguing that this can't be a good design choice, but at least for me, personally, it seemed pushy, while also being unintuitive if you're not there to take one of those actions.)

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Typically there are two affordances that tell the user he can scroll:

1) A scroll bar

2) Clipped content

Many browsers hide the scroll bar, so the only thing left is 2).

For some reason designers think that it's a good idea to scale the content in such a way that the initial page load looks like a complete page.

This is so idiotic! You are actively misleading the customer! You are hiding all the marketing copy.

Some designers have realised this is a problem, and they add a little arrow to indicate you can scroll. Nobody understands those weird arrows except other designers.

The easiest way to tell users that there is more content is to show it! Make it so that part of the second headline is visible, and noone will miss the fact that there is more content below!

If you go for sexy screenshots, sure, go make your first section fill the browser window. If you want your visitors to read your page, don't do that!

Interesting. I’m pretty sensitive to UX but this has never been a problem for me. I don’t come across single non scrolling static websites that often, and knowing that the entire content will most likely never be at the top, I immediately scroll down without thinking.

I find it extremely fascinating that some people actually have to look for a scroll bar or clipped content (spoon fed) in order to scroll down. Sometimes I don’t even know there is one unless I have to speed drag on a long page.

> I don’t come across single non scrolling static websites that often

google.com comes to mind.

Actually, now that this post curiously made me look: https://duckduckgo.com/ ACTUALLY has content below the initial search form. I have been visiting that page for a very long time now and I actually never knew that until testing it right now to add to above list. Wow.

aside: not sure why you included the word "static" in there, since it's kind of irrelevant to what users see. Maybe you meant it in a different way than most people take it, which usually means the site looks the same to all users.

age, every one has different life experience

The "spoon fed" bit is insulting. People are not infants if they don't guess that there's an invisible thing.

If designers want people to know something exists, they should generally make it visible. Especially given that with pages like this one, deemphasizing or hiding things is a common dark pattern to force people to think there are no alternatives.

> I’m pretty sensitive to UX but this has never been a problem for me.

> I find it extremely fascinating that some people actually have to look for a scroll bar or clipped content (spoon fed) in order to scroll down.

This demonstrates serious lack of sensitivity as you're unable to look beyond your own immediate usage.

> Many browsers hide the scroll bar

On touch devices, yes. On desktop, not really. I think Safari on OS X is the only one, all others (basically everything on Windows and Linux) always show scroll bars on scrollable content. And on touch devices, users tend to try scroll quite readily, so I don't think clipped content is a necessity.

However, artificially stretching content to the fold is still against the idea of a (scrollable) website.

Chrome on macOS hides scroll bars, too.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowScrollBars -string "Always"

___

This setting in terminal will always show scroll bars.

Also this:

System Preferences > General > Show scroll bars: Always

On the Mac, virtually all applications, including the major web browsers (Safari, Chrome, Firefox), do this. You can change it with a setting, but the system default is to auto-hide all scrollbars.

#2 can be tricky. Since everyone's screens can be of different sizes and resolutions, its hard to have a "perfect" layout that always clips the next bit of content on every single screen.

I would imagine its the opposite; you have to try pretty hard to make your content fit perfectly. Putting no effort should naturally lead to a misfit, and thus clipping, unless you have a lot of empty space.

One potential solution to that is to have a 'fade out' gradient effect at the bottom of the screen, which signals to the user that they need to scroll down to see the rest of the page.

It's not very hard these days. You can use height: 90vh (the page is using 100vh) and set min-height as appropriate. vh unit is a percentage relative to the viewport height and is already universally supported[1].

[1]: https://caniuse.com/#search=vh

This is awesome, thanks! I would have killed for this years ago.

As a web dev and designer myself I can't agree with you any more. People outside of design and development often seem obsessed with the "first fold" containing everything needed but it's not always the best approach, this is a perfect case.

Before I read the comment you replied to I myself too thought that I'd need to open the Inspect Element Editor to kill the modal hiding the example page / example image of the "Kaban Email", even if it were just an image I wanted to see what it looked like and if it seemed like something I'd enjoy / benefit from using.

I read a good article once (can’t seem to find it, I’ll link it if I do) where a UX designer had a similar reaction to a website. He was angry that he needed to provide an email address to access the “show me what this tool even is” part of a website. He concluded it was bad UX and wrote an angry tweet.

Turns out the UX of the website had been user tested extensively. The design they chose was the most successful at achieving their goal (new user signup or something).

The learning lesson was you may not be the target user for the design. Or you may not realize what the primary goal of the design is.

Edit: This was the article I referenced https://medium.theuxblog.com/there-are-no-ux-best-practices-...

To clarify I wasn't trying to defend dark / grey UX patterns. Just thought I'd share as it helped me look at (what I consider) bad UX in a different frame of mind.

Oh, I think everyone complaining knows precisely what's the goal of this design. This is a "grey" pattern - not very dark, but sort of signalling that the people you're dealing with do not have your well-being in mind. Not evil, just not nice.

Yup.

If a user doesn't understand something that a designer has worked to make hard to understand, that's bad UX, not good UX. If the phrase "user experience" is to have any meaning at all, the analysis has to be centered in the user's values, not the designer's.

As an example, if a mark is taken in by a well-executed pigeon drop [1], one could call plausibly call it a well-designed scam. But one cannot call it good UX.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeon_drop

“Help, there is this defective machine, it made a loud noise and a piece of metal emerged and lodged itself in my abdomen. It is unsafe, a very bad design!”

“Well, actually, it is a gun, and it is a very good design for its intended purpose. It’s just that the manufacturer does not have your interests in mind.”

> The learning lesson was you may not be the target user for the design. Or you may not realize what the primary goal of the design is.

A bad design doesn’t get better just because there are excuses that explain why it’s like this. It’s hard to justify that "Someone visiting my website to get info about my product" is not a target user.

Agree, also it is terrible UX if it is not apparent when you can not decide for yourself whether you are the target user. It isn't hard and it saves from these two scenarios:

1. Oh, this isn't for me, glad I found that out quickly - saved me lots of frustration.

2. Yeah, I'm not the target audience for this but I know of another niche where this is useful despite that - I might actually try it out!

It also gives a very bad impression of the company to actively not caring about frustrating users they are not interested in.

Seems I paraphrased the article poorly, here are the actual key points:

1. Never assume you know more about a design than the company that made it.

2. You don’t know the problem that the design is solving.

3. Don’t jump to conclusions until you have data to back it up.

4. You don’t have to be right to be a good designer. You just have to listen when you’re wrong.

5. Always test. Always.

6. There are no UX best practices.

In general I tend to align with you though. Do right by the user, and its probably the right thing for your company too!

If the problem the design solves is the designer's problem but not the user's problem, then it is definitionally a bad user experience.

You could call it a well-executed exploitative design, I suppose, but you can't call good UX when the U has an X that is by their lights bad. And even calling it "good design" only works if one thinks design has absolutely no ethics built in.

As a comparison, you can't really call what Josef Mengele did "good medicine". It doesn't matter how technically skilled he was or how much he accomplished for his employers, because medicine is deeply and explicitly patient-centered. Many designers believe that unethical use of design skills is flat out bad design, no matter how much money it makes.

> The design they chose was the most successful at achieving their goal (new user signup or something).

Sounds like they didn't define their goals well. I bet that would lead to a lot of people signing up just to learn more and then abandoning their accounts.

Personally, I provide fake info/email address to sign up on sites when it is required but never plan to return to the site. Do they get more signups this way? Yes, but it is probably a low quality user group and not likely to convert further.

Came here to say this. I really don't like this UI/UX trend of "If the user isn't smart enough to test and see if they can scroll, screw 'em!". Apple did something similar in their Podcasts app (when you are playing a podcast, it turns out you can scroll down on the "card" to see a lot of additional features. It took me months to discover this, and reminded me of the months it took me to discover that the Calculator app can rotate into a scientific calculator).

this is for hn users...you can assume we know. Plus its an mvp, who cares about landlords page.

who cares about landlords page

I really hope this is just autocorrect getting hilariously overzealous, heh.

I _am_ an HN user, and the landing page absolutely does matter for an MVP. The issue here is that they went to all of the trouble to make a landing page, then hid it from their users. The parent of this thread was tipped off by noticing his scrollbar, but it was worse for me -- Chrome hides the scrollbar. I opened the link, saw a barren a paywall / loginwall, closed the tab, and started to write a post questioning the decision to post a barren paywall to HN. Then I thought "wait a minute, maybe I can scroll...", and opened up the tab again.

That's not the first impression they want.

“That depends.”

Some MVPs presume that some instruction and filtering of users takes place outside of the app. In my company, we make “early access” versions of features that presume there is a product manager talking to an early access customer and walking them through its use.

Other times a feature is being launched to a wider audience, and we cannot presume they know anything about it. In that case, if it doesn’t interest them and inform them enough to use it, it is not really viable.

So... I neither agree nor disagree with you about MVPs not caring about landing pages. I think we need more context. Perhaps for the purpose of “Show HN,” it is a fine MVP. But perhaps it is not a good MVP for the purpose of my tweeting “Check this cool app out.”

I guess I'm not smart enough then, or maybe I am too old. Along these lines I also just recently discovered that when viewing photos on an iphone you can scroll and see more info about a photo (geo, related pics, etc). I only discovered this by watching my 3 year old play with my phone a few weeks ago. What else have I been missing?

Thank you for saying this for "the rest of us" who also find this incredibly unintuitive, counterproductive, and off-putting!

Let's see if I have this right: so, apparently this false "full page" design gets more people to sign up than if it were clear there was more content on the page? Is that right?

So following that logic, wouldn't you get yet even more sign-ups if it actually was just a full page Signup/Login choice? I mean, the "secret" content that the initial appearance is trying to "hide" can't possibly be helping the signup counts, can it? Otherwise you'd just have a "normal" page with clipped content that can clearly be scrolled, wouldn't you?

What I mean is, I can't understand the existance of more content except to "reward" visitors who either notice the scrollbar or (apparently) try to scroll on every page they encounter.

Please help me connect the dots, oh Monochromatic Lords of the Grey Pattern!

I think you are absolutely right.

If someone is not interested in the two options they have - done by purpose to increase sign ups - they will try something else like scrolling; which in this case is more information about the product.

I don't like it, but that's my understanding.

I had already closed the tab since it didn't seem like there was a way to get more info. I discovered I could scroll by reading this comment.

So I don't think it's a good design choice, no.

Funnily enough I came across the same thing today. I was browsing for a new switch game and came across http://www.fallenlegiongame.com/.

My first thought was that if you have to put a moving sign saying "scroll down ya dummy", then maybe you shouldn't be designing pages like this? But hey, at least they tell you to do it, unlike most others.

It's certainly a dark pattern. The area is purpose made to look like a modal has take over the page and left you with two options. That area even adjusts to the window size furthering the effect.

For me, this was a self-explanatory app. Just seeing the background image told me everything I needed to know.

sure, but enough to sign up?

not for me, but maybe for my co-worker

The "false bottom" thing is pretty well covered in UX/Conversion optimization circles. See, e.g. https://conversionxl.com/blog/false-bottom/

I am amazed by how astonishingly bad that article took to heart it's topic. I thought the article was super short when I reached the embedded Rebecca Gordon quote because I just assumed that was an "about the author" box that I could ignore.

I also don't really pay attention to "return to top" buttons, but while reading their section on why displaying such buttons before the end of the article is a bad idea I glanced to the right and noticed a "return to top" button.

A lot of the points in the article are well thought out, and I'm a bit fan of cut content myself but... they're hilariously bad at listening to their own advice.

I think this is is just a first version of an MVP launch without much UX research. I wouldn't assume all the design details have a well-thought intention behind. And I wouldn't be too harsh judging the design choices.

It may just reflect some explicit or implicit assumptions of the founder who is much more focused on the product itself than on the sales experience or onboarding flow. A good sign, in my opinion, to be honest.

And between giving too much and too little prominence to CTA buttons, I would err on the too much side.

i did try to find something of interest in the tinted background image while my mouse was travelling to the close button. i didn't.

Man, I actually left before I realized I needed to scroll. I went back and looked at it after I read your comment.

I look forward to the first Show HN post where the top comment is not a minor UX quibble.

Then you're in luck. This isn't a minor UX quibble. It's a dog shit UX approach that attempts to fool users into signing up before they get introduced to the product at all. It's not the worst approach ever, it's merely intentionally somewhat abusive.

Honest question: how did you not get what the app was about almost immediately?

It wasn't obvious for me either. I also didn't get the scrolling element. It seems to be a merge of emails and todo? Still not really clear. Perhaps an introduction video could help? I'm also concerned on information security. There could be a really clever solution how full privacy and match prioritising emails. Senders and subject lines are sensitive.

At work I currently get 1000-2000 email per day, of which about 500 need personal attention, including calendar invites. This sounds horrendous, and it ain't great, but Outlook is surprisingly adept at rule setting, being really responsive, and integrated with Office (and to a lesser extent Skype, OC was more pleasurable for the from a UX perspective) to make this manageable.

Oh I got it. But that was not enough for me to Sign Up.

I still need to know...

- on which devices will this work?

- what email hosting / APIs does this support?

- do I like the UI?

- do I like the web site UI and think it'll translate to the app... ?

- does this cost me something, such as a subscription or time clicking through ads?

- will I actually like this UI for my email over what I do now?

I've used Kanban type of task management sparingly so it was not immediately obvious what it could do for e-mail.

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