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Comment by Rygian | Hacker News Reader

I am impressed that UX and Usability can reach such lofty philosophical considerations, yet it's 2020 and I am still trapped by UIs that keep shifting around the content I'm about to interact with and trick me into clicking or tapping where I didn't intend to.

Not a day passes by that a partially-loaded screen moves that button or textarea just a couple milliseconds before I click on it (so now my click goes elsewhere), both on web apps, phone apps, and to a lesser extent, native apps.

There should be a hardcoded Rule #0 of User Experience: don't move anything on screen unless the user directly initiated an explicit action for the specific thing to move.

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I remember one of the earliest programs I wrote as a kid was a button in a window that would jump away when you tried to click it. It seemed incredibly funny and witty at the time.

Google's CLS metric should be penalizing sites for this type of experience, which in 2021 will be a ranking signal for search.

Keys too, like when a modal dialogs pops up and treats your Enter key as a confirmation for... something. Stuff that seems like it should have been ironed out at a deep layer 20 years ago.

And in the meantime, we have a constant stream of innovation: new ways to use angle brackets in your code, new ways to avoid angle brackets in your code, a new library that renders buttons and toggles, ways to add a depth illusion to the UI, ways to remove the depth illusion. None of it makes anything more usable.

Yes and usually the click ends up on an ad... I'm wondering sometimes if this is not intentional to artificially increase click on ads.

That is usually because an ad is dynamically allocated to a slot (of a dynamic size often too), which starts after the page loads. If said ad is above the content you want to interact with, it pushes everything down (below) and there you go.

It can be resolved by a) not using dynamically allocated slots or b) by never putting ads above any content someone might interact with.

c) blocking ads

I quite often don't understand why this isn't the norm already, especially by people in this community.

I agree completely.

And sometimes it is not easy to accomplish, even when you are not trying to implement dark patterns.

I've had to work hard to get rid of "the jumpies" in my UI, and it still happens a little bit.

I do find it frustrating, however, and I hope to eliminate them completely.

I always wondered why smartphones didn’t register a click as targeting the element that was in-position ~100ms before.

That would solve a lot of infuriating mistakes.

oh yeah, those are so annoying. Paypal forever shuffling that stupid credit card button of theirs in place of the 'pay now'. What the hell, don't they have enough money they dont have to use dodgy tactics to get me to sign up to a credit card of theirs.

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