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Comment by ubercow13 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it is just that. Google is just shockingly bad at web frontend. All their properties are terrible, except maybe Youtube which I find quite agreeable. For example I just made a search on google.com, the most popular website in the world, and it can't even fit the content into this reasonably sized window [1].

[1] https://i.imgur.com/ER5yfbd.png

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Which large companies aren't bad at web frontend? UX seems to always be far down on the list or priorities for modern websites.

I find Github and Amazon's main site to be pretty reasonable in comparison.

As someone who regularly uses other e-commerce front ends, I find Amazon to be quite cluttered and messy. Also it‘s surprisingly difficult to quickly find a specific product.

I felt the same way with Amazon. Before then it was easy to navigate and finding the product that I want to buy. Now, I couldn't navigate it well like I did in the past. And asian-sounding names products took over first few pages of result which made it difficult to filter out. And they are crap quality products. It is easily to tell which products is made in. Hint the brand name is all capitalized.

I am simply happy that Amazon has not embraced the ridiculous trend of low-information density with large amounts of whitespace.

Give me a cluttered UI that has everything available any day.

Totally. Cmd+F FTW, if you wanna search.

One pet peeve I have is getting to prime video. They own primevideo.com, but it just tells you to watch on Amazon. It's also the first result when you search (on google) for amazon prime video. There's no direct url to get it (afaik).

amazon.com/primevideo and amazon.com/video both go there.

The situation with primevideo.com is strange, but it seems to have something to do with non-US territories?

PrimeVideo.com is the website (in addition to apps on mobile and living room devices like TVs and consoles) where customers outside of the US, UK, Germany, and Japan can watch Prime Video. In the aforementioned four countries, customers can watch Prime Video directly on their amazon.* retail website instead.

Thanks, I had no idea!

Really? Criticizing Google's frontends but praising GitHub and Amazon? If I had to pick a large tech company with a bad frontend Amazon would be top of the list. GitHub is not great either. I guess this kind of thing is just subjective though.

What do you find lacking about GitHub's frontend?

For one, they're using some sort of link / browser history hijacking (something like https://github.com/turbolinks/turbolinks, IIRC) which is buggy, for example:

* say you're on page A

* navigate to page B

* navigate to page C

* click your browser's back button, hoping to be back at page B

* the github UI screws up and keeps you on the same page while changing the URL in the address bar

* so you click back again

* now your on page A, completely skipping page B

* clicking forward takes you back to C

Additionally, GitHub is insanely slow. This page, for example, takes 3 seconds to load: https://github.com/Boemska/create-sas-app/commit/85224fe6622...

Couple broken history back/forward navigation with long page load times and GitHub is easily one of the most frustrating web sites to use.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that GitHub doesn't have value -- it most certainly does -- but that doesn't excuse bugginess and absurdly long page load times. If they fixed these problems it would be 100% awesome.

What browser are you on? The navigation issues don't happen for me on Chrome.

The latest Chrome. This has been a problem I've experience for years.

For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks).

Back and forward work great on GitHub. My mouse has additional buttons for these.

> For me this page render instantly. i5 2500K, 16 GB RAM on Linux (I do have some aggressive tweaks).

My machine: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6850K CPU @ 3.60GHz, 128 GB RAM on Ubuntu Linux 20.04.

> My mouse has additional buttons for these.

Similar. As a sibling post mentions, the history hijacking does some nasty stuff -- unless you're lucky or something, I guess.

The page switch fuckery I'm noticing is not quite as severe as what you described, but still annoying:

* say you're on page A, an open pull request

* merge the pull request

* switch to a different site entirely

* go back to github's page A

* notice how it shows the pull request as if it wasn't merged yet

* refresh the page and see the status switch to merged

I'm using Firefox and I've never tried reproducing this on Chromium.

Github's site is really fast. Many of the pages it displays are dense with information and I think it displays everything well, for example viewing diffs in Github is very good, it smartly wraps all the text so you can view everything on the screen and everything loads fast. Try comparing it to Bitbucket's diff view, which can't wrap text amongst other things. It's light years better in comparison. It looks good at any window width with little wasted whitespace.

Amazon's site works pretty well. Their product range is quite a mess to navigate but I've never been annoyed much by their front end. It seems pretty well engineered, eg. [1]

[1] https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...

On the whole GitHub's UI is good, though I still find it unreasonably difficult/slow to do a review commit by commit compared to kiln.

I'd really like it if they added a way to thumb between commits in one click without page loads, kinda like flipping through pages of a book

Amazon is about the last site I'd use as an example of a good UX. They've clearly been working on making it better, as the account drop-down has shrunk, but the amount of items on this screen is such that it really should have its own search to navigate it. A simple thing like buying a new gift card for someone is surprisingly clunky.

https://i.imgur.com/ZNKOkMN.png

github is great, both web and mobile (especially mobile). and their new homepage is great too.

target's item pages are really good right now. I love the information density and layout on their site, which to me is suggestive of thoughtful human-oriented design rather than amazon's (highly effective) a/b test shit shoveling.

amazon has "ship-it" UI standards and a lot of variance in page section order (could be a/b testing, or just discrete developer teams).

they have lots of really interesting ideas scattered around for how they can reach customers with unique contextual information, but I have a hard time with how dynamic the layout is and they also don't know how to make good hero pages. too many over-compressed image banners and image tables.

amazon and github both have crappy search which is kind of interesting to me. amazon sort basically doesn't work either, for price or for rating. not sure why.

/ecommerce rant lol

I personally love Airtable’s frontend. That’d be a project I’d love to work on.

> Which large companies aren't bad at web frontend? UX seems to always be far down on the list or priorities for modern websites.

which web frontend is good ? (except HN)

>Which large companies aren't bad at web frontend?

I know it's popular to shit on them, but Facebook (and to an extent Instagram). Despite all the expansion, and third part integrations, at least for me (13" MBP 2017, i7/16GB):

1. Everything "feels" like Facebook. 2. It's relatively quick. I can hop from posts, to events, no notifications.

I hardly use Facebook, except for marketplace, so I can't say for sure if users find the interface confusing, but the UI at the very least is well done.

But then look at FB Ads Manager - it's hard to imagine that such a horrible UX drives billions in revenue and yet no one seems to care.

Youtube UI/UX is horrible, try moving items in a long playlist, it takes forever to drag scrolling. Imagine a search engine company that doesn't have a quick search inside a playlist. And you need browser extensions like Youtube HD to fix several issues. It has been this way for years.

The elimination of dedicated playlist pages also sucks for resuming progress in the middle of a playlist

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