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Comment by benlivengood | Hacker News Reader

GUIs should effectively be finite state machines and people expect them to operate that way. People understand latency and get used to it; it happened on mainframes and other terminal applications and people memorize the state machine and can tab and type through an interface at high throughput anyway.

One of the most frustrating experiences is related to the OP; reflow in browsers as new elements load making it impossible to click on the right thing until the whole page finishes loading. Popups are also nearly as bad but maybe less avoidable.

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I remember the time (10 years ago?) where you could go to google webpage and start typing your search immediately. Then one day I got my typing deleted once the page finished loading. I thought Google would quickly fix this, but soon realized that this kind of annoying asynchronous behavior was becoming a new normal for a lot of GUIs. I have a rule in my GUIs to only show up something when it’s consistent and usable: the GUI should never lie or mislead.

This has started happening to me constantly in Amazon! I start searching for something, make a typo, go back, then somehow it snaps back to the typo before I hit enter and I get bad results. Super annoying, I don’t remember it being a thing before a year or so ago.

The ebay search button has been like this for ages. To the extent, that sometimes, you correct your search query, hit enter to search and it resets back to the previous search query and re-searches that!

You can thank things like auto-suggest for this as well.

I remember the first time I encountered the epiphany that "woah, typing too fast can break my textbox/inputs" and coming to the realization that in order to accommodate the faster users you often have to be very careful thinking out your UI flow.

Hence why I hate UI's. Sometimes feels like they are nothing more than a fight between me and another developer.

Gmail has gotten worse with this. Convenience and usability are no longer arguments to not switch.

Google search bar also breaks the standard OS behaviour on a Mac, eg. when I am i the search bar and hit <cmd-left> it should jump cursor to the beginning of the line, which it doesn't.

is this possibly a case of "leaky abstraction"? e.g a "data oriented" ui where data flows in 1 direction, so updates to said data blows away any intermediate state?

The reflow issues as incredible in the Twitter mobile web, at least for me on Firefox for Android. When you go back from seeing a tweet's replies to the main timeline, it might take up to 5 seconds (or even more) to load some UI elements and reach a steady state. It even scrolls to a different point than where you were before!

Twitter Mobile is hands down the worst mobile website that I know. I always use nitter.net if I want to view something on mobile. Opening the browser and manually rewriting the link is more handy that clicking on it (e.g. in reddit). That should tell you something.

Yes. Twitter on mobile web seems to have some state of the art ai to reflow the page just when I'm about to press my thumb to read a subthread , like a post or such so I always end up liking the wrong one.

On Twitter for Android, I quite often open the app after a while, and the previous state is shown. Super! I start reading a tweet, and then the popup comes at the top that there are new Tweets; at the same time, that very tweet I was reading disappears from the timeline, whilst the tweets around it remain. Why??

Some folks use this fact to place ads in such way that when you want to click something by the time your finger taps the screen there is an ad underneath. So annoying.

Indeed. An even more nefarious Dark Pattern [1] if the have a listener on the "mouse down" event and use it as the trigger.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

That's not even a dark pattern, that's eqvuivalent to the link pointing to the ad all along =/

This is the worst, a french website Leboncoin (craigslist basically) does this, makes me want to murder the people behind it

When you click next page nothing happens long enough to make you think your click hasn't been registered, then right as you click again the page loads with ads right where the button was

You should use an adblocker.

The people who should complain about this are the advertisers. It amounts to fraud on the web site's part.

...at which part the whole site experience breaks. find a fine-tuned config that blocks the right things and it might break again in a month.

I’ve spent more time chasing an iPhone folder with an app I want to put into it than I care to admit.

That websites and volunteer ui projects get it wrong is understandable- the problem domain is huge. But dragging an app onto a folder is a rather constrained problem that should be easier to solve.

Yet...

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