And so it should be. There's hardly anything worse than having things shift around after you start reading, scrolling or clicking on something.
I think it's a very good sign if Google's own sites fail these tests. It means the tests are meaningful.
I can't count the number of times the "People also search for" box pops up in the middle of my search results 3-4 seconds after load. It's just enough time for me to identify the result I want, move the mouse there, and then proceed click on the new, different link that just loaded under my mouse.
It's infuriating.
It is obvious someone at Google is trying to game some metric with accidental clicks.
In case anyone ever needs it:
google.com##div[id^="eob_"]And for others trying, you need to just add this line to uBlock Origin's "Filters" tab, not the "Rules" tab.
"Data driven" development so often forgets about common fucking sense.
It's also not surprising that when you take a set of random people without science training, they'll just cargo-cult the most visible parts and forget about the hidden, essential ones. It should also not surprise anybody what part they forget about, since the calgo-cult speech is literally about this exact problem, but with trained scientists (did I say it was hard?) instead of random people.
Good science > intuition/experience/best practices etc > bad science.
I suspect we agree that a lot of product development is based on bad science. Yes doing good science would be best, but let's at least stop doing bad science.
A better way is dealing with confidence values with your intuition, and changing the required quality of science based on the confidence of the priors you are trying to verify. But then, this is hard too.
The real problem here is that, as you complained, those people aren't just competent enough on the work they are doing. I guess my point is only that this shouldn't be surprising, as it's a hard job.
I’m making a lot of assumptions here, but I’ve seen this before in a lot of projects where people get worked into a froth optimizing something that will provide no real value to users.
That was when I knew design was dead in practice at Google. There are so many other under-optimized parts of the experience that I have no idea how “if I could only find the perfect position on the screen for a button” became the question someone was willing to throw that level of engineering at. It’s missing the forest for the trees x 10^100.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/05/why-googl...
The problem with this sort of decision making is it ignores context and is liable to optimise one metric under study at the expense of other more important things (like user trust and retention). It also tends to bias towards easily measured small changes measured in isolation so it encourages blind decisions made without context or coordination.
For example a certain colour might mislead users into clicking more by making a link look like the purple default visited link colour. It makes clicks go up but may not increase user satisfaction.
That entire page probably had tens of thousands of UX work put into it.
If it works like that, it's intentional.
You have in duplex in one small fragment enunciated wonderfully why the rodent is never to be used for anything but video games and image editing.
Oh my god, this is one of my largest complaints. I'm an impatient person so i often go to click something before the page is done - bad me - and so often JS loads and swaps buttons.
Honestly though i've had that complaint about my OS', too. The number of times i'm typing and something pops up and steals focus or i go to click something and moments before it shifts causing me to click something else.. ugh.
Sadly, that's no longer true.
Yes, I know this effectively means having to keep two copies of the widget tree (one for input and one for output) and applying all changes as diffs. Don't care. I'll buy more RAM.
Result: I decide that I don’t care about that content anyway and just go do something else. Trying to log in via mobile site, forgetting my password, going through the reset flow, logging in again because my pw reset session happened in GMail’s safari context session and didn’t save cookies to main safari, all while being hounded constantly that “it’s better in the APP!”…just keep it.
Pinterest is uniquely bad because the thing you see the photo of doesn’t actually take you to the place where that came from. Add in all the ads, the page wasting tons of space with spacing / white space / low density, the placement on Google for so many thing, and I cringe whenever I see a Pinterest result. Quora isn’t much better.
Amazon and eBay at least take you to the right place with their “open in app” bars at the top of the page. Not an iOS dev but I’m assuming they’re using some special Safari APIs to do that instead of useless generic App Store links that don’t pass through context.
I really wish Google / Apple would punish sites for doing this, since it leads to such a bad UX. Please think about that, marketing and product people: I literally already have your apps, but you’ve made the mobile web page so annoying in trying to get me to use the app, that any interesting content I do find via SERP I discard instantly as inaccessible due to the hassle of trying to search for that same content through your apps, because you’ve intentionally broken the mobile web experience.
Just yesterday, opening the Amazon app, and the "Orders" button shifted before I could click it!
It's not hard to build pages without these problems but everyone is way too caught up in fancy web design they ignore UX.
Google used to be very concerned about UI performance, but they seem to have totally lost interest in it.
Most sites that fail for CLS don't have any CLS that's visible to the user.
There's no incentive for them to fix this, unfortunately. Everywhere else on YT there's a nice gray box that keeps the place of a UI element until that element loads.
I feel sorry for all the developers who are going to be inundated with complaints because their client's sites have failed yet another perceived important benchmark.
Web developers often have no clue how their page appears to others, because they are developing locally, and the production site is close and has few network issues.
So a lot of developers that think everything is fine end up having no clue what most people experience.
When web fonts first started seeing widespread use, I would very frequently see 2-10 second delays when all content had loaded except for the font, including massive images, but I couldn't see any text. When I complained about this trend in the web to web developers I knew, almost none of them even seemed to believe it was possible, or at worst I was just a very unlucky user.
I stand by the statement that you can still fail the test despite having content that does not 'visibly' shift though.
I agree, that appears to be a good sign. I am curious to what degree Google will reward fast sites and punish slow ones. I wonder if they are willing to make big shifts in the rankings.