Hacker News Reader

Comment by leidenfrost | Hacker News Reader

There was a small accordion in some Google search results that opened around ~1 second after the results page was loaded and I think it was the most infuriating thing ever. And we are talking about Google here.

View on HN

The one where you would go to click on the first result and it would expand seemingly perfectly timed in between and you’d end up somewhere else?

I want to say some webpages actually do this to make you accidentally click on ads but I have no proof.

We A/B tested it, and the 750ms accordion produces maximum revenue. Why do you hate evidence-based decision making? /s

You jest, but that's exactly how you get plausibly deniable dark patterns. It's a numbers game.

Worse, sometimes the people who do it are completely unaware they are making a dark pattern, because they see the result of A/B test and convince themselves it's superior to what they think.

The ultimate version of this was done by Optimizely some years ago, where - let's assume here unintentional - bad UI design encouraged people to terminate their A/B tests early when the metrics favored the new version, leading to people without good understanding of statistics implementing dark patterns (or just stupid patterns), blissfully unaware that they've biased their own A/B tests so strongly that they could just as well be replaced by a piece of paper with words "NEW THING WORKS BETTER" written on it.

It maximizes their revenue until I decide to stop using Google. Joke's on them for not measuring long-term effects.

A/B testing is so gross. In other domains human experimentation of any kind, no matter how low risk, involves getting fully informed consent and ethics board approval before going ahead.

Experimental behavior manipulation, without even telling the subject they are part of a manipulation experiment? You would be chased out of the room and your reputation destroyed! Utterly unacceptable. But in webdev universe this is somehow seen as a totally normal practice.

This is exactly how users felt when Reddit ran A/B testing on their "feature" that forcibly signed out people on mobile browsers and said they needed to use the Reddit app to sign back in. I saw a crazy long thread of straight backlash about how messed up it was and how they aren't cattle to experiment on and how they didn't consent to that (which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to).

Seeing as they were posting the backlash on Reddit, I'm guessing a lot of people downloaded the app to log in and Reddit said "Big Success!" when they checked the stats.

> which they prolly did in the T&C but no one reads that and actually understands what they're agreeing to

The GDPR's notion of informed consent really needs to be applied pervasively to all kinds of consumer contracts. If it's hidden in walls of text that the average user doesn't read it shouldn't count as consent.

I remember reading somewhere that if you actually read the TOS/EULA of every single thing you use, it would take your entire lifetime.

I really could see Apple adopting an approach from FPS games, where the phone applies a click to what was under your finger 1/4 second-ish instead of what's there when the click is recognized. Time-travel clicking.

But the real solution is better web page design.

My guess for this is that the average user doesn't parse text on pages as fast as more tech-savvy users. That delay is perfectly timed for the average user to grab their attention.

For me, I use google so often that I can rapidly parse information without really needing to read much of the text, the link just sort of 'looks' right. I've observed my wife reading google results and she is much slower and more methodical, probably because she doesn't google things 20+ times a day every day like I do.

That's how I end up misclicking, because i'm not working at the speed of a normal googler.

It is really annoying though, there are some css tweaks you can make using browser extensions to make that disappear if you're so inclined.

Their new AI shit on the top of the sesrch results does this. It's slow AF and I'll sometimes have scrolled partway down the page before it farts a huge blob of text up top and pushes stuff I've already scrolled past back down past my finger.

My goodness, that accordion needs to removed from their code base immediately.

A horrific piece of UI/UX/engineering/whatever.

I'm sure the person who wrote that accordion is quite good at solving leetcode tho! (only half joking)

That one ALWAYS foils me and I hate it and whoever created it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com