Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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Another big annoyance is websites with recipes that do any of the following indcredibly bad UX patterns:

- Big white page not showing any text or images until the entire page and its assets are downloaded, which means if you accidentally click something and go back you have to wait another several seconds for everything to load again

- Pop up GDPR popup while hands are covered in flour and eggs

- Pop up "would you like to subscribe to the newsletter" while hands are covered in sticky sauce

- Pop up "buy this shit for 10% off" with a microscopic X button while something on high heat on the stove

- Not specifying image height and width in CSS so that when user is looking at a piece of text and images above it load, the scrolling position jumps

For these reasons alone I've largely stopped looking at the internet for recipes and turned to physical books, which are much better behaved.

Don't forget the lazy-loading pages that don't properly set their flex box positions so that when you go to click on something a new link pops in at the place you were just about to click that takes you to a different page.

I'm tempted to say that this is a dark pattern because when it happens to me is is almost always a "subscribe", "purchase", or "login" button.

> dark pattern

I wonder how often dark patterns are the result of goal directed A/B testing?

If the goal is set to "did the user click on an advert" - and the A/B changes are fuzzed CSS - then the results would be deviously dark.

Reminds me of how my company is now tracking badge swipe data to try to enforce people going into the office 3 days per week, and sending tickets to managers about their reports who fall short of it.

Someone probably invented it to hit some KPI of number of employees going to the office 3 days per week.

The reality is people are going to the office sick and spreading all kinds of viruses, I often have to take meetings from my car because I can't find a meeting room, among many, many other problems.

But that dude that implemented the system probably got a promotion.

I've started copying these recipes into Crouton https://crouton.app/

It does a remarkable job at extracting the recipes, and the end result is a consistent experience no matter the source.

I've been using Paprika https://www.paprikaapp.com/ for much the same thing. It's amazing how useful it is.

Same idea at https://justtherecipe.com - also you can login with Google account and save recipes there.

You just described all websites

Thankfully reader view defeats most of this, though it has it's drawbacks, but the majority of what you need is readily available via this method.

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