Two annoying UI mistakes websites make | Hacker News Reader

Two annoying UI mistakes websites make

blog.dustincurtis.com

21 pointsdcurtis25 comments

the simplest mistake is not getting 10 or so family and friends to look at your site and watching what they click first/where their attention goes. This will suss out 90% of UI problems.

Most of the time, people don't have their browsers the full size of their screen.

[citation needed] (seriously, I'd love to see some real data on this).

I'd say he's wrong, as far as I've ever seen pretty much everyone but developers run their browsers, or any other app they're using, full screen.

i'm a developer on 13in macbook. i run full width.

my husband is not a developer or tech-savy and he runs ff partial width of 17in macbook. (75% i'd guess?)

as for the feedback button on the side of pages: it annoys me. whatever. a good product has users that really hate it and really love it.

> i run full width.

Really!? Can I ask why? Why not just make the browser about 1050px or so wide, you can view every website out there and you can have other things in the extra space (twitter, client, terminal, downloads, whatever).

I do this too. My screen is pretty much always taken up either by a full-width Emacs, or a full-width Firefox.

I can't speak for diN0bot of course, but the reason I work this way is to minimize distractions. I don't want all that stuff in my peripheral vision when I'm busy trying to get stuff done.

Assuming you're using a Mac, opt-cmd-h will hide all windows but the one you're using...

Personally, what I find worse than 'distractions' is being blinded by whitespace caused by Firefox (/whatever) being way too huge.

And, full-width emacs!? On my monitor (with a rather large font size) that's almost 250 columns, I hope you don't have any code over there! If you're vertically splitting emacs, then, I think we're on the same page. It's not about windows themselves being any specific size, it's about making them an appropriate size for their content.

Probably because managing windows is a big pain, but everyone still thinks it's 1980 and overlapping windows are really cool.

Managing windows is a big pain? Is it 1980? :)

I would go as far as saying "pretty much everyone but Mac users".

Of course, then I would be just as guilty of generalizing without any hard data as the author of the article.

ARE there any numbers on this?

Edit:

Here's a report from 2000:

http://www.evolt.org/article/Real_World_Browser_Size_Stats_P...

And another from 2006:

http://www.baekdal.com/reports/Actual-Browser-Sizes/actual-b...

Nice, so it looks like reality is exactly the opposite of what the author claims. Thanks for finding the data!

Interesting. I'll update my post. Also, hilariously...

http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Actual_Browser_Sizes_%28...

This doesn't take into account wider resolutions such as 1920x1200 which is what I've been running at for years. My browser takes up 2/3 of the screen and only 3/4 of that space is actual viewable page. Having it wider than that is generally unnecessary and a waste of space.

That's why I mentioned the years, those reports are a bit old.

Still, even today, 1920x1200 is far from accounting for "most" users.

Both of those are pretty minor and not very wide spread. Especially so for the second mistake.

Agreed. I run into the first one from time to time, and it does bother me a tiny bit. But I just make my window a little bit wider and get over it. Anyway, I'd rather there be no left padding than have a horizontal scrollbar across the bottom.

And I've never actually noticed the second mistake in the wild.

Oh man, get over it. In the scheme of things these are not "horrible, terrible" mistakes.

Was expecting content, just got whargarbl'd instead. :(

There are only so many big mistakes, and they've been long covered by the major blogs. If you're still reading "blah blah web UI mistakes" articles in 2009, expect petty annoyances that cover few sites.

"get over it."

Why is this getting voted up? The guy's not sobbing and there's no harm in using hyperbole.

Dustin is a very talented designer, and I'm sure he runs into this sort of stuff all the time through the work he does, so it makes sense that these details are more visible and have a greater effect on him than they would with any normal viewer.

While we are on pet peeves, how about the use of "blah blah blah after the jump" and then there is not, in fact, a jump.

E.G. http://themovieblog.com/2009/05/ladies-and-gentlemen-the-red...

That's because you're already on the full article page. If you saw it on the main page of the blog, it'd make perfect sense, since the full pic isn't featured on the main page.

Basically, the phrase 'blah-blah after the jump' should be removed from the full article, which this blogger didn't do.

Thanks for the explanation. Because of aggregators I hardly ever see the front page of blogs anymore.

Well, envisioning the souce of most blogging engines, the actual post source text probably goes something like this:

    blah blah blah after the jump<!--jump--><img ...

which is then split at the  comment, and the first part shown on the main page + feeds, while the entire thing is shown on the permalinked page. Rearranging it to eliminate your quarrel would require replacing  with a little SSI-like , which is a lot more complicated for not much reward.

I'd add to the margin issue that 3 column websites (besides being a mess in general) are basically unusable without excessively wide browser windows.

What you've done is far worse than those. I run at a healthy 1280x1024px

And ye gods the whitespace. The actual content takes up less than 50% of the screen width.

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