I wish to understand what elements or aspects of the design of modern websites the end users are annoyed from. Though you are free to express your personal opinions, it would be even more insightful if you could provide objective criticism and suggestions for alternative implementations so that I may incorporate the same in my current and future projects to make them as user friendly as possible.

Some criticisms I have encountered a while back include:

  • Switches being basically checkboxes with more ambiguous active state
  • Scrolling animations that prohibit user from linearly scrolling through the page

Make sure that the opinion is not

  • Related to business/legal matters e.g. Cookie consent notices, ad banners etc.
  • Too vague e.g. Poor website layout
  • Highlighting objectively bad practices e.g. Lack of accessibility features

I recognise I could have followed a design system for this question, but I want to understand the situation from the perspective of the end users to see if they have a differing view on what a convenient user experience should be like.

  • SouthFresh@lemmy.world
    27·
    15 hours ago
    • I don’t understand the logic of presenting just-arrived users with a popup to sign up for a newsletter or anything. I have just arrived and will need time to see the content before I can make that kind of decision.
    • likewise, I do not understand moving a video to floating at the bottom corner of a page after I have scrolled past the original location of the video. If I wanted to watch the video, why would I have scrolled past it? Very often reading is superior so moving the video to the corner only adds distraction to my attempt to consume your content.
    • Please do not overwrite established keyboard shortcuts for browser functions. Even if you have a desktop version of your web-app you should accept that your users are using a browser to access the web-app version of your product and retain all established browser keyboard shortcuts.
    • Lazy loading of data is counter productive most times. When a set of data is presented by a web page, pagination is fine. This provides a clear indicator that the set of data on the current page is complete, and a CTRL-F can be performed. The process of lazy loading of additional data after scrolling to a certain point provides the end user not visual cue where the current set of results lives within the full set. In the best of cases this means having to continually scroll to the bottom of a page until nothing new loads before doing a search through the results. In the worst of cases lazy-loading will remove earlier entries and make it completely impossible to do a search through presented results.
    • Is your site or product intended to be end-user data to sell to data brokers? If not, then you should not be engaging in any practices that will result in any data being sold to anyone. If you are selling a physical product or service that is unrelated to end-user data and you still find yourself tempted to sell end-user data, please consider increasing your product’s price instead. This practice makes it seem that your product or service is not of high enough quality for you to make the money you need from it, and instead have to rely on the questionable practice of selling user data to close that gap.
    • Nagging customers to disable ad blockers is objectively pathetic. Unfortunately these are NECESSARY because the vast majority of sites pushing advertising are doing so through 3rd party services that are NOT moderating the content of the advertisements to remove malware or outright scams. Either accept that this is a security necessity, or insert your advertisements yourself. The vast majority of ad blocking software do so based off of the established codes used by 3rd party ad vendors and manually inserted advertisements will not suffer. Your ad network made this a requirement and you should be punishing them, not your users.
    • if you have pagination on your site’s content, either allow to next set of results to actually load a new page, or ensure that clicking “Next” also includes moving to the top of the list when the next page is loaded. After clicking “Next” I shouldn’t have to manually scroll up to the top of the new results.
    • jonathanvmv8f@lemm.eeOP
      6·
      14 hours ago

      All of your points are valid, in fact I’ve personally had the same opinions for points 2, 3, 5 and 6 for a while. I wish I could upvote for each of your points

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      5·
      14 hours ago

      omg point 2 makes me want to leave the site.

      So many sites do this with “trending” or “new” content. Like youtube used to repeat your shorts every 3 or 4 rows of video to try and convince you to watch shorts. Drove me crazy at the time because I have no interest in them.