Two annoying UI mistakes websites make

http://blog.dustincurtis.com/day-8049-two-horrible-terrible-ui-mistakes-to

by dcurtis • 17 years ago

21 25 17 years ago

blog.dustincurtis.com

mr_justin• 17 years ago

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

mccutchen• 17 years ago

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.

poutine• 17 years ago

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

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

derefr2• 17 years ago

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.

kyro• 17 years ago

"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.

antiismist2• 17 years ago

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...

knightinblue• 17 years ago

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.

antiismist2• 17 years ago

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

derefr2• 17 years ago

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.

abstractbill3• 17 years ago

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).

gnaritas• 17 years ago

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.

diN0bot• 17 years ago

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.

alex_c2• 17 years ago

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...

nazgulnarsil• 17 years ago

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.

ajkirwin• 17 years ago

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.

stevedekorte• 17 years ago

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.

Two annoying UI mistakes websites make

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