Another one of the things I really miss about the pre-JavaScript, pre-CSS, document-oriented (as opposed to the current experience-oriented) web is being able to make my browser window half or a third of my screen, and having documents be eminently readable.
Man what I remember was doing multiple columns using Tables in HTML which never worked in anything under a 700px resolution.
Yeah but you could scroll your window horizontally to only keep the useful column visible.
Now it's "HEY I SEE YOUR SCREEN ISN'T WIDE ENOUGH TO FIT TWO COLUMNS OF ADVERTISING ON THE SIDES. HAVE THE CELL PHONE LAYOUT WITH FULLSCREEN POPUPS INSTEAD!"
Not to mention if you're actually on a cell phone it's "HEY YOU JUST CLICKED ON A LINK, BUT SINCE YOUR PHONE IS SO SLOW AND MY SITE IS SO BLOATED, BY THE TIME YOUR CLICK WAS REGISTERED SOME OTHER CONTENT LOADED IN THAT LOCATION. YOU ACTUALLY MEANT TO CLICK ON THIS AD, AMIRITE?"
This is a UI sin that should trigger public shame of developers.
It really should be handled at the OS level for apps, or at the browser level for web sites: If I click anything on the screen, it should react as if I clicked on what was there 300ms ago, maybe 400 or 500ms or longer.
The fastest (typical) human reaction is around 300ms. If I'm clicking on something that appeared less than 300ms ago, then I'm NOT intending to click on it. Maybe the delay should be configurable, or maybe it learns the behavior for a particular user? An elderly person surfing the web might have a 1000ms propagation delay between deciding to click and clicking on a button or link. But my reflexes are closer to the 300ms point if not better on a good day.
No matter how fast a human is, if a button is covered by an ad 100-200ms before they click, there's no way to not click on it. And that's bad UI.
Even my (our?) favorite search engine, Duck Duck Go, is guilty of this: I will frequently accidentally click on the "WikiPedia summary" popup which has just replaced the actual top link that I wanted to be clicking on. Bad web duck!
Heh. I've never thought of solving that via a delay before but it's a brilliant idea. I can't think of the site at the moment (but it was a popular well respected one) but yesterday I got caught 3 times in a row by this issue. I just kept thinking to myself "how could you have so little respect for your users?"
A quick Google finds numbers from 250-280, with record reflexes as low as 110ms. I've done less than 180ms on a "hit the button after the light goes on" game at a science museum (hardware designed for it, so no built-in latency).
300ms is a good lower limit, though, if you take into account complex video processing and standard brain activity when browsing; when hitting a button when you're browsing, your brain isn't wound up and ready to react as quickly as possible. Getting that extra fast reaction really requires short circuiting some of the mental processing you'd normally do. I'm pretty sure I'm remembering 300ms from the cognitive science/UI classes I took in college.
And don't forget the hardware lag in your own body. ;) The signal to click the button takes ~10ms to get from your brain to your fingers. When you think about things like sports where the accuracy of, say, releasing a ball when throwing it, needs to be in the 0.1ms range to hit your target, but your brain is actually giving the command 10ms before the ideal release time... Makes my brain hurt just contemplating how it works.
Pro tip: Don't think about this while trying to throw a ball accurately.
+1. My pet hate at the moment is the RunKeeper app. Every morning I fire it up to start my exercise. The interface loads up, and the 'Start my Walk/Run' button pops up at the bottom of the screen. The button waits there for around one or two seconds, then slides up about a centimetre and another button saying 'Sign up for our Pro paid edition' appears in its place.
I swear the the delay between appearing and sliding up is always timed and changed each day to cunningly coincide with my finger tapping on the area where the 'start' button used to be so that I almost always tap the 'pay us $$$' button instead !!!
I wouldn't be surprised if it feels random because it is loaded after a network request with variable timing checks to see if you have the pro version or not.
This happens so often, on so many different sites, that I can't just chalk it up to unfortunate coincidence. I used to think it was conspiracy-theory territory to call it deliberate, but on reflection - could blind A/B testing in the unthinking pursuit of "click-through rates" and "conversions" actually push developers towards this behaviour, even inadvertently?
I think it's intentional - just like the placement of display ads next to autoplay videos. People spend time mousing over and 'looking' at the ad as they're hunting for the mute button. Increases interaction metrics and makes the ad slot look more valuable to prospective ad buyers.
EDIT: While we're at it, there's a publishing group that displays all news articles as popovers over the main page.
People accidentally click out of the articles and get dumped on the home page, containing expensive "site takeover" advertisements.
Can't remember the name of the company - they have a bunch of US-based local news sites.
It doesn't even have to be clicking a link, it can even be scrolling. And you don't even need a slow phone to experience this behavior on a daily basis.
Most of the web was more usable on mobile before mobile sites started pandering to low IQ people who couldn't figure out how to pinch zoom and scroll. Now it's only the largest sites that can afford the developer know-how to make their mobile site actually usable. (And not all of them bother.)
If you are a small operation that still makes your mobile web site usable, then power to you.
Really? Websites I built up until like 2004 were optimized for display at 800x600 -- still roughly 50% of users at the time. This meant most of my content was somewhere around 640-700px width.
It wasn't until 2008 when 800x600 was below 10% of users and I finally started using a 900 grid.
Man what I remember was doing multiple columns using Tables in HTML which never worked in anything under a 700px resolution.
Case in point this beast: https://web.archive.org/web/20010503213654/http://www.techtv...