I agree in principle... but the examples they focus on seem kinda weird to me. I don't like flashing/animated/changing images or elements on a page either. However, I personally appreciate the...
I agree in principle... but the examples they focus on seem kinda weird to me. I don't like flashing/animated/changing images or elements on a page either. However, I personally appreciate the feedback lines on certain sites and apps, e.g. "Draft saved" messages, and don't consider those "flashing" in the same sense. And yet that's the majority of what they complain about in this article, which makes the headline feel misleading, and clickbaity (by using a common complaint everyone agrees on in the headline to draw attention to the article, but then using that to complain about a particular pet peeve of theirs that a lot of people wouldn't expect the headline to refer to).
By contrast, I absolutely find those examples to be valid and similarly repugnant. It's still an animated/changing/flashing element, constantly forcing my attention back to it. And, as is usually...
By contrast, I absolutely find those examples to be valid and similarly repugnant. It's still an animated/changing/flashing element, constantly forcing my attention back to it.
And, as is usually the case, there's no benefit to it that would offset that unpleasantness. What action am I supposed to take based on a "Draft Saved" notification? In what way is this information useful? Especially when the whole point is that drafts are saved continuously, so even if the information were somehow actionable, it's still not actually news.
At most, one might be able to justify some indication (with much more hysteresis than this) when it attempts to save a draft and fails to do so. But constantly flashing at me just to continually re-inform me that everything is working normally is abhorrent.
From my experience in web dev, the reason for a “draft saved” notification is we noticed a lot of our users would do an action (eg save a draft) but then contact us wondering why nothing had...
From my experience in web dev, the reason for a “draft saved” notification is we noticed a lot of our users would do an action (eg save a draft) but then contact us wondering why nothing had happened, so we use notifications like that to inform them. It’s silly but it saves us some headache in the customer support realm if users see the app working. Take this with a grain of salt, my users demographic might be different than other apps.
Visual feedback that a task was completed successfully is important. We're all used to sites just breaking for a miriad of reasons and local apps can lock up too. You need to know if continuing as...
Visual feedback that a task was completed successfully is important. We're all used to sites just breaking for a miriad of reasons and local apps can lock up too. You need to know if continuing as usual will result in losing work and you need to refresh/restart the app, or everything is fine. If the norm was that everything is reliable you could maybe get away with not explicitly saying anything, but that's not the case, and it's not how everyone was trained by the internet.
The framing of those survey questions makes it easy to argue their point. If he had done the same asking if they liked receiving feedback when typing into a form that sends requests while they...
The framing of those survey questions makes it easy to argue their point. If he had done the same asking if they liked receiving feedback when typing into a form that sends requests while they type I feel like it may have invalidated the argument. As you mentioned, the “Draft Saved” types of examples that provide functional feedback to a user is very different from animation in general and it feels very nitpicky.
I generally hate animation on websites, TBH. Don't get me wrong, it's fine when it's done in a transition of some sort, like a pop-up menu or between pages, but if things are moving for no reason...
I generally hate animation on websites, TBH. Don't get me wrong, it's fine when it's done in a transition of some sort, like a pop-up menu or between pages, but if things are moving for no reason then it's extremely annoying.
The thing that bothers me the most is animations that happen when scrolling through a page. Apple's product pages are a good example, though their animations tend to annoy me less than most of the others that I have seen. A lot of the time I will scroll down quite a bit because there's nothing on the page, only to see that the top of the screen now has a bit of text that wasn't there before, so I have to scroll back up to find out what it was that I missed because I'm apparently faster than the developer of the page thought I would be. If I'm reading your page, I want to be sold on the idea or product you're selling me, not on the skills of the organization's designers and developers.
I cannot stand the "scroll to experience" garbage. I always go right to the bottom hoping for a static spec sheet, and if there isn't one, I'm probably just closing the tab.
I cannot stand the "scroll to experience" garbage. I always go right to the bottom hoping for a static spec sheet, and if there isn't one, I'm probably just closing the tab.
Yes, introducing software to intentionally slow down displaying information on a web page is incomprehensible. I have also been annoyed by Apple's version of that, though they do come with the...
Yes, introducing software to intentionally slow down displaying information on a web page is incomprehensible. I have also been annoyed by Apple's version of that, though they do come with the tepid saving grace of a "Tech Specs" link right at the top for the "yeahyeahyeah, just tell me what the fucking thing actually is" experience.
Overall, I would say that such pages are one of many strong arguments that javascript is an abomination that should never have existed in the first place, and should never be used now.
When I started reading this, I thought it would be referring to the kind of flashing you find in videogames that might trigger some kinds of epilepsy. However, I agree with the author of the...
When I started reading this, I thought it would be referring to the kind of flashing you find in videogames that might trigger some kinds of epilepsy.
However, I agree with the author of the article. I hate websites that don't stay stable. I want a calm internet experience, especially if I am seeking information.
I have seen a rather high amount of websites that were designed with decisions that made me question if the designers understood what the users wanted out of them. It's not nearly as common now as...
I have seen a rather high amount of websites that were designed with decisions that made me question if the designers understood what the users wanted out of them. It's not nearly as common now as it was, say, 5-10 years ago, though.
Yes, I've always wondered if it was just me. Sometimes the front page of theguardian.com contains multiple blinking dots on various brightly-colored backgrounds, and it's so distracting that I...
Yes, I've always wondered if it was just me. Sometimes the front page of theguardian.com contains multiple blinking dots on various brightly-colored backgrounds, and it's so distracting that I can't even manage to read headlines. But it's been that way forever, so I guess they must increase engagement.
I miss blink and marquee tags in a simpler time. It was part of html charm. It was very simple animated text and it was fun, rarely horrific, unlike in this day and age.
I miss blink and marquee tags in a simpler time. It was part of html charm. It was very simple animated text and it was fun, rarely horrific, unlike in this day and age.
When Internet Explorer came out I was a Linux user and afraid that Microsoft would push "standards" like ActiveX that would make it impossible to use the web outside of Windows. I made a VRML demo...
When Internet Explorer came out I was a Linux user and afraid that Microsoft would push "standards" like ActiveX that would make it impossible to use the web outside of Windows.
I made a VRML demo that let you fly through a starfield of nearby stars and loaded the page up with IE-only tags that would make the page as annoying as possible if you visited with IE... And had Netscape feature it on their "site of the day" and got 80,000 views.
Maybe this is strange but I feel that the issue actually decreases the more flashing elements you have. One is distracting, but if half the site is flashing then suddenly the main content becomes...
Maybe this is strange but I feel that the issue actually decreases the more flashing elements you have. One is distracting, but if half the site is flashing then suddenly the main content becomes the outlier and easier to focus on.
It makes sense to me, since all the flashing elements can blend together to become akin to background noise. When there's only one flashing element on an otherwise static page, it stands out all...
It makes sense to me, since all the flashing elements can blend together to become akin to background noise. When there's only one flashing element on an otherwise static page, it stands out all the more.
Speaking of "flashing elements"... Why the hell does nearly every website I load jump around after 5 to 10 seconds, and sometimes gets even more jumpy as I scroll through the article? The ads and...
Speaking of "flashing elements"... Why the hell does nearly every website I load jump around after 5 to 10 seconds, and sometimes gets even more jumpy as I scroll through the article? The ads and features loading in literally make me play a reader's version of whack-a-mole where I'm trying to keep my place in the article while the text jumps up and down.
I wonder sometimes if is deliberate click fraud. There’s a cousin to the “dead internet theory” which says that nobody ever clicks on an ad deliberately, so all the actual clicks are fraud or...
I wonder sometimes if is deliberate click fraud. There’s a cousin to the “dead internet theory” which says that nobody ever clicks on an ad deliberately, so all the actual clicks are fraud or accidental. Moving content around is a great way to get accidental clicks, if people were able to get access to the sensors (accelerometer, camera, etc.) on mobile devices they could make a predictive model of when and where you are about to click and change the layout so you hit the ad next to the real link every time.
Anandtech is the site that I think is most likely to be doing this.
That certainly sounds plausible. I can't count how many times I accidentally click the wrong thing because of this. What you said also aligns with when the X button is incredibly small and as...
That certainly sounds plausible. I can't count how many times I accidentally click the wrong thing because of this. What you said also aligns with when the X button is incredibly small and as close to the edge of the phone on mobile ads as possible, which ofc causes my fat thumb to click the tiny pixel juuust next to the X, opening their website.
The only acceptable way I've seen it done is the page is still, and then an element changes color etc. once. For instance when you open a restaurant's page, click a dish, read the description......
The only acceptable way I've seen it done is the page is still, and then an element changes color etc. once. For instance when you open a restaurant's page, click a dish, read the description... and 5-10 seconds later (around when you've read enough) the white fill-maroon border button "Order now" blinks to all maroon.
I agree in principle... but the examples they focus on seem kinda weird to me. I don't like flashing/animated/changing images or elements on a page either. However, I personally appreciate the feedback lines on certain sites and apps, e.g. "Draft saved" messages, and don't consider those "flashing" in the same sense. And yet that's the majority of what they complain about in this article, which makes the headline feel misleading, and clickbaity (by using a common complaint everyone agrees on in the headline to draw attention to the article, but then using that to complain about a particular pet peeve of theirs that a lot of people wouldn't expect the headline to refer to).
By contrast, I absolutely find those examples to be valid and similarly repugnant. It's still an animated/changing/flashing element, constantly forcing my attention back to it.
And, as is usually the case, there's no benefit to it that would offset that unpleasantness. What action am I supposed to take based on a "Draft Saved" notification? In what way is this information useful? Especially when the whole point is that drafts are saved continuously, so even if the information were somehow actionable, it's still not actually news.
At most, one might be able to justify some indication (with much more hysteresis than this) when it attempts to save a draft and fails to do so. But constantly flashing at me just to continually re-inform me that everything is working normally is abhorrent.
From my experience in web dev, the reason for a “draft saved” notification is we noticed a lot of our users would do an action (eg save a draft) but then contact us wondering why nothing had happened, so we use notifications like that to inform them. It’s silly but it saves us some headache in the customer support realm if users see the app working. Take this with a grain of salt, my users demographic might be different than other apps.
Visual feedback that a task was completed successfully is important. We're all used to sites just breaking for a miriad of reasons and local apps can lock up too. You need to know if continuing as usual will result in losing work and you need to refresh/restart the app, or everything is fine. If the norm was that everything is reliable you could maybe get away with not explicitly saying anything, but that's not the case, and it's not how everyone was trained by the internet.
The framing of those survey questions makes it easy to argue their point. If he had done the same asking if they liked receiving feedback when typing into a form that sends requests while they type I feel like it may have invalidated the argument. As you mentioned, the “Draft Saved” types of examples that provide functional feedback to a user is very different from animation in general and it feels very nitpicky.
I generally hate animation on websites, TBH. Don't get me wrong, it's fine when it's done in a transition of some sort, like a pop-up menu or between pages, but if things are moving for no reason then it's extremely annoying.
The thing that bothers me the most is animations that happen when scrolling through a page. Apple's product pages are a good example, though their animations tend to annoy me less than most of the others that I have seen. A lot of the time I will scroll down quite a bit because there's nothing on the page, only to see that the top of the screen now has a bit of text that wasn't there before, so I have to scroll back up to find out what it was that I missed because I'm apparently faster than the developer of the page thought I would be. If I'm reading your page, I want to be sold on the idea or product you're selling me, not on the skills of the organization's designers and developers.
I cannot stand the "scroll to experience" garbage. I always go right to the bottom hoping for a static spec sheet, and if there isn't one, I'm probably just closing the tab.
Yes, introducing software to intentionally slow down displaying information on a web page is incomprehensible. I have also been annoyed by Apple's version of that, though they do come with the tepid saving grace of a "Tech Specs" link right at the top for the "yeahyeahyeah, just tell me what the fucking thing actually is" experience.
Overall, I would say that such pages are one of many strong arguments that javascript is an abomination that should never have existed in the first place, and should never be used now.
When I started reading this, I thought it would be referring to the kind of flashing you find in videogames that might trigger some kinds of epilepsy.
However, I agree with the author of the article. I hate websites that don't stay stable. I want a calm internet experience, especially if I am seeking information.
I have seen a rather high amount of websites that were designed with decisions that made me question if the designers understood what the users wanted out of them. It's not nearly as common now as it was, say, 5-10 years ago, though.
Yes, I've always wondered if it was just me. Sometimes the front page of theguardian.com contains multiple blinking dots on various brightly-colored backgrounds, and it's so distracting that I can't even manage to read headlines. But it's been that way forever, so I guess they must increase engagement.
I miss blink and marquee tags in a simpler time. It was part of html charm. It was very simple animated text and it was fun, rarely horrific, unlike in this day and age.
When Internet Explorer came out I was a Linux user and afraid that Microsoft would push "standards" like ActiveX that would make it impossible to use the web outside of Windows.
I made a VRML demo that let you fly through a starfield of nearby stars and loaded the page up with IE-only tags that would make the page as annoying as possible if you visited with IE... And had Netscape feature it on their "site of the day" and got 80,000 views.
"This page has been pessimized for Internet Explorer, as those of you listening to William Shatner singing Mr. Tambourine Man have realized."
Maybe this is strange but I feel that the issue actually decreases the more flashing elements you have. One is distracting, but if half the site is flashing then suddenly the main content becomes the outlier and easier to focus on.
It makes sense to me, since all the flashing elements can blend together to become akin to background noise. When there's only one flashing element on an otherwise static page, it stands out all the more.
Speaking of "flashing elements"... Why the hell does nearly every website I load jump around after 5 to 10 seconds, and sometimes gets even more jumpy as I scroll through the article? The ads and features loading in literally make me play a reader's version of whack-a-mole where I'm trying to keep my place in the article while the text jumps up and down.
I wonder sometimes if is deliberate click fraud. There’s a cousin to the “dead internet theory” which says that nobody ever clicks on an ad deliberately, so all the actual clicks are fraud or accidental. Moving content around is a great way to get accidental clicks, if people were able to get access to the sensors (accelerometer, camera, etc.) on mobile devices they could make a predictive model of when and where you are about to click and change the layout so you hit the ad next to the real link every time.
Anandtech is the site that I think is most likely to be doing this.
That certainly sounds plausible. I can't count how many times I accidentally click the wrong thing because of this. What you said also aligns with when the X button is incredibly small and as close to the edge of the phone on mobile ads as possible, which ofc causes my fat thumb to click the tiny pixel juuust next to the X, opening their website.
The only acceptable way I've seen it done is the page is still, and then an element changes color etc. once. For instance when you open a restaurant's page, click a dish, read the description... and 5-10 seconds later (around when you've read enough) the white fill-maroon border button "Order now" blinks to all maroon.