
It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences? - thebent
http://www.troyhunt.com/2016/01/its-2016-already-how-are-websites-still.html
======
Fuzzwah
A better article could be: "It's 2016 and we still don't know how to monetize
a popular website well enough to fund its continued existence".

Even better if it actually provides ideas on how to move forward.

~~~
ayushgta
Indeed! Other than examples like back button, scroll hijack, password criteria
most degraded user experiences mentioned in the article are side effects of a
desperation to monetize. These articles bitch and moan about the bloat and
degrading user experiences. I'm sure it feels good to vent. However the real
challenge here is coming up with a healthy economic model around content
publishing.

------
jack-r-abbit
I hate the pages that wait a couple seconds for you to scroll down and start
reading, then they have a banner ad at the top that auto-expands, which makes
the spot you are reading scroll down, then after you have re-scrolled to
compensate, the banner ad auto-collapses to make the spot you are reading
scroll back up so you have to re-re-scroll to re-compensate.

~~~
scruple
I auto-pilot CTRL+W those sites, there isn't even a decision process. The only
answer is, "Well, this is going away now."

In a similar vein are sites with modals, which pop as soon as you start
scrolling, that attempt to extort your e-mail address to continue reading.
They don't provide a way to close the modal via a button or the ESC key. Those
are rage-inducing to me. Who the fuck thinks that is a good idea? That's a
sure-fire way to make sure I will never click a link to the same domain again.

edit/ Editing this to say, I used to just fill in some bogus e-mail address
like "gofuck@yourself.com" but have realized that it justifies the behavior
more than it sends a message.

------
gragas
The funny thing is, half of the time links to Forbes don't even work. I'll
click on a link and it will show me the quote of the day, but then instead of
taking me to the intended article, it drops me off at
[http://forbes.com/](http://forbes.com/).

I'm really surprised they haven't noticed a loss of traffic related to this.
Perhaps it's just my setup, but I've been able to repeat it on Firefox and
Iceweasel, which are quite popular web browsers.

~~~
overcast
Forbes is infuriating, I've stopped clicking on their links. I experience the
same nonsense on a Mac using Safari.

------
joshka
I'm starting to think that a good approach to much of this would be an auto-
learning adblocker. E.g. visit a site once, refresh and if your browser
renders something different to the previous render, your adblocker gives you
the option to drop it or leave it (and then does the 'right thing' with
pulling out those elements of the DOM).

------
makecheck
I also think that stable URLs are long overdue.

I have always felt that file extensions make no sense in web pages. Why should
I, the visitor, need to be dependent on whether or not you ".asp" or ".php" or
".cgi" or ".flavoroftheweek"? I had a series of bookmarks break entirely
because the target site's _implementation_ changed. Fortunately, the site
managed to keep all the old root file names so after hacking each bookmarked
"/filename.foo" into "/filename.bar", I was able to repair them. (Usually
though, that won't work at all. And besides, most people would not even try
that, they would assume their bookmarks are lost forever.)

For years at past companies, I put up with corporate E-mails containing
literally 12 steps of instructions that say "go to company.net/portal", "click
X", "click Y", "click Z", and on and on. Meanwhile I'm thinking: OR, you could
invest in a non-crappy content management system that supports URLs of the
form "company.net/stable/foobar", allow thousands of employees to click once,
go directly to the target and bookmark it forever! Oh, and of course, the
pages would change arbitrarily so it didn't even help to save old E-mails with
all the instructions.

At the very least, _tools_ should support this. At a previous job, the company
overpaid for an "enterprise" bug-tracking system that couldn't even provide
"company.net/bugs/123456" for direct-linking to individual bugs, even though
this is an obvious case for a stable URL. Returning to any common issue
involved an aggravating series of steps every single time.

------
blatherard
What I'd appreciate would be if Google would start penalizing them in their
search results, because they really degrade the experience. Literally 30
seconds ago I did a generic google search ("small business loans consulting"
in particular) and the second hit looked interesting...oops, it was a Forbes
link, hit back.

------
nailer
100% agreed on ignoring the EU cookies. It's a dumb law, users hate the
messages.

~~~
sandstrom
I've never heard of anyone getting fined either. A plain privacy policy link
in the footer should be sufficient.

~~~
gruez
EU's directive requires getting consent from the user[1].

"Consent must involve some form of communication where individuals knowingly
indicate their acceptance"

A privacy policy link at the bottom would not suffice.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directiv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_cookie#EU_cookie_directive)

------
ourmandave
The article missed one. When the page is so densely packed that you can't find
any white space to scroll with your mouse wheel for fear of rolling over a
pop-up ad.

~~~
ZanyProgrammer
Twitter website on mobile is like that. I have to log out so I don't
accidentally fav or follow someone.

------
_asummers
The one that really ruffles my feathers is text highlight bringing up a share
modal. That's how I keep track of where I was at; I, in fact, don't want to
share this paragraph on Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest.

------
shiyuanis
Most of his points, I agree with, but it seems like he's against monetization
with his ranting against ads and paywalls. It's how the web makes money.

I also don't feel as strongly as he does about scroll hijacking. Sometimes,
it's beautiful and lovely. I see his points with the Macbook Pro page but I
don't think it's a huge offender. Perhaps minorly annoying, but sometimes I'm
okay with letting go of how I normally experience a website in order to have
an experience. I don't think browsers exist to normalize experiences for
everybody.

------
Someone1234
The latest bad: "Please complete this survey to continue reading the article."

~~~
cuddlybacon
Similar, but not so new:

You've been on this website a grand total of 3 seconds. Do you want to do a
survey on it's usability?

~~~
nailer
Or subscribe to a newspaper you're reading for the first time.

~~~
manicdee
Or subscribe to a newspaper you haven't started reading yet.

------
CaptSpify
Meh. Disable javascript by default, and call it a day. Seriously, it makes
browsing so much more bearable.

IMO, JS-bloat has already ruined so much of the web, that I've just given up
on it, unless it's a special case. I'd rather deal with the mis-formatted
webpage than your shitty js "features". And that's sad, because it really has
potential to make the experience awesome.

------
soared
What is the author's point? Regulate advertisers? Content providers?
Webmasters? The internet itself? Its easy to make a website so lots of people
will make poor choices. Either they don't know better or want more advertising
money. You can complain all day about it, why not make a browser extension
that fixes it instead?

------
rocky1138
Another one that's sort of touched on is websites which change the scroll
rate. For some reason, designers think it's their job to adjust how much the
page scrolls for any given spin of the scroll wheel on my mouse.

Just leave it be, please!

------
greggarious
The multiple pages are to increase ads.

News flash: you are the product, not the customer.

------
fffrad
Eu Cookie law. I think this law passed because it had the word Cookie in it.
"Protect people's cookies", no one wants unsafe cookies.

