
Grumpy Website – a blog about everything wrong with modern web & tech - Nextgrid
https://grumpy.website
======
gcmrtc
If you open more than one draw at a time you would unbalance the drawer and it
would tip over, falling on you and possibly injuring your feet and damaging
your stuff and the floor.

This safety mechanism is not there if the drawer is embedded in a larger frame
where tipping over is not possible.

Sometimes it's not bad UX, it's just the thing trying to protect you from your
stupidity.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
That makes sense for a 4 drawer, 5' tall filing cabinet -- which generally all
have the interlock, and little to none for a 3 drawer under desk unit with
drawers half the length or less of a filing cabinet. Even if you wanted to
load them as heavily as a file cabinet, the drawers are generally far less
substantial or well made. Doubly pointless considering the drawer unit shown
has no filing drawer. Most of those solve the possible tip with a castor or
slide under the front of the sole bottom filing drawer.

~~~
jacquesm
Those drawers can be used to hang folders and those can be _very_ heavy and
easily tip over the whole thing if you would slide out all of them at once.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
That would be a 12" deep file drawer, which either do have an interlock, or in
a desk side with single file drawer the castor or slide underneath, as
mentioned.

The one illustrated isn't deep enough for hanging files -- maybe the odd ream
of A4, pens and pencils. Will need an awful lot of carefully placed paperclips
and pencils to tip. Which is why you rarely see those locking each other out.
If you use it for storing your collection of lead weights you bring it on
yourself (the base of the drawer would probably fall through anyway)... :)

------
kugelblitz
When trying to find more about the website on mobile, I scroll down and I only
see a few links at the bottom, but within less than a second new content loads
and the links are gone, I will probably need to load all the content before
being able to see the credits / about links.

That's grumpy-worthy I find ;-).

~~~
dzamie
I have JS default to off (saves big on load times, bypasses some "please buy a
subscription" things), and thought this was just a weirdly short list of
eccentric things until I saw this comment.

So, add "JS is required for crucial, rather than merely useful, features."

------
skinkestek
[https://grumpy.website/post/0Sqvx1C9H](https://grumpy.website/post/0Sqvx1C9H)

> Five other people are reading this doc, right? Wrong! The user with a white
> avatar is actually a button to start a chat! Why does it look like a user
> and is placed where all other users are, we’ll never know.

> But wait, isn’t there a chat button next to Share? No, that’s comments!
> What’s the difference? Comments are square, while chat bubbles are oval!

> Also, if you ever wanted to check how your stocks are doing, there’s a
> button for that too.

Nice :-)

------
fenomas
My all-time anti-favorite UI thing like this is Mac dialogs where two
different buttons are focused.

E.g. when closing a file with unsaved edits, you typically get a dialog with
three buttons:

    
    
           [Don't save]       Cancel        [Save]
    

"Don't save" and "Save" are both highlighted, but in two different ways - and
for added excitement, spacebar activates one of them and Enter activates the
other. Feeling lucky?

~~~
rado
Fully highlighted button responds to Enter, the most powerful action. The
button with a border only is associated with the secondary action, space bar.
Makes perfect sense.

~~~
bathtub365
It makes sense because you’re already familiar with the platform convention.
It’s not intuitive. Space bar is a larger key and easier to reach, why isn’t
it associated with the more “powerful” action?

~~~
saagarjha
It’s not about “power”, it’s about the default key to perform an action being
enter. So dialogs will run the default action, signified by the highlighted
button, when you press enter. Space is intended for selecting the retargetable
focused item.

~~~
bathtub365
> Space is intended for selecting the retargetable focused item.

Sure, but how is that intuitive?

~~~
saagarjha
It's standard UI for keyboard focus across most operating systems. At some
point, you're just going to have to know that space selects the item that the
focus ring is around, just like you know that tab switches between fields. (By
the way, this is off by default so you don't invoke it accidentally without
knowing how it works.)

------
tzs
A Chrome UI idiocy: The new tab page in Chrome contains a text entry field
that says to search Google or type a URL. But as soon as you start to type in
it, it switches the focus to the URL bar. Why the heck do they put in the text
field if they aren't going to let you use it!?

On a desktop that is mildly annoying. On a Windows tablet it is extremely
annoying, because the onscreen keyboard closes when the focus leaves the text
entry field.

For Chrome startup you can fix this by changing the startup page from the new
tab page to a specific URL, and simply give the URL for the Google front page
as that specific URL.

But Chrome doesn't seem to have a way to set the new tab page itself to start
at a specific URL (without installing a third party extension) so you still
have this focus changing idiocy on subsequent tabs.

A further Chrome annoyance on Windows tablets: if you tap the address bar to
bring up the virtual keyboard and then try to paste something by typing CTRL
and then V (CTRL on the virtual keyboard acts as a one-shot CTRL lock, so you
can invoke control keys with one finger), Chrome somehow loses the CTRL part,
and you get a "V" in the address bar. If you then backspace, and try CTRL V
again it works.

------
dsego
The biggest problem with modern tech for me is that it almost never works as
advertised. A lot of times it's just there to tick a box on the marketing
material. The most recent example, got myself a new Fuji camera and it has
bluetooth and wireless and a smartphone app and theoretically you can transfer
your pictures wirelessly (but not over a physical usb cable). I'd rather it
didn't have these features, because it's not reliable, sometimes it won't work
at all, other times it takes too long to connect, it's a mess and I have no
time in my life to deal with this crap anymore.

~~~
da02
I totally agree. For file transfer on my Fuji camera, I just take out the SD
card and grab the files on a SD card reader (+ usb-c adapter) on my phone.
(The Fuji wireless app won't let me transfer regular JPEGs or RAW files. Only
compressed JPEGS less than 1MB large even though the original JPEGs are ~2.5
MB big.)

------
wodenokoto
The "doesn't add up to 6.5gb" is because storage is shared with other services
and doesn't pertain to just Google Drive.

I agree with Google, that it is more important to show how much overall
storage you have left, than how much is being used in this particular service,
but there needs to be an overview that can show where storage is used. And
clicking around on Google Drive it appears there isn't such an overview.

So yes, bad UI, but for different reason than what grumpy website says.

~~~
loopz
If the fix is relatively easy, the UI is probably bad. A good UI could show
"Other services x.y GB", but didn't.

Good UX/UI should provide intuition to the user, especially in more complex
circumstances.

------
dqv
I've got one. Sometimes when you start typing on Google, the keyboard drops in
the middle of typing causing you to tap a link where the key had been.

[https://imgur.com/a/v1CGba5](https://imgur.com/a/v1CGba5)

~~~
cdoxsey
This issue happens in so many places. About to press a button on a page and
suddenly something loads up top and the page shifts 50px.

~~~
lordnacho
Also when you try to dismiss a notification on the phone, and just as you're
doing it a new one appears and you end up dismissing that instead. Boom! Now
you don't know what it was.

This is on Android BTW, not sure how iOS does it. But instead of the newest
notification appearing at the top of the list, maybe it should appear at the
bottom. Problem solved.

------
softwaredoug
The git status issue he lists (that it will say it’s up to date with
origin/master) is really confusing to folks. Hard to wrap your head that your
local “pointer” to that branch is potentially not up to date. Well that really
it’s an out of date copy of a remote pointer, known as a reference... That
when you “fetch” it’s really updating local copies of remote references.

In a world of devs that has to wrap their head around pointers or references,
having copies of references, in a distributed system, doesn’t exactly come
naturally to most, especially new, developers. This is pretty bad for what
should be baseline dev tooling. It’s like having to learn regular expressions
just to be able to edit your first hello world program!

That being said, git is complex, and trying to idiot proof a complex system
with more abstractions only makes it more confusing when the abstraction leaks
(which it will)...

~~~
gmueckl
Abstractions only leak if the system design doesn't match the abstractions
properly. Other tools like Mercurial do a better (but not perfect) job because
they get more right than git does.

------
jborichevskiy
This site makes me happy because it reminds me that other people are just as
frustrated with stupid UI decisions everywhere. And that most apps are
actually terrible by default. Including ones I've built. UX is hard.

~~~
prox
If you enjoyed that there is
[https://thedailywtf.com/series/errord](https://thedailywtf.com/series/errord)

Stupid UX / programming decisions documented since 2004

~~~
1ark
Are they making their own decisions based on those documentation efforts?
_Scrolls to bottom of page, no prev /next buttons. Scrolls to top, "ah, there
they are!" :(_

------
coldcode
It's Don Norman meets the Muppets!

Actually I really appreciate someone collecting collective stupidity in one
place. I am constantly frustrated by terrible design and product decisions
every day (both at work and in general) that I can't do anything about. Maybe
shame will work.

~~~
Nextgrid
The problem is that I'm not sure it's stupidity. I bet a lot of this BS is
caused by "data driven" decisions that maybe improve ad engagement by 0.1% at
the expense of everyone else's productivity, but the company considers the
0.1% increase a win.

What makes me sad is that it seems like us who appreciate & demand good
quality, no-nonsense software seem to be a minority, and the masses don't seem
to care. I've noticed most non-tech people just accept their fate, either
they've already came to terms with the idea that "tech sucks and will always
suck", or they legitimately don't know how the experience can be improved (a
lot of things may look absurd to us as developers, but might not to someone
not familiar with how those things are built) or that they think software is
delivered by gods or equivalent superior entities and that they, the
"peasants" have no way to call for change even though voicing discontent in
feedback sometimes works and is at least worth a try.

~~~
ratww
I agree with everything, except with the part that tech people appreciate and
demand non-nonsense software.

A lot of people in tech enjoy being the "ultimate power user" and are proud of
using things that look or feel complicated.

You just have to look at HN itself to read trough rationalisations of why
software is bloated and why bigger software is probably better. It's never
driven by data or by facts, it's purely by anecdotal experience.

~~~
ryandrake
We, collectively as the software industry, have the power to fix this. The
fact that awful software still exists demonstrates we don’t care or want to
fix it. It’s not a popular opinion here, but software developers/designers are
responsible for bad software.

------
hackermailman
My new favorite default behavior annoyance was FF for Android deciding that
everytime I clicked an open tab after some short time interval, it would
reload the entire page making it extra annoying when you have the massive HN
who is hiring thread open and want to scroll through it while on a subway with
no connection.

~~~
slig
Mobile OS periodically have to reclaim allocated memory and this happens.

------
nsenifty
[https://grumpy.website/post/0SzBFLZy9](https://grumpy.website/post/0SzBFLZy9)

Not being able to open all drawers at once is actually a safety feature
preventing it from tipping over (see Ikea MALM fiasco). I suppose the UX could
still be better.

~~~
jacquesm
[https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/product-
support/...](https://www.ikea.com/us/en/customer-service/product-
support/recalls/following-an-additional-child-fatality-ikea-
recalls-29-million-malm-and-other-models-of-chests-pub4128a7af)

------
eyegor
I noticed that this site is missing the modern classic "giant modal covering
the entire screen". Usually reserved for "log in pls", "subscribe to
site/mailing list", etc. And then sometimes the modal doesn't render correctly
and instead I just see the whole screen go white/gray. News sites, reddit,
twitter, facebook, and tons of blogs are guilty of this.

------
jtms
The one about complaining about git status “Your branch is up to date with
origin/master” Not hitting the network just belies a complete misunderstanding
of both the message and distributed versioning systems in general. This
message is telling you that your branch is up to date with your LOCAL tracking
branch and is absolutely accurate and helpful in this regard. If you fetch and
pull new diffs then it will tell you a different story. I wish people would
stop complaining about git and just read the very easy to understand git book
[https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2](https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2) Learn your
tools people!

~~~
toomim
The point is that this behavior is confusing, not that the behavior isn't
written down somewhere in some documentation.

~~~
jtms
My point is the message is not at all confusing if have a fundamental
understating of a distributed system as opposed to a centralized one. Just
because most people want to use git just like you would have with SVN doesn’t
mean it isn’t a completely different architecture that is (admittedly) a bit
difficult to grok, but far more flexible and powerful

~~~
iamaelephant
It is confusing, as evidenced by people frequently being confused by it.

~~~
jtms
Learn. Your. Tools.

~~~
toomim
Rationalize. Away. Any. Criticism.

------
webreac
What are these "Hyperlink" that links to a page that do not contain anything
more to read. This makes me grumpy ;-)

~~~
ratww
They're permalinks so you can share the posts with friends and family :)

~~~
Nextgrid
That is unacceptable, URLs and copy/paste are unnecessarily complicated.
Better make those social media sharing buttons instead. ;)

~~~
dmitriid
Pro tips:

\- on a phone, long press on that hyperlink. Bingo, you've got your sharing
screen to the post

\- on a PC: right-click, copy. Bingo, you've got your shareable link to the
post

(Yes, I realise your post is /s :) )

~~~
Nextgrid
But long-press and right click are too complicated! /s

------
ensiferum
Hehe at our new office in the kitchen there's a cupboard above the sink so
that any person going to the sink will not be able to see what they're doing
cause the cupboard is in the way unless you double yourself over so that you
can stick your head under the cupboard or are a maximum of 140çm tall. Maybe
the design was done by a person who has 2m long arms so that he/she can
operate the sink from afar and thus avoid this problem.

------
ekns
Hm I was doing something similar, but in the end there was just too much stuff
that's broken, all the time:
[https://twitter.com/everythingisbr2](https://twitter.com/everythingisbr2)

In the same vein, I've been thinking of having some universal bug/annoyance
reporting tool where you'd tag each annoyance with the
software/hardware/website and optionally its version.

~~~
Too
Assuming you collected those yourself and events happening close to upload. If
you have such a high amount of breakages, it means an average user is
experiencing _several breakages per day_. Comparing with my own anecdotal
experience I'm not surprised but seeing it all in one place just makes one
depressed.

------
freetonik
Title edit suggestion: the authors often cover non-web related technology, and
even everyday objects like microwave ovens or furniture.

~~~
Nextgrid
Done!

------
freetonik
There’s also a relatively new sister project
[https://annoying.technology/](https://annoying.technology/)

------
stevep98
This reminds me of the classic ‘this is broken’, which has now been moved to:

[http://goodexperience.com/tib/](http://goodexperience.com/tib/)

Some real gems in there.

------
ubicomp
Wonderful website! Can’t wait to regularly follow this.

~~~
andrepd
That was my first thought. My second thought is this can't be good for my
blood pressure.

------
NeedMoreTea
In the spiwit (just watched Life of Brian) of grumpy Christmas, what's with a
grumpy _single page, lazy loading_ blog? Paginate the thing.

Happy holidays.

~~~
tonsky
I would, happily, if you could explain me why?

------
FartyMcFarter
If you're paying attention and not too desensitized, you can usually find at
least one software bug per day (often a new one).

------
hotz
`user-select: none` - From MDN docs: CSS property controls whether the user
can select text.

When the developer uses that on the body tag...

------
RandomInteger4
I like the copyright pun at the bottom.

~~~
BjoernKW
I can’t see it because of infinite scrolling, which is pretty ironic given the
website’s subject.

~~~
freetonik
Simply click the “refresh” button in the header to easily access the footer.

~~~
Nextgrid
Is there an easy way out of it after? The first time I used that button I had
to turn off my Wi-Fi so I could down to the "top" and click the button again
without infinite scroll kicking in.

~~~
freetonik
Simply restart your computer and clear cookies.

------
vorticalbox
To the Google drive one that storage also includes Gmail and some other Google
services too.

------
redmattred
Get off my lawn!

------
OrgNet
those are mostly minor annoyances that can be avoided by switching to a
different product... What is wrong with tech is that proper regulations to
protect customers have mainly not been written yet or are outdated (mainly for
privacy issues).

Why don't you suggest alternate products that don't have these problems?

~~~
briandear
A drawer system is a victim of inadequate regulations?

~~~
OrgNet
no, we are victims of how Google and other companies are allowed to design
their systems because the regulations are nonexistent or outdated.... forget
about the drawer this is just stupid to think that it is a big problem.

------
briandear
Claiming Reminders can be written in 600 lines of Ruby is pretty ignorant.
That reminds me of those posts that claim they could have written <some famous
app> in a single weekend. Reminders is far more powerful than a school Todo
app programming assignment.

