Looking for examples of bloated websites where you are seeking some textual data/information but have to suffer to retrieve it. EDIT: Preferably sites that do not require log in to access the data/information.
Reddit by far. I find the old version unappealing but the new is just a dumpster fire. I'm basically dreading any missclick because I'll be stuck for a few seconds. Not to mention the worst video player on the internet.
This website's performance is shameful.I would spend easily twice as much time on Reddit as I do right now if it was snappy
I was rushing to the thread to post this. The new site, even after all this time, is dramatically slower to load content than old.reddit. Does anyone at reddit actually use reddit?
Another issue is pretending comment threads are modal?? If I click to read comments, it presents a sheet of comments that if you accidentally click outside them, they just disappear.
And they broke the back button, so when you go back to read those comments you accidentally dismissed, you don't land at your previous scroll position.
Reddit must just have terrible developers. Like they havent paid them enough and it shows in the product. But its the most popular forum on the internet, so people use it anyways.
The Twitter website on mobile devices. I've just timed myself to see how long it took to view my own twitter profile on my phone (I don't use Twitter on my phone, hence I'm not logged in).
It took 15 seconds to load the profile, but I couldn't view any tweets until I'd pressed the "Not Now" button to the pop-up asking me to install the app. Five seconds later, I was able to view my most recent / pinned tweet.
This is all for a service that delivers a timeline of (primarily) text, with some images and video. It should not take 20 seconds to load!
I only visit twitter through links shared by friends, and ever since their last redesign 50-80% of the links give an "error loading" message which may or may not go away after reloading the page a few times.
When/if the tweet finally loads, it shows totally unrelated messages at the bottom. I still have to click on it and load it again if I want to see the comments thread.
The upside is that the redesign was the most effective way to keep me completely off twitter.
Originally it was just a fullscreen nag div on top of the already rendered content, so if you can delete elements, it should work for viewing or you can use something like Nitter.net
Nitter.net[0] solves a lot of these problems and paired with Redirector[1], it's a transparent switch out.
There's an expired cert issue 3 days ago, but there are other instances[2]
That is only true when using a web browser or some other software you cannot easily control. I wrote a script to read Twitter without Javascript, without a web browser. Text-only, as it should be (280 chars of text)
Jira has been slow and buggy for me for over a decade at companies of every size. When Atlassian loses half its market share overnight to some new competitor, we'll talk about how inevitable it was. Nobody has cracked that nut yet, but they will.
Totally. A light UI with some tuned edge caching and you will be golden.
There are quite a few competitors popping up, the main issue is that they all seem to be bootstrapped and don't have the funding to make a disruptive marketing splash.
I feel like the big marketing splash that will push a hot new competitor over the edge will be an acquisition by a big company. "BigCo acquires issue tracking startup X" will be the headline for a week, and they will gain a ton of credibility and momentum, and they will eat Atlassian's lunch. Eventually the big company will ruin them, and we'll end up with another slow and buggy version of Jira, but maybe we'll get a good 5-10 years of the default, ubiquitous issue tracking software being clean and snappy. I'd like to experience that before I retire.
It's not hard to build something like Jira, it's not even that special. However it can be painful to uproot it once installed and used for years. It's probably not an issue for a small shop with a few devs, but imagine a large software house with hundreds if not thousands of devs and the amount of info that goes into Jira. Nobody wants to be that guy who proposes 6 month company wide data migration. That's the main reason it will take years to dethrone it.
In 13 years it went from something I pushed and installed at every client I helped with business processes, help desk, Dev… to an overbloated frustrating mess to operate and manage.
Just changing a dropdown field’s content now is hidden in sublayers that requires a bookmark if you are not toying with that on a daily basis.
(not everybody is an actual full time Jira admin, and a Jira admin should’nt have the mental load of an Exchange admin for such an application).
Happy to hear about alternatives experiences as well.
"not everybody is an actual full time Jira admin, and a Jira admin should’nt have the mental load of an Exchange admin for such an application".
Couldn't agree more. I've got admin rights to quite a few systems, including Exchange, which is a pretty big ship,so to speak. However, having tried Jira it's hands down the most convoluted piece of software I've ever seen. It took me less time to spin up an instance on AWS+ configure its access to the internet than it took to make a few changes on Jira. God knows how they managed to do It.
There are too many to list nowadays. I keep one browser setup with JavaScript disabled for when I want to look up a product review, a recipe, or a how-to (even on my mobile devices). I’ve set all my browsers to disable autoplay (why is this not the default?). The web is becoming a miserable, slow, annoying experience. It’s hard to believe that as we have the best tools ever and the fastest computers that we’re choosing to inflict the most burdensome and repellent experiences on our users. God help us.
NoScript and uBlock Origin go a long way to making the web usable-ish. There's still hurdles, but at least you have to opt into those hurdles instead of having every website punch you in the face with garbage. Works on Firefox for Android, too.
The thing that's driving all of the bad behavior you're talking about is the advertising business model. The sooner we can destroy web advertising as a viable business model, the better.
Noscript is such a PITA though. A phenomenal app, but goes to show it's borderline impossible to stop that abuse as it makes your experience almost entirely unusable.
Walled garden seems popular based on behavior, but rarely a position that a user reasons themselves into. People who really care about this stuff would rather use emacs as a browser than an app store. Not trying to make a judgement, but it really seems like a vocal minority / silent majority case.
Confluence. A truly hot mess of an SPA-style website. Literally >10 second page load times with hundreds and hundreds of API calls to populate a page. To show a document. Literally the very thing the web was created for. It's honestly astounding how bad it is.
Reddit has lots of valuable info, especially if you are looking for tips on products, but the UI isn't just bloated, it's downright hostile with its dark patterns to make you use their terrible mobile app.
The old Reddit UI is still available under the old.reddit.com domain. I use browser extensions to automatically redirect to the old saner UI every time I visit Reddit.
The 'new' Reddit UI caused my Intel macbook to get really hot just clicking around, it's not so bad on the M1 but I still prefer the old reddit UI, which feels snappy.
Some sites are bad but I use them so little that they don't matter. For instance, USAA shipped my 529 to another company and their site is trash. It's heavy and broken. I login once a month though, so it doesn't matter much.
Slack and GMail I have open all the time. Slack is by far the worst of the two but they both consume a ton of resources. I'd probably be more annoyed by GMail if the UX was as bad as Slack though.
Then there's any atlassian product. Slow, confusing, constantly changing for the worse. There was a time in my life when I used both daily and they weren't that bad. Now I use a slack bot to interact with jira and and make one edit in confluence a day (for a standup and it takes about three minutes to edit, update and save).
And reddit... If I had to rely on that daily I'd probably rage quit the internet. I still use the old interface for most things. It's ugly but it's not a dumpster fire of slow loading API calls to render bloat.
USAA's new 529 company is absolutely horrible. Has arbitrary password length limits. It complains of good, complex passwords and you can't paste them in. I couldn't even log in because my account became locked. It definitely hurt USAA's reputation for me.
Is it actually USAA's 529 company still or is it like other investments that got shipped to Schwab and you can just click through USAA's site to get to it now?
I kind of understand their desire to separate these divisions and focus on insurance and (I suppose still) core banking, but I really miss having a singular place to log into and access the bulk of my financial activity and data.
EDIT: Seems they farmed their 529 plans out to Victory Capital. Going directly to their site they only seem to support: financial professionals, institutional investors, and USAA individual investors. Which suggests, to me, the problem. They aren't really set up to deal with individuals. At least Schwab already dealt with individual investors so my brokerage account and IRAs weren't screwed with too much.
I think Yammer takes first place. It's required reading at work (the main feed). It loads incredibly slowly (I think it's like 5 redirects for auth and whatnot) and the default "What's new" view is entirely useless.
Jira and Confluence are excruciatingly slow, too, but at least the information isn't hidden behind useless feeds.
<ad>
Make Cookies Like Grandma Used To!
<ad>
[Jump to recipe] <- only works half the time
Let me tell you about my time with my grandmother,
making cookies with her on Sunday afternoons in the summer.
<ad>
[READ MORE]
So there I was, making a mess like usual.
<ad>
<20 more sentence or paragraph and ad pairings>
Recipe:
[READ MORE]
Ingredients:
- 2 1/2 cups of flour
- 1/2 cup of sugar
- Eggs (wait, how many?)
...
1. Beat sugar and butter in a mixer.
[READ MORE]
When I'm on a repository, the sidebar has 5 items that I don't use and cannot remove (Github in comparison lets me hide almost anything I don't use: discussions, issues, wiki...).
Issues are bloated and nothing can be hidden: designs, linked issues, votes, comments, right sidebar with todo, assignees, time tracking, due date, labels, weight (even though the feature is "locked"), confidentiality, status and references.
That's true on every single page on Gitlab: tons of great stuff hidden between things that I don't use.
I love that Gitlab has so many features, but I hate that I cannot cherry pick what I actually use to cleanup the UI.
GitLab Product Design Manager here Thanks for your feedback!
You bring up quite a few great points. We have worked hard on bringing every tool from the DevOps lifecycle into our platform, and I agree with you that quite a few areas have become overwhelming, especially for new users or people who don't use our entire set of features.
We are actively working on refining that, but as you can imagine, that's no easy feat, as we have a vast variety of project types, workflows, use cases, user types, etc...
One of the most problematic areas, as you perfectly mentioned, is the left sidebar. We already enable project administrators to remove items from there by going to Settings -> General -> Visibility, project features, permissions, and then toggling off the areas you would like to remove. However, this is a project setting, not per user.
At the same time, we also work on making that left sidebar better for everyone, in multiple smaller iterations. As first step, we are making some small changes to the visual design (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/322680) and make the navigation easier to understand (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/322687). We are also aware that our left sidebar has become too crowded with too many top-level/sub-level items, and we are validating an idea that would be the first step for us to get out of this (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/ux-research/-/issues/1421). There are already a few follow-up ideas (e.g. grouping items into larger groups or pinning most important items per user), but they are a bit further away.
I hope that gives you a better understanding how our UX team at GitLab thinks about this. Let me know if you have any other feedback or ideas
> One of the most problematic areas, as you perfectly mentioned, is the left sidebar. We already enable project administrators to remove items from there by going to Settings -> General -> Visibility, project features, permissions, and then toggling off the areas you would like to remove. However, this is a project setting, not per user.
I can't believe I missed that. Is it a somewhat recent feature? I could swear I could not disable everything a few months ago when I tried it (I remember not being able to hide Operations, Analytics, etc.). Maybe I just went too quickly through the visibility options.
Well I apologize, it is indeed feasible to hide the features I don't use. Thanks for the heads up.
> I hope that gives you a better understanding how our UX team at GitLab thinks about this
Thank you for these explanations. Although I think some pages are too bloated, I like the fact that you act on it. And to be honest, I've always found each iteration of the UI better than the previous one, so there's that.
> I can't believe I missed that. Is it a somewhat recent feature?
Yes and no We did have this section, but only about half of the items in the left sidebar were initially included. This was an oversight from our teams, and we managed to get most of that fixed over the last 2 milestones (more refinements coming up as well, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to create an issue).
> And to be honest, I've always found each iteration of the UI better than the previous one, so there's that.
That's amazing to hear and proves our high focus on iterating fast and improving each time. Thanks so much for your feedback!
Atlassian products: Jira, Bitbucket and Confluence. They are the tools I use the most and they bog my computer right down especially when connected to a corporate proxy which only supports HTTP 1.
Fandom. Unfortunately it's the best source for in depth data about several video games I play (notably Civ VI... e.g. here's a random page [1]) but for a website with primarily user-generated text content, it loads a ton of video ads on every single page, making it a bear to use.
You keep making these comments, like HN users don't know that ad blockers exist. These comments are particularly unhelpful in a thread specifically about identifying bloated websites.
Google Drive. It is a file listing, there is no excuse for a folder not loading nearly instantly. Furthermore they make it feel even slower by requiring double clicks and breaking basic features such as copying the URL or opening in a new tab.
Whenever I use the drive file browser I miss Apache directory listings.
I don't know if it's really bloated but in terms of feeling terrible, it's Google Cloud's various dashboards. The underlying page loads in reasonably enough, but then everything on top is 'hydrated' on the go and it psychologically feels dragged out, like how pages used to load in the 90s but faster.
I haven't worked with Google Cloud dashboards much, but I feel like I recognize what you're talking about. I hate pages that load quickly with everything missing and then incrementally load all their components, even if it happens very quickly. As soon as the page comes up, my brain starts fruitlessly working to figure out how to interact with it, while it churns through its transformation into an actual working page. Instead of wasting my attention like that, just be honest and don't ask for my attention until you're ready for it.
I find these days almost any local tv news website to be all but unusable. Between the multiple ad pop ups, multiple auto play videos, and the general clutter. Just trying to read a single news story is an effort that pisses me off to the point where I just close out the tab instead of reading the article.
I honestly find the opposite. Facebook's website seems to be one of the best ones of this new SPA trend, and doesn't seem to have any speed issues. The (android) app meanwhile consistently lags for me, and things like voting on polls have a 50/50 chance of working.
Huh. I guess I forgot about it. My browser has touch.facebook come up if I type in the URL bar and I've basically only used the touch version even on desktop for ages.
Tripadvisor beats them all: I have been using it since its beginning (amazing product and amazing competitive advantage over other travelers). Today, it is a hall of fame of all the direct marketing tricks, black hat seo technics, anti-patterns, external javascript from everywhere, etc. Also, its information is so diffused and played that it does not provide extraordinary advantage.
Thanks to covid, I have not visited it this last 1.5 year.
The heaviest website I use is Figma, but for completely understandable reasons—it's a professional piece of design software, which so happens to take the form of a website. A questionable choice, perhaps, but Figma is still relatively performant for what it is.
Facebook. What does it do? Chat (for adults and kids), dating, blogging, marketplace, groups, stories, AR, image recognition, live feeds, YouTube-style videos, shopping, property rentals, Q&A, clubhouse-style rooms, COVID-19 info center, multiplayer gaming community, events, job listings, mental health, weather, fundraising.
I avoid the app because I think it's data harvesting, but the mobile site is such a pain. Sometimes it's the little things like writing "the..." in the text box, and accidentally tagging "Theodore" because of a generic word. I have to type all my Facebook comments in a separate text editor.
LinkedIn, partly because the tech is so bloated and slow and it makes it hard to navigate/search, but also because literally 99% of the site is bloviating self-promotion spam.
My bank (a Bank of America subsidiary). Takes about 12 seconds to log in, 5 - 6 seconds to load each page in their site. My typical session (check that a transaction went through, or read a message through their secure portal) takes a minute or two. Infuriating.
Data transfer isn't a major factor, it's all delay in their servers.
our regional electric utility provider's site is slick, all ajax and pretty and every click takes at least 30 seconds to complete an action. it's noticably slower than most other bloated sites, and i don't understand how their developers, much less anyone else can stand it. it can't be THAT much faster being local to the machine or network.
Chase bank banking.
What an unbelievable bloated animated JavaScript monstrosity... I do my bills once a month, so I open chase side by side with all the other tabs, and it's like - click a button in chase, pay one entire credit card/mortgage/check account history/whatever in the other window while it's loading.
I usually have time for everything and sometimes even to research and do my option trades in the time it takes to check and pay 3 cards with chase. Cancelling chase sapphire soon in part because of that (I have another similar fee card with a normal site), and stopping the use of another no-fee card purely because of the site.
If we ever interview someone who worked on this atrocity I'd have to recuse myself :)
- AWS new UI: For some reason, recent changes by AWS in their UI/Console is terrible. When I open S3, the buckets now take few seconds to appear compared to before when it was instant. The number of buckets are similar. WTF AWS.
There has a been a lot of work in this area. Look up discussions around Net Promoter Score (NPS). There's a general belief that page load time has a rather direct relationship with user happiness and how likely they are to recommend your service. It's not my area of expertise but I think it's something like 2s on a decent connection. No action should take longer than that.
For example:
* Page should load to a useful state (could still be background tasks) in under 2s
* Clicking a link should take me to the next page and it should be useful in under 2s
* Making a change to a config item and saving the update should complete in under 2s
If your service can do that, you customers will feel like your system is fast. On the other hand, this is generally considered a technical crowd and we probably look at resource consumption. A site that eats 25% of one of my CPUs and requires 128M of RAM just to load is going to check my box for bloated.
Loading a page of text is effectively instantaneous. If the user's goal is to read that text, then anything else on the page that slows it down is bloat (from the user's perspective).
All the stuff that is extraneous to the reason you visited the webpage would be bloat.
Think about a news article on [insert your favorite news website]. Often before you can see the article, you have to process a bunch of JS (SPA framework, tracker code, etc) before the text loads and you can get the info you were looking for.
Every time I'm taken to an NPR article, I'm offered a choice to accept or reject their non-essential cookies. When I click reject, I'm given a text-only version of the article. It's glorious.
Loading the page instantaneous is again can be solved by adding spinner.
Sure, adding tracker and other stuff might be a jarring experience. But I think you can have all the stuff in your app and make it async so that it does not impact the core functionality of the app.
Adding a spinner is just putting lipstick on the bloat. Progressively loading a page can at least hide the bloat from the end user.
A page of text should just be a page of text. That's the beauty in sites like hackernews and craigslist. They are down-and-dirty, just-the-facts, we'll-get-out-of-your-way websites.
You see bloat when you start adding stuff that obscures that core functionality and/or slows down/degrades the experience.
Of course, the core functionality changes depending on who you are. The customer might just want to read the article, but the sales team wants to get you to see/click on ads and the marketing team wants you to signup for their newsletter. So, one person's bloat is another person's core functionality.
As with most things UI, it's subjective and difficult to quantify, but in the context of a website, it could mean a few things.
If you, as a user, feel that the site is sluggish, unresponsive or difficult to use because it feels too crowded or has too many features, you might judge that site to feel bloated.
In a more technical sense, bloated might refer to very large (or poorly optimized) files, either javascript or static assets, required to run the thing, causing it to load slowly (i.e. at a speed that the user feels is "slowly").
So maybe a good summary might be: "does too much stuff and/or poorly optimized/coded"
Again, not exactly a tight definition, but UIs are inherently characterized by the perception of their users.
I think becomes difficult to argue and render this question invalid if we fail to quantify a problem.
I know it is subjective thing that is the reason why I asked this question. For me all UIs are bloat the CLI experience is the best, for someone else, it might not be.
The bloating problem from my perspective might just be a UX problem that the framework you use or the library you use.
> I think becomes difficult to argue and render this question invalid if we fail to quantify a problem.
It is difficult. It's probably the central difficulty of UIs on the web. However what I said is still true: The quantification inherently rests on users' perception of their experience. This is more a question of psychology than of computer science.
What percentage of your users feel that the app is too slow or confusing? What percentage would you be okay with? If you're selling some kind of enterprise software whose users will not be the buyers but rather the buyers' employees, who cares if it takes 30 seconds to load every page and another 30 seconds to find the widget you need once it's loaded?
The definition of "too bloated" is a function of both how users feel and also how much value you get from reducing it, and the measurement of "bloated-ness" (as well as many other parameters of UX) can't happen without getting feedback from users, which means there's a pretty strict limit to how much we can understand just from discussing theory.
And just to further complicate things: If I'm making a richly featured web app (something like Slack for example) I have a predefined set of features that will need to be implemented using javascript. Obviously there are many parameters that determine how well these are designed and implemented and optimized, all of which will affect how the users perceive the app as a whole. However, what about users (say, some plurality of HN readers) who intrinsically value websites which function without javascript, and will always consider those that don't to be bloated; What use is it to quantify that if it's always going to run up against my stated goal of building a chat app in the browser?
Another example are the poorly optimized websites where each tab uses > 100mb of memory and the all pops new tabs open frequently (I’m looking at you JIRA).
I’ve basically just stopped browsing the web at this point. It’s nigh on unusable sometimes. I buy recipe books, read the NYTime’s daily newsletter, and browse hackernews. Reddit’s unbearable these days, Twitter’s a bit of a dumpster fire even if it wasn’t bloated (I don’t have social media accounts to curate the experience either), and god forbid you click a link on a news aggregator site like Fark (where the headlines are as misleading as something your Great Aunt shared from some long chain of disinformation anyways), even with ad blockers half the pages are just absolutely bonkers.
It’s just not worth it anymore. My print copy of the New Yorker and occasionally some blog posts from here.
You can look at it from a different perspective. I wouldn't mind if an app like figma takes a huge amount of memory. It is comes in my critical professional path. I think if an app falls in your life's critical path, you can look past the memory, cpu usage, bloati-ness etc. I am judging website these days with this kind of yardstick.
Oh yea certainly, but Figma vs JIRA for instance. One, as a professional design suite dealing with image manipulation and simplified component emulation I sort of expect to take up some memory.
On the other hand, JIRA displays lists of tickets. It should be a bit snappier probably. There’s gotta be a way to display 200 tickets without it slowing my computer down. It’s certainly not the text that’s the issue, HN displays that many comments fairly easily and without hiccup.
IMDB has been getting slower and slower with feature bloat, to the extent I avoid it for doing movie-info searches. Thankfully there's a nice app for that I wish more people knew about: Coollector. https://www.coollector.com
The IMDb website just changed to look a lot like the mobile app, and I've noticed it's worse in dozens of ways already. Everything takes more clicks than before, and is harder to read. More whitespace, more bloat.
Since JIRA has already been thoroughly excoriated, I'll go with The Athletic. It used to have a brilliant, simple UI. Now, it takes forever to load and when I click, the UI will magically shift and I will end up clicking an ad.
Any news site, but foxnews.com is one of the worst. On top of everything almost every article has some auto-playing video that follows you as you scroll.
GCP. I don’t know what it’s doing under the hood but it’s such a slog loading it up and waiting for the UI to settle before I can actually do something.
This website's performance is shameful.I would spend easily twice as much time on Reddit as I do right now if it was snappy