You eye goo rue
Venting about some UI annoyances.
Bad Drop-Downs
When a drop-down is active, typing a letter will take you to the first entry that begins with that letter. Pressing the letter repeatedly will go to the next entry in the list that begins with that letter.
For example, in a list of states, clicking on the drop-down and pressing ‘C’ will cause ‘CA’ to be selected. Subsequently if you press ‘C’, it will select ‘CO’ and ‘CT’ and then ‘CA’ again in a cycle.
Not breaking this behavior is basic usability.
But how many sites have you been to where they prepend a hyphen or a repeating word in front of every single value, making the letter shortcut worthless?
Much worse than that are the sites that use the javascript onChange event to take the user to another page. In that case, when I use the letter shortcut to get to ‘CT’, the first time I hit ‘C’ I’m immediately taken to the ‘CA’ page, in direct violation of the drop-down’s standard behavior and the user’s desire.
Double-click lookups
Being able to look up the definition of any word in an article is nice. However, overriding the default double-click behavior (highlight word) is not. I happen to use double-clicks to highlight words as a visual reminder of where I am in an article. Having to manually close all the popups this generates on the New York Times site is so frustrating that I refuse to use their site.
Meaningless progress bars
Have you ever watched a progress bar get to 100 percent complete, only to start all over from scratch?
Once upon a time, progress bars reflected how far you were through a process. Now they’re just animated gifs, with no correllation to how close you are to “done”. I’ve watched software installs where the progress bar got to “complete” a dozen times. What?
This practice has become so widespread that users are now trained to completely ignore progress bars, so even if you code yours properly, no one is going to believe you.
Great. Thanks, guys.
Remember me?
In lots of web-based apps, the login prompt also includes a checkbox labeled “remember me on this computer”. In theory, it sets a cookie so that the user won’t have to login-or at least not retype their username-the next time they visit the page.
The problem is that almost none of those sites actually remember anything. I have to type in my username and password every time I visit my work email, even though I click “remember me” every time, and that’s not an isolated incident.
Again, this is shit. What the hell are these people thinking? “Gee, that’s a great feature… Let’s pretend we have it!” Fuckwods.