I wish to understand what elements or aspects of the design of modern websites the end users are annoyed from. Though you are free to express your personal opinions, it would be even more insightful if you could provide objective criticism and suggestions for alternative implementations so that I may incorporate the same in my current and future projects to make them as user friendly as possible.
Some criticisms I have encountered a while back include:
- Switches being basically checkboxes with more ambiguous active state
- Scrolling animations that prohibit user from linearly scrolling through the page
Make sure that the opinion is not
- Related to business/legal matters e.g. Cookie consent notices, ad banners etc.
- Too vague e.g. Poor website layout
- Highlighting objectively bad practices e.g. Lack of accessibility features
I recognise I could have followed a design system for this question, but I want to understand the situation from the perspective of the end users to see if they have a differing view on what a convenient user experience should be like.
I have to mention consent popovers anyway, because many of them don’t even comply to law. They should be better. None should ask for sharing data to over 50 or over 100 “partners”.
I hate what I would label marketing or design websites with huge banners and non-telling marketing-speak text. I want information, and in a reasonable form and density. A huge banner [of happy people] with no relation to the product is wasted space. I want concise information, not evasive and positive-only speak.
Article webpage where the next article follows. Even worse when there is no clear visual content separation to indicate it’s something different now.
Auto-playing videos. Despite browser blocking them, evading that, or popover videos when scrolling, or videos embedded that have nothing to do with the article. They are atrocious.
Overly verbose text. Overly verbose intro text and context descriptions. Not getting to the point. Not linking sources.
Too small text. I have a web-browser setting for default font size. Don’t make it 40% of that for no reason.
No dark mode. In the evenings, flashing me is always irritating, and I have to manually enable a dark mode hack.
Wasted space for layout spacing. Looking pretty over usability or dense information.
Zoom can be implemented good or bad - depending on what you increase in terms of font size, spacing, component spacing, etc.
Contact - support or otherwise - only via shitty chatbot or web forms with too much required details. Give me a simple email address.
Newsletter or subscribe requests. I’ll do it if I want to, never upon request. Worst when they show up before you consumed their content; could not even assess quality or interest.
Shit DOM design, lack of selectors. Programmatically interfacing with a website through DOM can be very helpful. For CSS hacks, or content extraction. Like tracking Terms of Service or Privacy Policy, or customizing or fixing layouts. Lack of speaking DOM element classes or ids breaks those interfaces.
Hey that’s a great idea for the euros with actual consumer protection - as a next step to the consent popups, you should limit how many things you can consent to at once. For example, if users had yet another pop up for the next ten “necessary partners” they would quickly abandon sites that made them do that
Sounds like a feature.