I rather miss those early days. Web 1.0 is looked down on for its visual clutter (and definitely the hatred of image backgrounds and animated text was well-deserved), but Web 2.0 has just as much if not more clutter, and of a darker nature.
The current web isn't anything like Web 2.0. Web 2.0 never happened, except in tiny isolated pockets. It's a terrible name anyway - it indicates a natural progression (which never happened), a clear improvement (which didn't materialize quickly enough for anyone important to care) and incompatibility with the past (which was never necessary since semantic components can be embedded in a normal web site). We're currently at Web √(-2) alpha-Google-2-Facebook-4-patched-0af33cd.
It boggles the mind to think of how much resources (time and money) have been spent so that control freak corporations can control my user experience from the server when I have a rich client under my control.
The whole web is backwards these days; users should’ve able to download themes for different kinds of content and the content itself should be barely human readable self-describing text with no layout instructions, only hints (like title and h1 and p)- leave it to the client to choose how to display.
I think it's extremely important that the text going around on the web be human readable and notepad editable. It really lowers the bar to start creating content rather than just consuming it.
Obviously it's a minority that do, but the potential itself has value I think.
So, I'm younger, but there was absolutely a shift in thinking from web 1.0 to 2.0 in that 2006-2008 era. You could even call it the Ajaxian era. http://ajaxian.com/
I read that blog every day and the techniques and tooling (jquery/mootools/etc) absolutely shifted the thinking that birthed our "modern" react/vue style single page app.
This is like saying that Classical -> Baroque never happened because people still paint in a Classical style.
No, what happened was that a lot of people said "web 2.0!", a bunch of other people said "AJAX!", and only the AJAX thing actually happened. Web 2.0 meant the semantic web, not the asynchronously loaded web.
For as far as i remember 'web 2.0' meant replicating Mac OS X's Aqua on the web (very poorly, of course) with gradients and shadows (not necessarily through CSS, thanks to IE6, but it helped) and unnecessary javascript everywhere.
My favourite sites are Hacker News, and similarly reddit with the old design and custom themes turned off. Functional, clean, content focused, and high - but not too high - information density. There are changes I would make to both, but there are reasons I got addicted to them.
That country selector that is all the country flags of the world in greyscale with colours only shown on mouse-over deserves a special mention.
Not really a problem if you're just entering garbage information, but try to find the proper flag if you actually want the correct one. Bonus points if you are one of the many lucky citizens born under a flag that consists of three horizontal or vertical areas of equal size.
Maybe the downvotes (not from me) were because your post initially appears to be correcting your parent (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20346737), but is actually agreeing with it?
I have always dreamed of creating a country dropdown that was not in alphabetical order and contained historical countries/territories/empires that don't exist anymore. This is even better though.
I got a good laugh out of this for a few seconds before getting actually frustrated with it.
Mostly because my bank does a lot of these terrible things.
I scrolled down and still couldn't see the checkboxes under the last row. Maybe it also doesn't work on Firefox, because as trivial as it is to make a site that works everywhere no one does. Normally this frustrates me, but if that's the case here it kind of makes sense.
I did exactly that as well. I’m also happy that there appear to be several different captchas, as others mentioned ones I didn’t see. The best one I clicked through was “select every picture with glasses” and every picture had either eyeglasses, drinking glasses or panes of glass.
Mine was "select all checks" and had plaid cloth, chess kings in trouble, checkmarks, x marks, bank checks, etc...
The one that almost got me was the popup with the timer that said "hurry up" but instead of a "go away" box it had a "full screen" box. I don't know how you are supposed to get rid of that box, I had to inspect element->delete node to get past it.
I did manage to finish in a little over 5 minutes.
I had this happen today, in the wild, after visiting a HN linked Wired article. A few seconds on the page, a banner appears, blocking about a quarter of the page. Close it, start reading the article. 30 seconds later, the original banner reappears, again blocking a quarter of the page, and I close it again. I continue reading, think I hit a "click to read more button", another click. Keep reading, maybe two thirds of the way through the article, get bombarded with a modal dialog asking me subscribe to an email newsletter.
Who the fuck is implementing these things and how do they justify this shit as contributing to the user experience? I came to your aite to read an article, not to be bombarded with ridiculously distracting prompts, banners and subscribe prompts - and this completely ignoring the intrusiveness of the ads with autoplaying video and audio.
Shit like this really makes me rethink visiting sites like Wired, though they are by far not the only ones doing this, just the one that happened to me today.
Why do web devs think this a good thing to do? Pull this crap in a desktop, sure as he'll would uninstall.
A developer being told by management that Optimizely showed this design gives a 20% boost in conversion.
I don't trust this tooling after creating 3 control groups, one A group, one B group and having the three control groups report different values (Control 1 was better than Control 3 but worse than A but better than B)
when i see an interesting article, i just send it to Pocket (or Instapaper). I do this partially for time-shifting and/or text-to-speech purposes, but avoiding crap like this is a major benefit.
It's not "devs" -- it's shortsighted business staff focusing on short-term goals rather than longterm value and user happiness. Now that Wired is paywall and has been upfront about its shift to paywall and affiliate revenue, be prepared for more dark patterns like the ones you articulated.
Reminds me of Marc Canter's online social network "PeopleAggregator": "sort of like a MySpace in a box", "we support Facebook import/export!" -- aka "PeopleAggravator"!
Intro to PeopleAggregator (turn your volume down first)
It's genius. It's got a little "online services" icon with a friendly smiley face with a microphone and headphones.
You click on it, expecting an interactive chat but what you actually get is a photo of someone smiling hugely with headphones on and a laptop open, and a sidebar where you can search their inadequate help documents.
I'm glad it's a parody or it would be really insulting.
Oh I definitely recognise this, it's using Microsoft's Bot Framework (https://dev.botframework.com/). I had to make a chatbot for a hospital during my end of studies internship.
I still don't get why people want chatbots as they're terrible UI, so frustrating to use even when they're made properly.
People don't want chatbots - businesses want(ed) them because they offer(ed) the promise of much cheaper support. Of course that's predicated on them working at all, which in practice they don't, obviously. Think that message has filtered through enough now that the hype surge that was in full swing a couple of years ago seems to have petered out again.
It seems to be a recurring pattern. Business introduce some new form of support that customers like because it means less waiting times and less automated gatekeeping, but then companies look to put that back in to save costs. Web chat was the previous quick way in, but now that's been automated and reduced to the same obtuse trees as phone or email support so now social media is the fast/less BS option. That too will pass.
I'm working with a successful ecommerce company who have hugely improved conversions on their (high touch, bespoke but sold online) product by introducing a chatbot.
For some use cases, customers like them very much indeed.
I guess customers want them to the extent they help them achieve their task without hassle and/or them realising it's a chatbot, pretty much just as well as a human would.
In some use cases, I suppose this might be possible (though I've not ever seen this - would love to see your example if you can name it!) but in most it's not, yet.
Come on, who doesn't want an interface that takes 5 times as long to use, misunderstands what you want most of the time, and trades clicking for typing and autocorrect fails? It's great!
I about fell off my chair laughing with how slow closing the "how can we help" popover was. If I had to write a backstory for this I'd say some dev was really proud of animating that and wanted to make sure everyone noticed it.
Right? Every new web developer that first learns how to do animations REALLY over does them.
It's like how elementary school kids write their "papers" in comic sans (and eight other fonts half-way through) and each word is a different color. Or they make a power point and every-single-dang-thing just HAS to spin into the slide.
> like how elementary school kids write their "papers" in comic sans (and eight other fonts half-way through) and each word is a different color
HA! I did that! I thought it made the essay more interesting to read, and it was a pain in the ass since I had to transfer the text by hand (ie rewrite it) in Deluxepaint on my Amiga 500, then print on our 9-needle matrix printer. Oh, how I miss the sound of that. Or do I?
Naturally, I was told by my teacher to never do it again.
I wonder how much of this is related to how we teach kids initially -- everything is primary colours; schools value appearance of writing above content ('it's so neat'); it's all about big gestures, no subtlety; ...?
Oh god I’ve had this happen before. At my first job our CEO was so proud of the splash screen she designed that she asked me to slow down the apps loading time by three seconds.
Seriously? There's tons of stuff missing, at the very least a cookie banner ("we value your privacy not") and "aw, snap, we're having probs to bla blah blah" and social media icons. Also, it's known that call-to-actions must come in a group of three, and have cute vectors. See [1] on how to do a website.
Yet the site of the people who made this (Bagaar) does not have a privacy banner but happily contacts Google Analytics, DoubleClick, HotJar and HubSpot.
This was okay, but if you want to see how the pros do it, try to apply for a Russian visa on their Australian web site.
Things I remember:
- Not being able to enter my correct date of birth. At all. So you enter an incorrect date to get to the next screen, which is "I certify all information to be true and correct"
- Having to list the personal details of every relative living in Russia. Where do you stop?
- Having to list the details of every foreign trip you made in the last 10 years
And if you try to phone in to ask for help: you are advised that the phone is answered on one day of the week, between 9 am and 12 noon. You get that message until 8:59, from 9:00 you get "all the lines are busy, you have been placed in a call queue" which changes back to the original at 12:00.
Two that made me laugh and think were on the last page:
Choose images that contain a bow, where the images were of bows (archery), bows (ties), bows (hair ties), and bows (gesture).
But then they really got me with the checkboxes for those images. You think they're beneath the images, but they're actually above and the frame was just scrolled down. You don't realize until you get to the bottom row and don't see any checkboxes
> But then they really got me with the checkboxes for those images. You think they're beneath the images, but they're actually above and the frame was just scrolled down.
I saw that immediately, but it still got me, because I tried to scroll down, thinking the checkboxes were beneath.
Brilliant! Captures every frustration I have ever had with stupid-ass, half-baked web forms. Is there a form in there that messes up with your autofill? That could be a nice addition. I couldn't make it past the 1st form. I could feel my heartbeat go up as I was trying to figure my way around it. I had to close it so that I could remain calm for the rest of the day.
Silicon vendors are the absolute worst. Everything requires an especially arduous signup complete with employer, product usage grid, and favorite color and the websites are impossible to navigate because they were designed entirely by the marketing people.
The cookie approval dialogue was quite snappy though. Better than most implementations I've seen. Didn't reload the page. Didn't display a large spinner once you made a choice.
"Holding ALT to scroll faster is cheating and not allowed."
This is interesting, since ALT + scrollwheel on Firefox is supposed to move forward and backward in your page history, but in the terms and conditions, it helps you scroll at normal speed.
Gave up at the user agreement, where you can't "accept" or dismiss until (presumably) you scroll to the bottom. The scrollbar is screwed up so that (1) wheeling is super slow and (2) you can't grab the elevator and drag it to the bottom of the shaft.
Upload profile picture area didn't appear correctly in Edge, had to switch to Chrome. Don't know if this is intentional but it's definitely accurate from my experiences, lol.
Reminds me of some old maths software we had to use in school which only ran in 'IE 6 or higher', but if you used IE 8 or above it would report the same 'use IE 6 or higher' message and not let you use the software. That software was also the only way to check whether your answers to the practise questions in the corresponding textbook were correct, which made revision pretty painful.
I had a similar idea to parody the irritating practices of some news sites, where they have five different headings/footers, some with auto-playing video (I'm looking at you independent.co.uk), others with cookie warnings which take 30s to close (AFAIK theverge does this), some that are static and don't move when you scroll, others that disappear in arbitrary random ways when you scroll and reappear when you move the page just a little bit.
I've seen websites that show so many that the news article is only visible through a tiny 10% sized crack. So frustrating.
Some time ago I tried registering an account on a site where the password policy was that you couldn't use special characters and that it would discard any characters you entered after the first 15 ones.
But you know what the worst part was?
They never bothered informing you about these limitations. The site just returned a generic error.
Not supporting special characters I can kinda understand but silently discarding characters from the password the user has picked is just evil. It took me LOTS of registration attempts and password resets before I figured out what the hell was going on.
I registered an account for some software company that was acquiring some other services, so the left hand wasn't talking to the right.
Sure enough, different parts of the site had different password requirements, and they enforced them on password change. So you could create an account on a sub-site that wasn't accepted on the main site, which was the only site with the password change page, but you couldn't enter the old password to fix it.
I think password reset did work, but I wound up creating another password that worked in one place but not another...
I once registered a password using a special character, but I could not get in. It turned out that they url encoded it, if I used %21 instead of "!" I could get into the site.
The discover card (As in discover credit cards) had a limitation of 15 characters for the password back when I first signed up for one out of college. Even back then I was using long complicated passwords. The "clever" thing is that they never told you about this. They just truncated it at 15 characters on both the sign up page and the login page. I didn't realize this for several years because their password entry field was so small.
> Not supporting special characters I can kinda understand
IIRC this is mostly done to prevent SQL injection attacks. In a modern system there is 0 reason not to allow any characters in the password (within whatever encoding you support).
Don't forget all the people who are, you know, bowing. Seriously, I'm pretty sure it rejects your captcha if you do. Sheer evil genius all the way through.
Clever. I would have gone with 'Select all images related to set'. If I recall correctly, 'set' has the most definitions of any English word, plus it could lead to some interesting contradictions, paradoxes, and confusion - any answer could be right!
Instagram does something similar if it detects that you are on mobile. A huge banner advertising their app is displayed, and the [x] in the top right corner is almost impossible to hit.
An underappreciated portion of this section is "expand to full screen," which expands the white space to full screen but keeps the TOS frame the same size!
This froze and then crashed my browser (Chrome on iOS) while I was trying to type in a password. I’m not sure if that was intended, but I would definitely consider it a “worst-practice”.
This is like the movie Brazil, no longer funny because it has come true. If I was sure it was intended as a joke instead of a showcase of "best practices" it would be funny.
They all are! That's the joke. They're all "checks" because you have to check a box, they're all "light pictures" because that's how a computer display works, they're all "glasses" because they all have glass of some sort in them...
So far I haven't seen anything on this site that I have not encountered on a real web site at one time or another (though this site is unique in bringing all these horrible design practices together in one place). This includes not being able to get past the captcha.
Not that I want to brag, but, you can get past the captcha. You just have to mindlessly click everything (at least it worked for me. And yes, I should probably get a life, but I made this passed as UX research.)
Ah. I was proceeding on the assumption that a bow and a bow tie were not the same thing. Silly me.
Still, nothing on this site was as bad as the "security questions" on the United Airlines site. All of their security questions are multiple choice. Here's an actual example:
Because obviously no one who flies United likes football or baseball.
The worst thing is that when you have to answer the question the answers are presented in a different order than when you set them up, so a simple hack like "just pick the third answer" won't work. It's genuinely more frustrating than anything on the parody site.
I got through in 2:45, and found myself very rarely surprised by any of the nonsense it pulled. I think that means either the people who designed the websites I use a lot are monsters, or I'm a monster, or maybe both.
This is amazing, hahaha, expert-level trolling! I'm impressed by the degree to which they managed to capture all of the insanely frustrating UI design choices made on countless websites and software products.
Reminds me that recently Bitwarden has placed the logout button under the password field so if you don’t pay attention you’ll type in your long password and the click log out.
No idea why they’d do that (although now that I think of it I guess one possible reason is someone inside Bitwarden tries to send a subtle message that they cannot be trusted any longer, kind of like raising a flag upside down to signal distress.)
This is amazing...so often I get frustrated with real sites that I use which incorporate these 'worst-practices' but when I talk to non-technical folks about my issues, they don't understand 'dark patterns'.
I plan on showing this to family and friends to help them realize how common these anti-patterns are.
I really like this. If these guys are smart, they could use it as an experiment to isolate how much impact a given "bad practice" has on a user's ability to accomplish their goal. Then if they're REALLY smart they could monetize that knowledge in the form of a course...
I am a UX designer with 30 years of digital design experience, 20 of those in UX/UI design. In my opinion, UX is dead. Companies don't want it. They still think they want it from a competition standpoint, but in terms of what value UX brings, they don't care and would prefer not to have it. UX in corporations is purely a political thing now.
It used to be that commerical activity on the internet was not allowed. This was because, in part, we knew it would ruin the experience. Now, the internet is pretty much 100% commercialized. its a wasteland and it will only get worse.
I have an exit strategy in play to get out of UX and anything to do with working on the internet. UX and UI design will be rolled into "design" and eventually be automated. Same with coding. So, if you think you have a nice career ahead of you as a UX or UI designer or a web developer, think again. Your days are numbered.
Yikes. I see it the opposite way. My title has evolved from UX Designer to Product Designer. A lot of organizations have started to understand the value of design and are now giving us the power to think through everything, rather than just the optimization of a web form.
Technology is evolving and expanding so quickly that there's exponential need for good design. I'm happy to hear you're getting out of UX though. I wouldn't want to go to a doctor who blatantly calls the whole medical industry a sham.
Every developer should be required to use this site daily for a month, before they can graduate. Simply using it once isn't enough ring home what you'll put your users through
Ugh, I thought there were a few in there to trick me. Like on the "check" one, there was a pen hovering over a checkbox but it was unchecked, so I didn't think that counted...
I initially tried selecting all of the boxes, and noticed the bottom row didn't have any boxes. So I scrolled up, saw some more checkboxes, and selected those. It worked.
Brilliant! Would suggest tick box part to not require all tick boxes to be ticked. So when user notices their wrong assumption with tick boxes being at bottom, they have to redo whole thing again
Honest question: Where do people think those cookie banners come from?
Because, they aren't a dark pattern. They aren't a sneaky way to try to juice your engagement numbers. They didn't show up everywhere because growth hackers started getting jealous of the other guy's cookie banner. They are literally required by law, or at least many lawyers interpret the law in that way. The designers at my work really didn't want to make one, and especially didn't want it added to our site.
Cookie banners are only really required if you're doing things like using them for "personalizing ads" and the like. If your cookies just there to check if you're logged in and other essential functions, you don't need a banner.
Please tell that to my Communications department. If they believe you, I'll owe you lots of beers.
I'd guess the thinking is "Well, I don't really understand those requirements and it's hard to be sure if we meet them, safest just to put the banner on." And "Well, if we don't need it, how come all these OTHER sites have it? You really think they're all wrong and you're right? What, are you a fancy pants lawyer now?"
"Cover your ass" is the main driving force of most of America.
1) Require adblock
2) Banner saying the website doesn't use cookies, which goes away if you mouseover
3) If you're on mobile, show a banner saying the website doesn't have an app
4) A signup form, but when you try to focus it, it turns into a banner saying "jk this website doesn't have signup"