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.
One thing i hate most is when websites act like an app without url changes. So when you click “back” in your browser, nothing fucking changes and you are still on the exact same page.
Same thing happens when you change for example a filter on a website showing a list of items. So when you set up the filters and then click on an item, then click “back”, everything fully resets because non of it was set in the url.
You can’t share the url with anyone because it just opens the website in its default state.
As an example, imagine a website showing all games. You set the filter to show playstation only or sort it by popular. Then if you click on a game, then go back to the list, everything has reset. Its no longer sorted by popularity. Its no longer playstation only games etc.
It fucking infuriates me.
Or when browsing images or videos, and when you click on one and go back, it goes all the way back to the top. Because the genius that made it wants shit to load as you scroll. And then not store that scroll position in the url. So you are right back to where you started.
Single page applications and their consequesnces.
Yeah, particularly bad SPAs. All these things can be solved correctly, but implementing an SPA means you suddenly have to solve these problems, which just don’t exist with traditional document-like webpages.
I can relate to this too. I try to fight the site out of spite by furiously clicking on the back button of the browser to get me to the home page, and it does show the page for a split second before undoing the redirects and pulling me back to the page I was originally in. In the end I have to succumb to using the website’s own navigation buttons to incrementally head back to the starting page.