Published December 12, 2015
What's UX? UX stands for User Experience. It refers to "a person's emotions and attitudes about using a particular product, system or service" according to Wikipedia. I'm starting today a series of blog posts about UX and some fails I ran into on software I use every day.
I'll start with Twitter. First of all, I'm a big fan of the service and I use it a lot. Especially for favorites (now likes). I follow a lot of people and I favorite a lot of articles as a read-it-later. I don't tweet much, and most of the time, I just scroll my timeline and favorite everything seems interesting.
What happens when I scroll my timeline and click on some tweets. More information are shown under the text. Then, I continue scrolling and sometimes, I just click on the background. Twitter folds all previous opened tweets and I lose my position in my timeline. Just check the video below, I need to scroll up to find where I was.
DuckDuckGo
I'm using DuckDuckGo every
day and I almost never fallback to Google for my research online. When I try to use Google, it's just to discover that the result are not better than DuckDuckGo and I will not find my answer on the Internet. What's my favorite feature of DuckDuckGo? Bangs. I can type !w Neil Patrick Harris to go straight on a Wikipedia page or !php date to find the parameters of a PHP function.
Do you know Instant answers from Google? DuckDuckGo has that too. But instead of showing a card in the right of your screen, DuckDuckGo put it before the first result. When I'm really fast and I want to click on the first result, DuckDuckGo often replaces the first official website by the Wikipedia page and I'm redirected even if I didn't want that in the first place. Check the video below.
Online.net
Online.net is a famous hosting company in France. They tried to improve their website with a modern look. But they just created an awful user experience.
The Starting at €5.99 / month text looks really like a button. But when I want to click on it, it just disappears, replaced quickly by a clickable table of options. Check the video below.
Conclusion
If you don't want to confuse your users, please don't move elements of your page. In case of an asynchronous request, save the space right at the beginning. And if you really have to move an element, make the animation not too fast for the user to understand what's happening.