My god that was almost better than sex.
The problem is these sites are being over designed.
I always wonder about the value of design both graphic and UX. I mean don’t get me wrong I love good streamlined, efficient, effective design. But so often what we, as designers, do is completely overlooked by end users. I mean they don’t care. There’s probably only 1% of us who really care.
…and that, dear children, is why I am doing these things in handcoded HTML/CSS. It is easier, faster, and you can take a whole directory of images and autogenerate the bulk of the document using a bash script.
GUI. It sounded like a good idea…
Their products success, and the data supporting how people use it, suggest they can be as arrogant as they please.
I’m not a fan, personally, but I’d be embarrassing myself suggesting they change pretty much any of it.
I can assure you that users request all kinds of crazy nonsense from SaaS products - and frequently request you remove that thing ‘nobody understands’, even though you’ve got a spreadsheet showing that all but one of your users considers it the cornerstone of the application.
Henry Ford quote about horses etc.
Arrogance is still insulting, even if you’re successful enough for it not to affect your bottom line.
These universal IDs or whatever they’re called, that allow you to comment on blogs etc. I had one on Yahoo for pseudonymous discussion, then they break it after an update and ask me to make a new one. Well, I don’t trust them if they’ll dick around like that so I switch to Disqus (or was it OpenID?). Some months later it’s not working and I’m asked to create a new one. FFFFUUUU. So I consider Google ID, except their drive to tie everything to G+ makes me wary as I already have a G+ account and the whole point is that I want to comment without being recognized. After further thought I decide I might as well use this as an opportunity to cull what blogs I read. Boingboing is the only blog I could be bothered to create an account for commenting.I post this here because cbloom apparently doesn’t allow anonymous commenting.
It still mystifies me that on landline phones you need to figure out whether to dial a ‘1’ or not. The computer that tells you that you should have or should not have dialed the ‘1’ ought to be smart enough to just fucking go ahead and do that for me please.
That thing you just read on that blog is the same thing as this thing, as far as I’m concerned.
Who on Google Earth thought that the latest change to Google Maps was a good idea?
Sure, it’s nice to be able to focus on the beginning, middle, and end of the directions, instead of seeing them all at once, but I also need to be able to zoom in on the area I’m going TO while looking at the directions and keeping the line on the map that says what my path is.
I know how to get to the freeway from here, I know what 50 miles of freeway looks like, it’s the streets near the destination I’m trying to get detail about.
The default setting for Google Photos deletes pictures stored online when they’re deleted from the phone. That’s so completely something that Google would do that I didn’t bother to see if it could be changed until I started writing this.
Only if you delete them from the phone from within the Google Photos app (which kinda does a weird merging of your online and device-specific photos any way). And it gives you a big honkin’ popup telling you that it’s going to do it. If, for example, you connect the phone to your computer and move all the photos off, it doesn’t delete the online backups. Likewise if you delete the photos via some other method on the phone directly (via another gallery app, or via a file manager, etc). I guess that would be an issue if you only had the Google Photos app on your phone as a gallery app, but I’ve never owned a phone that had that app as its default gallery app from the factory. All of my phones have all had their own gallery app pre-installed, and then I added Photos myself.
Can I just add, “News sites where the text of the story fails to appear unless you authorize a load of javascript? WTF. DIE SITE DIE DIE DIE” And images too. You should not have to allow another site to execute javascript to have a static image appear. 
To be fair modern interface design is evil. Did you like that feature? Sorry, it’s gone now and we just made it twice as difficult!
What I hate in the forums here is when I hit control-f to search the page the page grabs that key and brings up a site search forcing me to go find the find function directly in the browser.
Dammit!
That site search also searches within the current page. Which is important, since in long comment threads only X amount of comments actually get loaded, so the browser find function isn’t actually all that useful.
Such a savvy internet user, but he doesn’t use a password manager (keepass, lastpass, etc.)? Oh, security, right. I guess those sticky notes are gonna be just fine.
However, as @japhroaig mentioned above, the trailing space thing with password login boxes, OR the password login boxes that don’t allow the user to paste in content? That’s some evil shit.
Edit: Hey @beschizza, that GIF (that’s with a hard ‘G’ too, godamnit) is fucken awesome.
Some sites allow spaces in their passwords.
SPACES IN THEIR PASSWORDS!!!
Its keepass, only keepass, and always keepass, you heathen >:)
(Encrypted on Dropbox of course, cause I am also a heathen)
If you ever, EVER, have a space at the end of you password I will DOX you, find where you live, come over and have a lovely pot of tea while we discuss agriculture and how much we love our families.
So don’t. Make. Me. Do it.
It is still massively annoying to have a browser feature be grabbed by a website.
Some of the technical aspects are over my head, but I’m completely sympathetic. It has been simply maddening to see how over the years as our computer and network and speeds have gotten exponentially faster that web pages still take about the same time to load as they did 15 years ago. All that great computing potential has been wasted loading up websites with kruft. I’m not sympathetic to arguments that we get more utility and more features, because that ignores the fact that 99% of what I need from websites (information, NOT branding) could just as easily be communicated in plain text.
Taking even the smallest step to control your own browsing experience, such as using ghostery or NoScript or turning of flash or cookies shouldn’t suddenly break half the web.
I’m not sure though how he managed to rant about the broken web without once mentioning flash.
