User Interface Irritations
Yes, I know: Most Web sites are intended
to make money. Okay. But some now common
Web site user interface (UI) practices
have me leaving the site, in particular,
resulting in the Web site producer
(publisher) making from me $0.00 in money
and, really, losing money, reputation,
etc.

Here I hope to help both users and
producers.

(1) Full Screen. It appears that in Web
page design it is common to assume that
the user is looking at the Web page with
the page size at full screen.

Nope. Mostly I don't want one Web page
covering all my screen -- for the relevant
activity, I need to see more than one Web
page on my one screen.

(2) Header Lines. Yes, a Web page
designer wants to start with some lines of
header material. So, there is such
material from my Web browser, more from
the Web site, and maybe more from some
page at that site, and the result is maybe
just 1-2 lines of text left for the
relevant content. I no longer struggle
with that situation and just close the Web
browser instance.

(3) Growing Windows. Apparently it's
possible for Web page code to grow the
size of a window. Please don't do that.
Instead do permit both horizontal and
vertical scroll bars.

(4) Subtle Shades. It can be elegant to
have subtle shades of screen content.
Often that means, I can't read the
content.

(5) There is now an old UI practice: Have
UIs with obscure functions users are to
discover by experience, even experiments.
That practice must lower the use of the
obscure functions.

(6) Old Controls. In the Web pages I
wrote just using HTML and CSS, I noticed
that I had some controls available --
single line text boxes, multi-line text
boxes, check boxes, radio buttons, etc.
So, that's what I used. But as I recall,
some or all of these controls go all the
way back decades As a result, no doubt now
some billions of people understand these
controls right away.

But now it's possible to alter these
controls: So, can change the border of
single line text boxes so that they don't
show at all until a user happens to click
in some hidden locations.

Or the text box can already have content,
say, "Street Address". Sorry, I'd prefer
the "Street Address" hint, title,
instruction to be outside of the box.

Generally any change in the old controls
reduces the number of users who understand
a control from billions down to zero
until, in the sense of (5), they do some
experiments to learn the new controls.

I go to a lot of Web sites, and it is an
irritation to have to learn for each site
a unique variation on the old controls.

(7) Small Fonts. Yes, large fonts can
look unsubtle. But small fonts can
easily be too small to read and are an
irritation.

Generally, just use relatively large
fonts. And pick color combinations that
are easy to read even if not elegant,
subtle, or understated.

(8) Effects of Keys and Scrolling. Please
do not change the function of the up/down
arrow keys, the page up/down keys, or the
mouse scroll wheel.

In particular, on some Web pages, if I
scroll up, then suddenly I get a block of
header material covering the top maybe 20%
of the screen. That is a case of covering
up content I'm trying to read and/or
changing content I'm trying to read --
irritations.

Get a lesson from Google: Their Web page
has mostly just a cartoon and a text box.

There are more cases of irritation: But
there is, really, just one lesson here:
Make the UI easy to use and not
irritating.