I think this is a sub-category of a wider problem which permeates web/software/app design and that's hubris. Most sites/programs/apps are designed with the assumption that they're way more important than they really are. It's like the little kid who demands their parents immediate attention/action over the slightest thing which they consider hugely important. And while it's understandable (maybe even endearing) with a small child it's just annoying when it's a web site/piece of software made (presumably) by intelligent adults.
Obviously there are exceptions but start by assuming I don't want you to change my default programs/subscribe to your newsletter/have your program or website pop-up or play sounds without asking/take a tour of your new features/flash text on my screen/create multiple non-hidden folders in the root of my home folder/install multiple services that need to be running constantly/receive marketing push notifications or texts/watch unskippable cut-scenes in games etc...
I fear the wider, wider problem is that hubris pays off, it's not economically optimal for most sites to show this humility you'd like to see. Someone decided it's worth it to annoy us grumpy nerds in order to sell fractionally more stuff to the statistically average user.
I don't think apps/sites are getting worse about this, it's that they're getting better at optimizing for users who aren't me. It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products).
(To be clear this isn't meant as derision of the 'statistically average user', it's perfectly justified that not everything is built to suit me, the protagonist of reality.)
I reject this notion based on close to 20 years of consistent observation of and participation in the web development industry. In that time I can count on one finger the number of times I've seen credible AB tests even attempted, and even then the initiative was abandoned because none of the client's staff were interested in interpreting the results of their testing. All of that is to say in nearly two decades of building websites I've never even heard of a client attempting to make results-oriented decisions based on actual data about how their website looked or performed. 100% of the drivers of obnoxious website behavior that I have personally witnessed have been overeager marketing department heads and designers refusing to come to terms with the limitations of the medium.
You're right there are obviously economic incentives driving this but I think (in general) the things that annoy us grumpy nerds also annoy everyone else - we just might be more conscious about what specifically is going on. Over the years I have helped out many non-tech savvy relatives/colleagues/friends and things like changing program defaults, changing home pages, browser desktop (or mobile push) notifications, too frequent business newsletters, etc have been a common source of rage and stress - made worse because the person doesn't always know how to stop the problem. In fact, we're shielded from some issues - imagine how bad it is for users without adblockers.
But you're right - there's no easy way to deliver negative feedback for these negative practices - so they will presumably continue where commercially it's profitable (and not prohibited). I can hardly boycott every company/product which displayed arrogant behaviour - I'd have to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle by the end of the year.
> It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products).
This. As every day goes by, more and more software becomes deeply annoying to use because of this. This is mostly a problem with Windows and mobile, fortunately, but is increasingly an issue with Linux.
Somebody needs to write an updated Big Red Fez because modern devs clearly don't understand the idea. 20 years ago the problem was sites didn't have a banana; the problem now is sites are nothing but bananas. But the impact is the same.
Everyone seeks attention... in some form. That's ultimately the point of communication. It is to change the views of others, or to challenge, or to ask for answers.
Communication is a means of influence.
I don't think it is hubris. It isn't that they assume greater importance. To assume means to have considered. Instead, I think they either don't think so consciously OR they exert actions that are meant to derive more power/status/etc.
I agree with this point and often see in the language used. Most companies seem to think we are all on the same page but we aren't.
I bought a tool recently and it came with a registration card. All I had to do was scan it. The problem was scanning it took me to what looked like an error message but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was search page. I have no idea.
Both Reddit and Twitter show a fake notification indicating some activity directed at you like an @mention or a reply but are actually just a trick to get you to open the notifications tab/popover.
Stopped using Twitter and reddit the second I realised this. Infuriating subterfuge just to put some inflated engagement metric in their decks.
Twitter's infuriating thing is that it flashes up "7 notifications" when you first load the page, then hides it for a few minutes, then shows it again. This is so tricksy. I assume they are trying to reward you for staying on the site.
Proxomitron, the original web filtering proxy from 2 decades ago, already had a "Freeze GIF animation" filter, along with "Blink to Bold" and "Flash animation killer", among others. It was clear back then that a lot of users already hated this stuff. Now we have even more annoying CSS and JS animations which are a lot more difficult to block effectively.
On the other hand, I find HDD activity lights and a status monitor displayed in the corner of the screen to not be distracting, so I think context has a lot to do with it --- something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.
> something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.
Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).
Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.
> and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).
This affected me about 5 minutes ago so this drew my attention - I find this more directly now. Fans had increased, but I've plenty of cores so nothing else was slow. I then checked and found some linting process that I'd killed was still running in the background using up a couple of cores.
I do kind of miss things like dialup tones and knowing how things had gone wrong by sound. I wonder if there's other fun ideas around that. I'm picturing either a ferrofluid or textured display that becomes more grumbly as my computer works harder. I can't hear disks thrashing now we're on solid state but big steady waves of water vs turbulent waves feels like a good analogy.
Oh man, that's quite a nostalgia-trip right there. Setting up custom rules/transformation was probably one of the main things that steered me into a software-development career, along with client-side scripts for Starseige:Tribes. Apart from advertisement/privacy stuff, I remember using it to customize and streamline the appearance of web-forums I often visited. (e.g. TribalWar and AntiOnline.)
I can’t use a website with flashing anything, and especially so when I’m writing. Then I realized the CMS I make was doing this with a “saving draft / draft saved” notice above the content area and couldn’t believe I’d done this very thing without realizing how annoying it was.
I still wanted to display the info, so I tried a few different techniques and ended up settling on a slow (~2-second) fade in and fade out. The result, at least for me and the people I’ve asked to try it out, is that goes completely unnoticed unless you’re looking for it, which is what I wanted initially but hadn’t taken the time to try it myself beyond ensuring the notice appeared and disappeared at the appropriate times.
Design is about communication. Watch out for cases where what you want to communicate as a designer is not the same as what you should communicate.
I believe almost every “Saving…” indicator is an instance of that discrepancy.
They were appropriate back when on-the-fly saving was a fresh UX revolution, but today they’re nothing but self serving: us weathered designers, who grew up when the floppy disk icon actually represented the real thing, bragging about how cool our app is—it saves your draft on the fly! No need to press buttons, can you imagine?
Nowadays, as devices are constantly connected, latency is low, and constant saving has become the dominant and intuitive behavior, what the user needs to know is not that stuff’s constantly being saved; what the user needs to know is the extraordinary situation where you fail to save it.
This, if I may be so bold, is what you should be communicating—and if you ask me how, I might suggest a single, completely unchanging line of text informing the user that their draft is being constantly saved (though ask yourself if even that is required; it might not be if you are dealing with digital natives) and an obvious, flow-interrupting error state when that doesn’t work as intended.
I'd disagree personally, but only because I recently found out the hard way that a wordpress plugin I use doesn't have autosave. It's not as universal as one would think.
I mostly agree that the app should only be communicating when exceptional things happen (like failing to save the draft), and my solution of an unnoticeable (but discoverable) status message is meant to give confidence to the users who aren’t very technical and consciously wonder if their work is being saved, which describes much of my target market. The messaging also differentiates these areas from the parts of the app where there’s no concept of a draft and so where auto saving doesn’t happen.
How about the case where the network is slow, so the save operation hasn't failed yet, but it will be interrupted before completing if the user closes the webpage?
Maybe instead of saying "saved" to users of your app you need to say them "NOT SAVED" in big red letters? Draft saved regularly is an expected behavior, it is futile to notify people about it. If they wouldn't annoyed by it, they would stop noticing it, it is how human mind works, it doesn't notice predictable patterns.
From the other hand if draft was not saved, it is a rare case when something went wrong, and users want to know about it.
The "draft saved" complaint sounds very weird to me, especially as I once had to implement a similar feature in an editor.
When editing, one needs to convey to users when it's safe to close the app without a risk of data loss. You might want to tell users that connectivity is down and stuff can't sync right now, but "draft saved" also confers some psychological safety that everything is OK. That I don't need to wonder about the state of my editing. I can safely leave and return.
There are ways to make that flash more or less. There are even basic ways regular editors do this by visually including a star at the end of a filename. But it will still need to display somehow if it's an environment where you're not hitting ctrl+s manually.
Not having some indication is worse than it flashing.
If someone asked me that flashing question, I would also say they are annoying and would probably stop using the site, HOWEVER, I would not have considered this, or other similar status indicators related to my work, that toggle automatically to be part of the problem.
As a Substack writer, I find it very distracting. Part of the reason is that when my eyes are looking at the body text, the motion happens in my upper peripheral vision. That's also where tab heading notifications are (eg. an incoming Google Hangouts message). So as I write I keep subconsciously looking up to see what's happened, only to find it's just another "draft saved".
> Not having some indication is worse than it flashing.
I figure it's more that there's no one-size-fits-all thing. "Normally", that isn't a problem, because you just switch to another program that suits your preferences/takes good care of your brainworms. It just becomes frustrating when companies tie their services to uncustomizable programs (like for instance a website) narrowly designed for their archetypical user persona.
... but beyond that there has to be a better way to do this?? Surely this particular thing has been designed to death a million times. I think with Google Docs, I get to assume everything is saved all the time, so this is the default state that doesn't need to take up space on the screen. In the risky situation where I alt-f4 before the save call returned success or whatever, I get the javascript popup telling me stuff wasn't saved and I can cancel and wait a few seconds. In the other risky situation where the save call just keeps failing for a prolonged amount of time (because my wifi died, usually), I think it says that somewhere in the UI, and it seems like a good enough justification to grab attention to me.
In most cases, it's better to bring attention to when something is not normal and/or have a faded indicator. That indicator matters because different programs have different conventions about how stuff gets saved, and you want users to not second guess your conventions.
It's perfectly OK to add a star char the moment the user starts typing and removing it once they save. For many who are easily distracted, it's horrible if something like "saving draft...." appears and disappears every couple of seconds.
If the network is down or syncing fails for other reasons, display a warning, preferably in red so the user notices. But don't spam if everything is going fine.
Arguably you could hide the info under a button or an actionable item. If the main use case is informing whether the page/app can be closed, letting the user check before closing would do the trick (and potentially force save at that timing if sync was pending).
For corporate products, it's easy to see why this would happen so often; there are a hundred tacky people with no sense of taste for every one person with a strongly developed sense of taste. The people with taste have finite political capital in their organization, and they aren't going to spend it all fighting the constant stream of tacky crap.
The only way around this is to find a tasteful design czar and invest them with a huge amount of political capital. Steve Jobs held this role when he was alive. It's rare, unfortunately, that arrangements like this emerge.
Not just websites - the whole desktop is infected - bouncing dock icons, slack notifications, etc. You need to opt out of all of it to get a sane place to work. Also, like most other people who will be commenting here, I'll suggest using ublock origin and not adblock.
I've really been disappointed with gnome on this, not only is it full of difficult to disable annoying notifications, they appear on top of and cover part of the screen. Yet at the same time it has little to no affordance for unobtrusive non-disruptive ones like a mail or chat tray icon that changes color when you have unread messages.
A lot has been said about enshittification, but free software desktop environments shouldn't have any profit motive to abuse their users in this way. I've wondered if it's a case of second-hand enshitiffication: commercial products like windows adopt abusive patterns because the user is the product, then free software cargo cults it because they think if the big players do it that it must have value/been user tested/etc.
Recently, you also have free software LARPing big companies by adding telemetry to FLOSS, because asking users for feedback (or reading the damn issue tracker) isn't professional enough anymore - everyone in the big leagues is Data Driven™.
Er, did I say issue tracker? That's quickly becoming a thing of the past - the newest trend seems to be, "we can't help you here, join our community Discord instead".
I think you’re right on the money- gnome is trying to make the desktop environment more familiar to new users so they’re implementing poor design choices that Microsoft, Apple, et al. have made.
> I've really been disappointed with gnome on this
I personally can't stand Gnome in a million different ways, but that you can't actually customize it sufficiently is really the core reason why I refuse to use it.
Readit News
Obviously there are exceptions but start by assuming I don't want you to change my default programs/subscribe to your newsletter/have your program or website pop-up or play sounds without asking/take a tour of your new features/flash text on my screen/create multiple non-hidden folders in the root of my home folder/install multiple services that need to be running constantly/receive marketing push notifications or texts/watch unskippable cut-scenes in games etc...
I don't think apps/sites are getting worse about this, it's that they're getting better at optimizing for users who aren't me. It's probably just deeply frustrating/alienating to have to use products that you're not the target audience for (and that's increasingly almost all products).
(To be clear this isn't meant as derision of the 'statistically average user', it's perfectly justified that not everything is built to suit me, the protagonist of reality.)
But you're right - there's no easy way to deliver negative feedback for these negative practices - so they will presumably continue where commercially it's profitable (and not prohibited). I can hardly boycott every company/product which displayed arrogant behaviour - I'd have to live a hunter gatherer lifestyle by the end of the year.
This. As every day goes by, more and more software becomes deeply annoying to use because of this. This is mostly a problem with Windows and mobile, fortunately, but is increasingly an issue with Linux.
Communication is a means of influence.
I don't think it is hubris. It isn't that they assume greater importance. To assume means to have considered. Instead, I think they either don't think so consciously OR they exert actions that are meant to derive more power/status/etc.
But not only that. Or even mostly that. In my experience, it's primarily a means of cooperation.
Except when it comes to commerce, but most modern commerce is inherently manipulative in nature.
I bought a tool recently and it came with a registration card. All I had to do was scan it. The problem was scanning it took me to what looked like an error message but maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was search page. I have no idea.
The sites who don't do those things don't get the sale, whether that sale is email addresses, new products or more engagement.
It's a sad state of affairs.
Stopped using Twitter and reddit the second I realised this. Infuriating subterfuge just to put some inflated engagement metric in their decks.
It’s like a furniture shop advertising a “going out of business” sale or a shepherd boy crying wolf twice.
People wise up to this and become more open to alternatives.
Surely, even VCs and investors know not to take DAUs and MAUs and click rates at face value. Who are these companies trying to con?
On the other hand, I find HDD activity lights and a status monitor displayed in the corner of the screen to not be distracting, so I think context has a lot to do with it --- something that is trying to get your attention unnecessarily, vs. something that is changing but not hard to ignore.
Also, signal vs. noise. The physical blinkenlights on your computer and the status monitors correlate to a signal that is occasionally useful, rarely if never of negative utility, and is simple enough to eventually be processed "in the background". At worst, your brain just filters it out; at best, you gain a subconscious awareness / "feel" for the state of your machine (though I found this used to work much better with the noise made by HDDs, and back when fan noise was more directly correlated with system load).
Also, predictability. Aforementioned indicators have very little variability. It's just a time series signal. You quickly learn that it will just keep flashing or scrolling continuously - it won't suddenly start changing colors or shapes, nor will it render words you have to read. This, I believe, is also critical for the ability to offload paying attention to such indicators to your unconscious. In contrast, most of those web flashing annoyances are to a large or small degree unpredictable - they vary from site to site, they vary within a site, and you rarely spend enough time with them to learn to trust they won't surprise you.
This affected me about 5 minutes ago so this drew my attention - I find this more directly now. Fans had increased, but I've plenty of cores so nothing else was slow. I then checked and found some linting process that I'd killed was still running in the background using up a couple of cores.
I do kind of miss things like dialup tones and knowing how things had gone wrong by sound. I wonder if there's other fun ideas around that. I'm picturing either a ferrofluid or textured display that becomes more grumbly as my computer works harder. I can't hear disks thrashing now we're on solid state but big steady waves of water vs turbulent waves feels like a good analogy.
Oh man, that's quite a nostalgia-trip right there. Setting up custom rules/transformation was probably one of the main things that steered me into a software-development career, along with client-side scripts for Starseige:Tribes. Apart from advertisement/privacy stuff, I remember using it to customize and streamline the appearance of web-forums I often visited. (e.g. TribalWar and AntiOnline.)
I find those greatly distracting, personally. HDD activity lights belong on the box itself, not on the screen.
I still wanted to display the info, so I tried a few different techniques and ended up settling on a slow (~2-second) fade in and fade out. The result, at least for me and the people I’ve asked to try it out, is that goes completely unnoticed unless you’re looking for it, which is what I wanted initially but hadn’t taken the time to try it myself beyond ensuring the notice appeared and disappeared at the appropriate times.
I believe almost every “Saving…” indicator is an instance of that discrepancy.
They were appropriate back when on-the-fly saving was a fresh UX revolution, but today they’re nothing but self serving: us weathered designers, who grew up when the floppy disk icon actually represented the real thing, bragging about how cool our app is—it saves your draft on the fly! No need to press buttons, can you imagine?
Nowadays, as devices are constantly connected, latency is low, and constant saving has become the dominant and intuitive behavior, what the user needs to know is not that stuff’s constantly being saved; what the user needs to know is the extraordinary situation where you fail to save it.
This, if I may be so bold, is what you should be communicating—and if you ask me how, I might suggest a single, completely unchanging line of text informing the user that their draft is being constantly saved (though ask yourself if even that is required; it might not be if you are dealing with digital natives) and an obvious, flow-interrupting error state when that doesn’t work as intended.
Deleted Comment
From the other hand if draft was not saved, it is a rare case when something went wrong, and users want to know about it.
When editing, one needs to convey to users when it's safe to close the app without a risk of data loss. You might want to tell users that connectivity is down and stuff can't sync right now, but "draft saved" also confers some psychological safety that everything is OK. That I don't need to wonder about the state of my editing. I can safely leave and return.
There are ways to make that flash more or less. There are even basic ways regular editors do this by visually including a star at the end of a filename. But it will still need to display somehow if it's an environment where you're not hitting ctrl+s manually.
Not having some indication is worse than it flashing.
If someone asked me that flashing question, I would also say they are annoying and would probably stop using the site, HOWEVER, I would not have considered this, or other similar status indicators related to my work, that toggle automatically to be part of the problem.
I figure it's more that there's no one-size-fits-all thing. "Normally", that isn't a problem, because you just switch to another program that suits your preferences/takes good care of your brainworms. It just becomes frustrating when companies tie their services to uncustomizable programs (like for instance a website) narrowly designed for their archetypical user persona.
... but beyond that there has to be a better way to do this?? Surely this particular thing has been designed to death a million times. I think with Google Docs, I get to assume everything is saved all the time, so this is the default state that doesn't need to take up space on the screen. In the risky situation where I alt-f4 before the save call returned success or whatever, I get the javascript popup telling me stuff wasn't saved and I can cancel and wait a few seconds. In the other risky situation where the save call just keeps failing for a prolonged amount of time (because my wifi died, usually), I think it says that somewhere in the UI, and it seems like a good enough justification to grab attention to me.
If the network is down or syncing fails for other reasons, display a warning, preferably in red so the user notices. But don't spam if everything is going fine.
Wouldn't it be better to put up a warning dialog if the user tries to close the app when there's still state to be saved?
uBlock Origin can do this, either by removing an annoying class from an element or by modifying an element's style directly:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Static-filter-syntax#...
Here are a couple of my personal custom rules as example:
The only way around this is to find a tasteful design czar and invest them with a huge amount of political capital. Steve Jobs held this role when he was alive. It's rare, unfortunately, that arrangements like this emerge.
A lot has been said about enshittification, but free software desktop environments shouldn't have any profit motive to abuse their users in this way. I've wondered if it's a case of second-hand enshitiffication: commercial products like windows adopt abusive patterns because the user is the product, then free software cargo cults it because they think if the big players do it that it must have value/been user tested/etc.
Er, did I say issue tracker? That's quickly becoming a thing of the past - the newest trend seems to be, "we can't help you here, join our community Discord instead".
I personally can't stand Gnome in a million different ways, but that you can't actually customize it sufficiently is really the core reason why I refuse to use it.