Yes, this is horrible UX design and there's absolutely no need for such inflated amounts of padding around everything.
Huge companies are the absolute worst offenders for crap like this. Seriously, have you ever tried using Facebook to manage business pages? It is unbelievably poor.
Google is by far the most hypocritical, however, because their search engine ranks pages lower for UX sins like "cumulative layout shift" while at the same time committing those sins themselves.
(Having said all that, I would not personally expect an online spreadsheet app to look great on "half a 13" screen" on first load.)
Ha. Facebook Page management. I used to work for a 5-person company, and setting up the Facebook page was one of the things that ended up on my plate. We were acquired over two years ago, by a Real Company, with Actual Marketing People.
It’s been my mission to get this damn Facebook page out of my life. I have no business having anything to do with it, especially now. Every few months I manage to wrangle someone from Marketing to take it off my hands, but most of the time it takes me at least half an hour for me to work out how to even grant someone else permission to manage the page. This is AFTER I find the official Facebook help article for this process.
Through a combination of the Marketing person losing interest, and my ineptitude, I think I only managed to actually close this one off a few weeks ago. There’s every chance that in a few months I’ll find out that I didn’t do it properly.
I’m in my late 20s. I understand this generation of social networks. I was a very heavy Facebook user up until a couple of years ago. I’m not some clueless old idiot. This isn’t an operation that Facebook has any incentive to ‘hide away’. I can’t possibly see how this is anything other than egregious incompetence on Meta’s part. They’re simply too big to make…anything, anymore.
> Android is also quite a space waster compared to iOS. It's much less comfortable to use a small Android than a small iOS device.
Now in terms of reading I'm sure you're right, but on small iOS devices the bounding boxes around certain buttons are so unbelievably tight that I even see people who've been using an iPhone mini for years still have to press 4 times to get them to register. Never had that issue with small Androids.
Popups announcing new features should be banished to hell. 99.8% of the time I do not care, I just want to open my fucking document and not have to click "got it" on a bunch of feature announcements.
If I want to learn about new features I'll go to the Help menu.
> If I want to learn about new features I'll go to the Help menu.
No you won’t. There’s nothing wrong with announcing new features, as long as it’s not disruptive and obnoxious, like a pop up. Linear[1] for example adds a small insert at the bottom of the sidebar. It doesn’t take too much space, it’s easy to close, and you can ignore it for as long as you want, it doesn’t prevent you from working. IMO this is the right way to show new features.
At least for the "to the right" part, I think the monotonicity of time has that one covered unless someone invents a time machine to improve metrics in the past.
I like how Windsurf does it, you see a small notification in the status bar, in top-right, saying that a new version is available. After you update, at the same spot is a tiny link to view changelog.
Around 2004 there was an invite only email that... took you straight to inbox once you logged in, not to a landing page with news and weather. Years later, I'm dumbfounded by other Google products like Firebase and GCP which send massive js blobs and marketing pages in the product.
i set my browser zoom to 80% or lower. on a high-DPI screen everything is still perfectly legible and readable. i don't understand the fascination with extra-big-ass fisher-price sized UI elements.
The huge UI elements are a consequence of optimizing for touchscreens.
Mice (and even touchpads) are very precise pointing devices compared to a toddler's chunky fist. Modern UIs are created assuming you'll be using fingers to interact with them. Mice are an afterthought.
I’m pretty sure what happened was all the UI started out big, and then high dpi displays made everything tiny, and eventually UI design caught up and made things legible again.
There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
You're probably young. I can barely see in 100% zoom and going back and forth with reading glasses is very uncomfortable. I spend 90% of my time looking for them. I have an air and a 16 inch Dell. I don't want to lug the Dell around because also, back pain.
Yep. If there’s one thing that Big Tech is doing even remotely better at in 2024, it’s letting the self-interest of the increasingly aging top brass guide the ship into making products that don’t assume that everyone is 20 years old with perfect vision.
It’s one of the few things that Apple is doing well at, but they’re doing really well at it.
Well, yeah. Companies store a lot of information in spreadsheets. CRM, financial info or really anything. People need to access it from their phones when the data is urgently needed.
Extreme levels of padding just means zoom makes thing tinier than they should have to be, its still a problem even if continuing to zoom out and get more on the screen.
Nobody bothers to think about large screen and mouse UX anymore. Everything's optimized for phones and tablets, and I guess that's where 95% of users are anyway.
People have a limit of information they can process at once, which goes higher the more familiar you are with given domain. Previously, having all the buttons visible on main screen was a good thing, because average tech-savvy user had no problem navigating that. But then we made technology accessible to general public, who cannot handle such complexity, therefore we needed to make UIs way simpler.
A little on accessibility too but there’s a line all these companies cross. Designers are not always UX experts. Google hasn’t had any good UX, period.
I just went to StackOverflow, where I'm logged in and don't get the GDPR box. With my browser at 100% zoom, it's over 400 pixels from the top of the page down to the top of the first question's box. Over 100 of those pixels are a banner saying "Welcome back, (username)". Their landing page is absolutely polluted with UI bloat that is far beyond just the GDPR box. The first piece of real content is literally on the bottom half of my laptop screen. Even the ~56px sticky floating header is clearly superfluous; getting back to the top of the page to access those UI elements is far too easy to justify keeping those controls on screen at all times.
I've managed to create an uBlock Origin element hider to hide the DIV with that particular CSS class (or ID?) across all of their sites - hiding it on just 1 site would disappoint because they use so many goddamn domains.
Readit News
Huge companies are the absolute worst offenders for crap like this. Seriously, have you ever tried using Facebook to manage business pages? It is unbelievably poor.
Google is by far the most hypocritical, however, because their search engine ranks pages lower for UX sins like "cumulative layout shift" while at the same time committing those sins themselves.
(Having said all that, I would not personally expect an online spreadsheet app to look great on "half a 13" screen" on first load.)
It’s been my mission to get this damn Facebook page out of my life. I have no business having anything to do with it, especially now. Every few months I manage to wrangle someone from Marketing to take it off my hands, but most of the time it takes me at least half an hour for me to work out how to even grant someone else permission to manage the page. This is AFTER I find the official Facebook help article for this process.
Through a combination of the Marketing person losing interest, and my ineptitude, I think I only managed to actually close this one off a few weeks ago. There’s every chance that in a few months I’ll find out that I didn’t do it properly.
I’m in my late 20s. I understand this generation of social networks. I was a very heavy Facebook user up until a couple of years ago. I’m not some clueless old idiot. This isn’t an operation that Facebook has any incentive to ‘hide away’. I can’t possibly see how this is anything other than egregious incompetence on Meta’s part. They’re simply too big to make…anything, anymore.
Blame it on Kennedy Gmail rollout which started the waste-the-space movement.
Android is also quite a space waster compared to iOS. It's much less comfortable to use a small Android than a small iOS device.
Now in terms of reading I'm sure you're right, but on small iOS devices the bounding boxes around certain buttons are so unbelievably tight that I even see people who've been using an iPhone mini for years still have to press 4 times to get them to register. Never had that issue with small Androids.
If I want to learn about new features I'll go to the Help menu.
No you won’t. There’s nothing wrong with announcing new features, as long as it’s not disruptive and obnoxious, like a pop up. Linear[1] for example adds a small insert at the bottom of the sidebar. It doesn’t take too much space, it’s easy to close, and you can ignore it for as long as you want, it doesn’t prevent you from working. IMO this is the right way to show new features.
[1]: https://linear.app
But then how will the product manager make the chart go up and to the right?
In 2024 it's still like that. Only inbox no news or weather.
I have to admit, I've just closed the tab a few times instead of acquiescing to click "got it".
Mice (and even touchpads) are very precise pointing devices compared to a toddler's chunky fist. Modern UIs are created assuming you'll be using fingers to interact with them. Mice are an afterthought.
There’s no reason why I need 20,000 items on the screen at the same time. Fewer but more legible items are better. I can scroll for more.
It’s one of the few things that Apple is doing well at, but they’re doing really well at it.
from:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/textCo...