Ask Lemmy

Hamburger menus with the button in the top left corner. Bro, my thumb is down here in the bottom right corner. I already try to buy smaller phones and it's still almost impossible to use these menus. Would it be so hard to at least put them on the right side?

Large empty margins, especially when the content in the middle doesn't fit due to a lack of space

Light font colors on light backgrounds are a terrible trend. The idea of text is to READ it.

Really appreciate these responses as an a11y and UX focused frontend SWE

Basically the entire UI and content feels built around / optimized to serve ads. Which means everything sucks

Forced dark mode.

White font on a black background absolutely kills my eyes and I'll enable light mode wherever possible, but some sites force dark mode for the UI with no option to switch to light mode. I can read a paragraph and I'll still see that same paragraph in my vision for several minutes, even if I'm looking away from my monitor.

Not using HTML that's rendered server-side for everything.

Popups demanding I join newsletters, engage in chats, review your site, etc. Make that stuff available on the menu and I'll have no problem with it. Shove it in my face as I'm loading your site and I'll likely just close it straight away. Some pages are just one popup after another with absolutely no thought given to the UX. The users want your content, not your popups. And what if after using your site for a bit I actually do decide to join the newsletter when the only reference to it is the popup that I already dismissed?

Divs sliding into position as I scroll through the page annoy me intensely. When I see a page doing that I'll autorepeat PageDown to the end, then go back to the top. What is even more irritating and page-close-worthy is when those divs still insist on sliding into position after they've already done that.

Sound effects. Just NO NO NO NO NO. Sound effects are not the answer. Sound effects are the question. The answer is NO. I can see the point of sound effects in a chat, IF AND ONLY IF YOUR PAGE DOESN'T CURRENTLY HAVE FOCUS. But please don't bleep ping bing and bong every time someone presses Return. And test your sfx on decent speaker systems, not all of use have tinny 1" speakers; I have a decent hifi woofer and some of those bass drops really shake my room and I can only imagine that they were tested on crappy little speakers.

Spamming my screen with ads, obviously. You can have a single static ad that doesn't bounce around the screen, demand I punch some stupid monkey, vibrate, flash etc. And of course that ad has to be legit. There are still far too many ads that lead to scams and other malware. Stack Exchange is one of the few pages that get on my whitelist because of their advertising policy.

Give new fads time to settle down before you spam your site with the latest whizz bang animation. Yeah sorry that means you aren't going to be able to play with all the new toys. But your users will thank you. If you must use the latest CSS tricks then use it judiciously on one or two gadgets instead of applying it to "*".

And of course as you've already alluded make sure you use standard user interface gadgets correctly. Checkboxes are checkboxes and radiobuttons are radiobuttons. They are not the same as each other. They are also on/off. If you need tristate or more then you need something else.

Mouse-over menus that don't stay open to be able to navigate to the other end of that menu.