The spectrum of flashing element annoyingness is immense. When I took the survey I probably picked one of the two middle options, because I was imagining the constantly-moving video ads you get on some websites, or even worse, the popups that move around the screen. Stuff like the "draft saved" notifications in Gmail gets dropped several layers of visual processing before it hits my consciousness and I couldn't care less about it.
Yeah, this is an interesting one of those "shared human experiences" things. I was agreeing wholeheartedly with the first part, but I've never found stuff like "draft saved" to be a problem - it's usually pretty unobtrusive, and it's keeping me informed of useful program state. It never would have occurred to me to think of flashing banners and "draft saved" to be in the same category of thing.
Likewise. Even though flashy elements on webpages annoy the bejeezus out of me, I had to go check Gmail to figure out what was being talked about here, because I've never even noticed this element's existence. That said, I'm all for optionality and configurability on such things. As a person who's often bothered by stuff in my environment that others find innocuous (or even desirable), I feel for those who can't tolerate this.
In a perfect world, everything would be configurable. Unfortunately, every configuration option costs money, defects, and additional user confusion. Every option must be weighed against both its own individual cost in testing, and its impact on interrelated tests, which increase exponentially as you add interrelated options. Each increases the chances of introducing a defect. And each configuration setting you add increases the difficulty of using you configuration options by both making it harder to find the option you're looking for, and making the overall options experience overwhelming rather than simple.
As usual, everything is tradeoffs. And most users want you to make *their* thing the thing that other things get traded off against -- because what they want is obviously what most people would want, or what's best for your product.
Absolutely. Note that MS-Word always includes an easy-to-use Word Count feature because a professional journalist with 2,500 words to write cares much more about their word count than I ever will.
Back when rocks were squishy and people read magazines, there was a consistent pattern that any word processor that neglected or hid Word Count got a bad review in PC-World, because the (nearly always) guy writing the review was a professional journalist with 2,500 words to write.
I'm glad William Codex wrote this blog post, since I also had no idea a nd I actively believed that you need some animation (AKA "juice") to keep things interesting
I'll make sure there's a 100% juice-free mode for any apps I write in the future, haha
For me the solution that I usually pick to that kind of problem is "move the window so the annoying thing is off the edge of the screen". Then I forget about it until next time.
I'm in the same camp as Scott, I find elements like "draft saved" very distracting. It just straightforwardly feels like an accessibility issue to me - if 1% of your users have a bad experience / cannot use your product because of sensory issues, that is bad and you should go fix that! At least with e.g. colourblindness you can ask someone for help on the rare occasion it poses a problem.
Oh, I definitely agree--if there's a contingent who want to turn it off ideally it would be possible to turn off. The problem is (speaking as a software engineer though not one who ever worked on Gmail in particular) that there are 57,292 little usability/accessibility/quality of life improvements that 1% of the userbase want, and none of them will ever happen because the developers are spending half their time keeping the infrastructure working and the other half migrating off of deprecated dependencies.
A product where every option that 1% of users want is configurable is also a nightmare in several ways:
- There's a combinatorial explosion of ways you could have it configured, so it's not possible to test all of them. This leads to situations where certain combinations of options result in totally broken behavior, that was working at one point but someone made a change and didn't test it under your setup.
(An example from my job - when GDPR was new and we introduced options for which cookies were enabled, the site would crash if you enabled advertising cookies but disabled functional cookies, which no one had thought to test because, why would a user do that?)
- Users won't understand what all the options do and will feel overwhelmed, and will end up in undesirable states. Even the developers and support people will often be confused.
-Options that once made sense often become irrelevant, because the feature being configured has changed enough. Now you have a config option laying around the codebase that no one remembers what it was supposed to do and you can't really figure it out from the code because it's changed so much.
I work on a software product with a lot of configuration options, and we are always trying to have fewer of them. Convincing or forcing all users to switch to the same option and then deleting the option is generally seen as a win.
That has problems of its own. Each setting clutters up the preferences panel or whatever, making other setting marginally harder to find, and it expands the number of combinations of settings that your test matrix should cover.
On this particular issue, there's probably room for a keyhole solution that fine-tunes the feature so it works for both sets of users. For example, they could add some sort of de-bounce feature so the "draft saved" text doesn't get displayed until it's been stable for a second or two.
Same, I was imagining flashing GIFs, pop up ads, or video ads on a non video page. Those things annoy me a lot. But the examples in the post barely register for me.
I guess I'd have to see the rotating rabbis in motion to judge, but the autosave notification doesn't bother me at all.
When I answered the survey, I thought it was about banner ads and the like. I was picturing elements from the first website I coded, back in 1998, which was a hellscape of blinking text, GIF animations and colors that could scar you for life.
When I occasionally have a hand in designing websites today, I consider flashing GIFs and videos that are meant to grab your attention and tear you away from the main content, to be border-line evil. And I put them in an entirely different category of things than helpful, little status markers or signals that update based on the users' own input, or animations that illustrate/explain something.
In fact, I find *lack of feedback* to be a much bigger, and still all too common, annoyance. Not knowing whether my document/draft/progress is saved, for example. Or not knowing that I've timed out, and will lose my entire 2500-word rant to customer service when I click "Submit" … (That may be a feature, not a bug.)
It's interesting to discover how opinions differ. Now that I know some people get this annoyed, I'll probably think more carefully about how to do stuff like that in the future – hiding it more, making it optional, or otherwise getting the best of both worlds.
(As for screenshoting animations and movement for use in a post – not that Scott will ever need that feature again considering this post – Dropbox Capture and Giphy Capture are both good, at least on the Mac. And adding a gif or video to Substack should be as straightforward as adding any other image.)
Yeah, I was one of people who voted "won't use" in the survey, but when I selected that I was thinking in the range of things like Scott's first example at minimum, up to the infamous "punch the monkey" ads of yesteryear. I never even noticed until now that the "Draft Saved" thing existed.
Same here. I had to open up gmail to confirm that it actually changed dynamically. To my eye it is a very subtle indication that the page hasn't crashed. It just feels like a different class of things to animated banner ads which I agree are annoying. The jewish rabbi website (who must be very confused about the surge of traffic they're getting) is just over the line of annoying, but even that is mild.
I agree wholeheartedly. The jewish law thing or popups are incredibly annoying, but I actually like things like the draft saved animation. Makes me feel secure that my browser hasn't crashed or my internet disconnected and just makes the interface feel more snappy and responsive.
It’s funny how personal this is. I don’t mind and actually sort of like the Draft Saved notifications, but it irritates me no end when a website’s title changes in the tabs list. One is something that might be important (if I got an actual message or something), and one is an interface thing when I’m already ignoring the entire interface to write my email
Ublock Origin doesn't have the flashing text problem, and it's generally recommended over AdBlock Plus these days, after some controversy about AdBlock letting some ads through.
+1 on Ublock Origin. It's got a lighter footprint, cleaner and more unobtrusive UI (no flashing elements!), and doesn't have any history of bad behaviour.
More details: Adblock Plus has an "acceptale ads" program. It's supposed to allow "unintrusive" ads. Sounds reasonable. Then, at some point, it started deciding whether an ad is acceptable based not so much on whether it's unintrusive, but whether the advertiser pays the company behind Adblock Plus protection money. uBlock Origin has no such program; the only reason Adblock Plus can pull this off is that it's the best-known ad blocker, and most people don't realize what it's doing. Adblock Plus is developed by a for-profit company, uBlock Origin is community-developed.
At least turn off the acceptable ads thing then; it's on by default, but it can be turned off. (Though ABP's behavior disqualifies them in my mind regardless of whether it's a bit more convenient in some way.)
Ha ha, I can't even imagine using anything but uBlock origin, so my brain just assumed that's what he was talking about, and didn't even notice it was Adblock.
Yeah, Scott, uBlock Origin has been way better than Adblock for... 8 years? Long time. Install it everywhere on your phone and computers, and hate online life a little less.
Once AdBlock Plus sold out (gradually, beginning around 2011) there was a hunt for a successor. It turned out to be uBlock Origin and by 2016 most people (who were aware of the problem) had switched over. uBlock Origin has been the standard recommendation ever since.
I'd like to note: If people are still using LastPass the standard recommendation is to replace it with BitWarden now, for a variety of reasons.
The reason I switched was their Firefox extension was leaking lots of memory. But they also got hacked a few times, once somewhat seriously, and they got bought out by a private equity firm.
The effort to switch password managers is low so there is no reason to put up with this kind of stuff. There are a ton of good alternatives, even native browser managers, but I'm confident that BitWarden is the consensus pick.
Also LastPass has more functionality locked behind a paywall. I used to pay them in the early days but now I get the same stuff with BitWarden for free.
I am considering a password manager (not using one atm, but I'm looking at my options). Thing is, I'm not interested in cloud storage; I want it all local. In that case, LastPass getting hacked is not a problem, right? And if my googling so far hasn't misled me, Bitwarden doesn't offer me that option in a straightforward manner?
EDIT: nvm, I was thinking about KeePass when I read LastPass. That's the one I was looking at.
Any password manager is better than not using one. If you don't want cloud storage, look at KeePass; but really, cloud storage is immensely useful here, to ensure your passwords are synced across devices.
Using a password manager has always seemed to me like putting all your eggs in one basket. Even a good one could get subtly hacked, or stop working just when you needed it.
Using a bad one would be like asking a passing fox to look after your eggs while you left town for a few days.
Bitwarden is open source. If you really want a pure local experience, in theory you could just run the server part in a local docker container. If you want to use it with multiple devices and sync in between them, you don't have to use their own SaaS offering, you can host it yourself at home or on a VPS (although that is kind of of cloud as well, of course, given that "cloud" has evolved to mean basically "data center that I don't own").
Interestingly I switched from LastPass to BitWarden last year without collecting any information from the consensus, just by trying out ~4 alternatives when I was tired of LastPass's interface.
Good to know great minds think alike. (Or is it idiots seldom differ?)
Serious question, don't you see using blocking software as stealing from the very content creators you are using?
As annoying as I find ads, or paying for popsicles, I would never walk into a grocery store and steal a popsicle because I find it annoying to need to pay.
Just because stealing is technologically easy doesn't mean it is right. And just to be clear I hate advertising. If I was dictator part of the platform of my economic policy would be shirking the amount of ads people see by ~90%. But I am not dictator.
Stealing a physical good, and declining to exchange data with server B every time I exchange data with server A, are not the same. The presence of instructions in the HTML provided by server A that would direct a naive browser to engage in such an exchange with server B does not constitute a contract to obey those instructions. The supposition that the entity operating server A may depend on a certain number of naive browsers obeying those instructions to continue to operate is immaterial. You might as well call it theft to order off the dollar menu at a fast food restaurant without purchasing a heavily marked-up soft drink; perhaps the business model and the continued existence of the restaurant depend on people purchasing the profitable sugar water along with the loss-leader miniburgers, but a business plan that relies on certain customer behavior does not impose a moral duty on customers to behave that way. Actual theft, leaving someone else with less because you took it from them without compensation or consent, is a violation of the implicit contract of the marketplace, in addition to being prohibited by law and the moral intuition of the vast majority of people. Comparing ad blocking to theft is preposterous.
I don't even find ads themselves all that annoying. I ad block because I fundamentally object to the premise that I should feel obligated to, say, call up the window repair shop being advertised at the park and tell them that I'm in this park at this time and I saw their advertisement, even though I have no interest in their services. I especially object to the premise that choosing not to do so is stealing from the park because the park derives revenue from the shop in exchange for the advertisement. Having my browser engage in this behavior on my behalf behind the scenes doesn't make it any less intrusive.
Look I am very down on advertising. But I just disagree that.
>Stealing a physical good, and declining to exchange data with server B every time I exchange data with server A, are not the same.
Sure they are the same in the relevant moral way we are discussing.
We as a society have norms/expectations that people posting things online and run ads are trying to pay for their content with your attention to the ads.
If I am running a charity race for cancer, and as part of the race everyone need to wear a jersey with 15 sponsors on them, you are an asshole if you cover up all the sponsors with tape. End of story.
If you want the content that X website is offering, take the content on the terms the website is offering. If you don't like those terms, don't steal from them, but just abstain, like a big boy with some self respect.
> We as a society have norms/expectations that people posting things online and run ads are trying to pay for their content with your attention to the ads.
Remove the word "online". Advertising wasn't born with the World Wide Web. When newsprint media ran ads, did you consider it theft to ignore the full-page advertising spread when flipping through to page A29? When watching broadcast television, did you never get up for a bathroom break or a snack during commercials? Did you tell your children to be big boys if they didn't pay rapt attention to the mattress store jingle? After all, you're receiving content that's being paid for with your attention! When visiting a movie theater, do you always make sure to arrive twenty minutes early so that you can catch all of the pre-show cinema advertising? Those local businesses keep the magic of the theater alive! How could you respect yourself if you didn't?
If you did in fact behave in the above manner, then I have to respect you for your devotion to your principles; though I hope we can at least agree that this would not be what most of our society considers normal.
If not, what is it about being online that changes the relevant moral principles for you?
I'll highlight one thing that's different about online advertising: in print and broadcast media, the advertisement is delivered along with the content. Nothing is asked of the consumer other than to consume the content as it's served up. When online advertising is done this way, I don't block it. The old SSC site had some sidebar banners served from the SSC server; I think one of them was for something called Beeminder? I won't say I paid conscious attention to them as intentional compensation for the content Scott was providing me with, but I didn't take any steps to not-notice them. (Though it still wouldn't have been theft if I did, any more than it would be theft to discard the full-page advertising spread in a newspaper without reading it. Once the content is in my hands, physical or virtual, I have the right to read or not read it how I wish.)
But the bulk of online advertising is not done like this. The bulk of online advertising is the equivalent of asking me to call up the advertising company and tell them when and where I saw their advertisement. We as a society do not have a norm that such requests must be honored. A restaurant is free to put out a sign reminding its patrons to leave a five-star review on Yelp, and patrons are just as free to decline to do so, and I doubt you would find very many people who would consider that morally equivalent to theft.
This isn't about how down I am on advertising, or even on internet surveillance (though, yeah, I'm down on both). This is about what businesses should and should not be allowed to demand of their patrons. Pay for what you take or damage: yes. Conduct yourself appropriately while on premises: yes. Compelled speech to third parties: no.
(Of course, if you enter into an explicit contract with terms that compel your speech, yeah, abide by the terms of the contract or don't agree in the first place. But a browser fetching a webpage doesn't establish a contract, at least in the moral sense. IANAL but I hope it doesn't in a legal sense either—yes yes "terms and conditions" but those are generally unenforceable in the interesting cases, as I understand it.)
This position implies that prospective advertisers, collectively, have a moral right to shut down any content provider, by simply refusing to bid for that site's ad space. I don't think that such a framework leads to the sort of society I prefer to live in.
Websites that I cannot/will not use clutter up my search results and crowd out competition. If a company doesn't offer some content, a likely alternative is that some other company will. Or even a volunteer. In a very real sense, companies are (at least sometimes) taking something away from me by putting up a webpage. So what about the imaginary contract in *my* head that says they shall not do that?
The problem is not even advertising per se, it is that most advertisements are actually scams. And many others slow web sites down to the point that it is essentially impossible to use many websites on mobile devices, even if they nominally have a mobile version. Many people would literally not be able to use the internet at all without an ad blocker.
Perhaps the people who program all these sites to flash hate their jobs and don't want to do them, and also know that there's no disincentive for them to spite their employers by making the web pages awful.
Yeah, I didn't think of that. At the current rate of things in order for a website team lead to be able to tell anyone is working, he will have to open a browser and instantly die of epilepsy.
FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that programmers are unilaterally doing this. I just meant that I can see how there actually is non-zero incentive for the people who *do* make such design decisions to make the change more noticeable in a way that draws attention to their project or contribution.
That's a common problem in video game design, where an often used feature that's ostensibly meant to be unobtrusive fluff instead takes up much more time and space than reasonable, without an option to skip it. Think those Hearthstone pack opening animations.
Speaking as someone who works on UI for a living, UI design is just difficult; even in the best of cases.
There's just a ton of conflicting priorities: it needs draw people's eyes to interactive bits, and indicate the current state of what's going on, and also look visually appealing, and meet business needs (which often conflict with what the user wants - is it surprising that the adblock extension has a 'flashing' donate button?), and needs to be "accessible", which is its own laundry list of eyes to cross and tees to dot.
You're never going to please everyone: If they removed the "Draft Saved" indication, there'd be people asking where the button to save a draft is (not knowing it autosaves).
The 'obvious' answer is "make it an option", and in many cases that's a good choice, but that adds complexity to the UI, and that's more work and options are exponential in complexity: if there are five on/off options, you now have thirty two different combination behaviors that you need to test, so you have to be careful what functionality becomes optional.
There are several things going on here, at least for the "draft saved" style elements. One part is what NormalAnomaly said about "flashing elements" being a concept the covers a lot of ground. Almost everyone finds things like the switching Rabbis at least a little bit annoying, but the "draft saved" type elements are much smaller and less obtrusive. The people who are seriously bothered by the latter are probably relatively few in percentage terms despite being many millions of people in absolute terms, making them easy for dev teams to overlook.
Another is that these elements actually do convey information. And the people working on the product are going to be a lot more interested in when and whether a draft gets saved than ordinary users are. So they'll tend to see them as useful status indicators rather than a random distracting blinky thing.
A lot of these things have been around for a while and used to behave differently, but other stuff has changed so the same design for the element has a different effect. The draft saved status label in Gmail used to change slowly and less frequently, so it wasn't particularly blinky, and draft saved were infrequent enough that it was more useful to have a signal of when it's safe to close the window without losing the last several words you wrote. But as connections have gotten faster, draft saves have become more or less instantaneous most of the time and Google has configured it to try to save more often, so the same behavior of updating the label in real time comes off as blinky. What's probably warranted is either to hide the label by default (as it has lost most of its utility) or at least de-bounce it a bit, either by hiding it while you're actively typing and only showing it when you've paused for a second or two, or by leaving the status as "saving draft" until it's been saved with no further updates for a second or two. Knowing how these products tend to be run, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a task in the backlog to do this, and it would be relatively simple to implement, but it isn't seen as a priority and never floats high enough in the task backlog for it to actually get done.
This is starting to remind me of that video of the woman crying while a man puts all of the blocks through the same hole in the bucket lid.
I do all of my longest insightful writing in the substack comment field which doesn't autosave. If it gets long I ctrl-a ctrl-c it if I get called away (before leaving the browser tab). I'm also on mobile right now as we speak, with a bluetooth keyboard or sometimes talk to text. I haven't written a work email that was worth autosaving in at least ten years. if I'm going to write anything important i do it in sublime text. When I write these comments I mostly don't even look at the screen while I type, and only proofread at the end. I say all of this autobiographical text-entry information to conclude that as a percentage of users I must be in some tiny fraction of a percent that no UI designer could ever possibly care about.
I just got back from a long weekend in the Scottish Highlands, and my phone was basically unusable for most of that time even when I supposedly had signal. Even for some apps which could in principle have done all the work I needed locally. Please, I implore you, think of your users with slow or intermittent connections.
My current team at my current employer does. I'm currently involved in design discussions on how to improve one particular aspect of user experience for desktop and fast-mobile users without breaking the experience for slow-mobile users. For this particular feature, CPU usage is more of a concern than bandwidth, but bandwidth constraints (not just for "phone in the Scottish Highlands" use cases, but sometimes also for desktop usage in countries/regions with bad infrastructure) have also been a major concern on other features/products I've worked on at the same company.
Other companies I've worked at have been more sanguine about such things, sadly. Sometimes because it's purely a desktop product targeted at a user base with good infrastructure access (e.g. large-company corporate IT tools), and sometimes because of a strategic decision to focus just on users with decent connections.
for google etc, I think these UI elements are designed as "heartbeat", letting users know the site is live. for the large banners, it just might be aestethic - but low status aesthetics.
If you remember the start of personal websites, flashing blinking elements were RAD. It's something that appeals strongly to a subsection of the population that also does not go on ACX, like the olden ones and the children, who either delight in sensory overload, or need a kind of feedback when inteacting with technology.
Which is itself an annoying UI element: Things which are supposed to be there as heartbeats, to show that the site is live, but are actually some sort of animated image, or blinking tag implemented in the browser, or other thing which wouldn't actually stop if the site wasn't live any more.
The programmers don’t design and release the websites themselves, stuck in a cubicle, with no input from the CEO, marketing or sales etc. the design comes from the top and nothing is released to production without executive agreement.
But why take it out on the customers? The only time I hated my employer enough to want to spite them, I named a bunch of their new servers after Icelandic volcanoes, such as fagradalsfjall and hromundartindur. (I drew the line at accented letters, as that would have been too much of a giveaway, and Unicode was less supported back then.)
In case anyone is as suspicious as I, Hromundartindur is an actual Icelandic volcano, as confirmed by a one-sentence-long Wikipedia entry that appears to exist only for the sake of those needing confirmation that Hromundartindur is an actual Icelandic volcano.
I imagine that most people who answered your survey were not at all imagining a single text element changing to indicate status, and were instead imagining annoying flashing banner ads, like you mentioned at the start of the post.
Along the same lines as the "just use protonmail" gmail support comments, I will throw in a recommendation for uBlock Origin over Adblock Plus. Mostly due to the "acceptable ads" fiasco, but your screenshot of the ABP interface also looks covered in, well, ads, to upgrade and share on social media and install it on all your devices. The UBO interface is mostly buttons to block things in various ways.
(Copying over all your custom filters should be straightforward)
I think on the survey, people may consider flashing elements to be things like banner ads or newsletter sign ups, so that may skew numbers. At least, I wouldn't consider the Saving Draft stuff to be what the question was asking about.
On a side note, consider using uBlock Origin instead, it has no flashing and doesn't have the controversies that Adblock does.
Edit: Ha, looks like everyone has the same thought.
If you're interested in some of what is known about causal effects of ads on websites, I cover a lot of material in my banner-ad page: https://gwern.net/ad
For the most part, I never even notice this kind of stuff. I had no idea about the flashing Google drafts message, even though I use GMail for both work and personal use. On the other hand, the alternating rabbi photos would probably annoy me.
One note: you're using AdBlock Plus instead of uBlock Origin and should stop that. ABP in 2016 started allowing certain ads and is more resource intensive while having fewer features. uBO is also open source.
I don't know if design is getting worse, but I've noticed an increase in my "wow, you are doing something so annoying I literally don't want to use your site" reactions these days.
It's gotten to the point where I'll open the dev console and delete/hide the offending element rather than put up with it.
I've been doing that for years now. I'm up to about 400 lines of CSS in Stylish and around 20,000 user rules in UBlock Origin, and I still add at least 5-10 per day.
Sadly I haven't found a solution for 'unsticking' elements without hiding them on mobile, which makes Substack infuriating to use.
The extension ekill is handy for this. It's useful if you have a visual element you want to remove, but don't want to create an Adblock rule for it. It's similar to xkill for X11. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ekill/
The Brave browser can also be configured to automatically block GDRP cookie consent pop-ups, which I find indespensible when traveling in Europe.
While UBlock origin is certainly the ultimate solution for those who want to control everything, Brave does a good job of blocking 99 percent of what I want blocked without breaking most web sites using a very simple interface (shields up/down with blocking standard/aggressive/disabled) and community supported block lists.
There is a Brave rewards program you can use to get "paid" to see ads via BATs (basic attention tokens), but you can completely disable it (which I do, the value I place on my basic attention vastly exceeds what any sane advertiser would want to pay).
The Brave browser can also be configured to automatically block GDPR cookie consent pop-ups, which I find indespensible when traveling in Europe.
While UBlock origin is certainly the ultimate solution for those who want to control everything, Brave does a good job of blocking 99 percent of what I want blocked without breaking most web sites using a very simple interface (shields up/down with blocking standard/aggressive/disabled) and community supported block lists.
There is a Brave rewards program you can use to get "paid" to see ads via BATs (basic attention tokens), but you can completely disable it (which I do, the value I place on my basic attention vastly exceeds what any sane advertiser would want to pay).
Pretty sure I said the flashing mildly annoyed me, but I was very much thinking of the Jewish Rabbis. The Draft Saved indicator is so small, and practically the same color as the background, that it doesn't bother me. And I had to open Adblock to see it was doing that, I tune that part of the board out entirely. (Granted, that means whatever it's supposed to be doing, it isn't doing it.)
Thinking about it, I think videogames with loading screens still benefit from changing the text on them; if nothing else it tells you the thing hasn't frozen. So there are situational exceptions.
Perhaps the idea is that when you’re trying to do one thing, there shouldn’t be anything distracting you from it, but when you’re just waiting and watching, you actively want it to do something to show that it’s working.
Those things drive me nuts. If there is something moving on the page, I can't read the text. Luckily, most browsers support reader mode which really helps. I also keep a post-it note handy to block things.
For technical control freaks, I've been told the answer is Stop the Madness, but I haven't tried it yet.
Does Stop the Madness exist for platforms other than Mac and iOS? I don't see it.
I've been using the Togglific add-on for Firefox on desktop, but it doesn't catch everything and is an "overkill" button for when a page is ridiculous with it. Other than that I mostly have to use uBlock Origin's eyedropper / element zapper tool.
I don't think so. There may be an alternative for the Windows and Android worlds.
Ages ago, Pippin Barr put out his It's As If You Were Doing Work web page. Like work, it's full of meaningless tasks and ridiculous interruptions. Now, it seems every web site is like that.
Flashing ads exist to maximize revenue in basically the way you'd expect. If you get paid per impression and an impression needs 5 seconds then you can get 12 ads in a minute. They also increase attention paid to the ads (which is generally quite low for banner display ads). While you find it annoying the adnets want to make money more than they want to please you. Though I expect they'll decrease as we're increasingly training users to expect to pay for content and as ad rates go down.
Flashing interface elements exist because people expect feedback on their actions. Action and reaction. If you don't give them a reaction then they think nothing happened. There's no permanent way to display it because it has to show up in response to the action. Meaning it has to change in some way on the action and then un-change to wait for new actions. If you have a different solution to this I'd be interested in hearing it. Making it an option takes some extra work but should be doable if there's enough demand people will actually switch over it.
Also, remember the median internet user is not extremely online and generally needs some degree of assistance/guidance. Accessibility and ease of use is almost considered synonymous with good design.
I think the feedback issue is a lot easier than that. As a user, I’m happy to assume everything is working fine unless the app tells me it isn’t. That’s how the problem was generally solved for years.
If I’m on a plane, I need a message from the crew to put an oxygen mask on, I don’t need a "the plane is still flying" announcement every 20 seconds.
More modern planes do have an interface that informs you the plane is still on course continuously on the tv monitors. And even ancient ones have flashing symbols in those lights that tell you about whether you can get up or need to put on your seat belts.
Do you have an example of a site that years ago didn't provide reactions to user actions to confirm something was occurring? I can't think of any even previously.
You were the only one who read the popup about no save button. No one ever does. For normal use, assume no one had any way of learning that and were accordingly frustrated when they wanted to save.
Nobody needs to know that something is being cached to disk every so often. This isn’t in response to the input, the displayed text is the response to user input, it’s something the engineering team has decided and the design team has surfaced. In general software is writing to the disk all the time, which you can measure with some command line utilities. You don’t need to know.
Whether the auto save is working is something that you probably do want continuous feedback on, if you might be drafting something long and don’t want the cognitive burden of worrying it might be lost.
If you’re in an airplane, you always have constant information that the plane is still flying, through the noise and vibration. But think about an elevator - there are occasional elevators that move so slowly and quietly that you worry that it’s stuck. You don’t want that.
There is an obvious way to fix that, if indeed you need constant reassurance that things are working as they are intended to work. Provide no attention-grabbing feedback if auto save is on, and a sudden and continuous banner alert if auto-save capability is lost.
Blinky lights need only be used to alert you that something’s gone wrong, and in fact are more effective in drawing your attention that way. When your status light is constantly blinking, it trains you to ignore state changes in the interface.
a) It is extremely easy to automate an alert that only appears on failure to save to server; it is just as easy as automating an alert when you successfully save to the server.
b) A lot of cursors don’t blink. It’s only a convention that most word processor cursors don’t blink, it’s not universal, and as far as I can tell the main reason a cursor that inserts text blinks is to further distinguish it from a cursor that overwrites text, which is really the original word processor cursor style. But it’s really unnecessary to distinguish them in that way and my favored word processor for long form writing does not have a blinking cursor.
“Flashing interface elements exist because people expect feedback on their actions”
Somehow, mysteriously, people know that drafts are saved in offline email clients without being told they’re saved every 175 milliseconds.
The idea that constant feedback on nonessential background tasks is required because of my 70 year old Aunt Sally is absurd. Aunt Sally expects no feedback whatsoever besides that for her immediate actions. She grew up typing on a keyboard or writing longhand. The only feedback she wants is the letters appearing, and she doesn’t want anything on the screen but the page she’s writing!
By which I mean, you're probably both correct in a way. People didn't need to be told the software on their computer does things in the background because the expectation is that computer software works. People do need and expect feedback on dynamic websites because they're quick to learn those are fundamentally unreliable.
The solution should be to ditch dynamic websites (for standalone programs when complex features and/or real-time responsiveness are needed, and for static websites for when they're not), but that would require correcting the paradigm the entire industry has been built upon, so it will refuse to do so.
I really love that sometimes this blog just covers really specific personal complaints. Very humanizing. Zero irony btw, I also hate flashing elements.
I'm surprised this article doesn't seem to consider the massive selection bias inherent in the ACX survey, and assumes that 16% of survey respondents equates to 16% of all internet users. That seems like complete nonsense to me; people who like to read 10,000 word book reports are not remotely representative of the average person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average person likes those sorts of flashing text elements, and including them gets them more users.
(That doesn't explain why there isn't an option to turn it off though.)
Nothing worse than Facebook's messaging popups which flash to indicate that the other party is typing. It's the visual equivalent of phone music interrupted by "Your call is important to us..."
I'm working on an antidote:
https;//conntects.net
It's not finished yet, but I can safely guarantee that it won't flicker, because I hate writing JavaScript. I'm writing a social networking site in which every url is a genuine page. No infinite scrolling. No gigantic JavaScript framework upload. Instead of a single-page JavaScript app pulling in data, actual server served pages include just enough JavaScript to do whatever dropdown menus, etc. are needed on the page.
If you want to see what's new, you need to refresh the home page.
Social media is frying our brains.
But connecting with geographically dispersed friends is useful...
I don't mind a changing element as long as it is doing something useful. Reporting that my current draft has been saved is useful information.
I recall keeping the lights of my modem within view back in my BBS days. The pattern could tell me if I was connected yet, or still connecting, or if a file transfer was full or half duplex or just stuck. I normally hate flashing elements, but that had enough utility that I would bear it.
Both images showcase Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the preeminent authority in Sephardic Jewish law. One image captures his younger years, while the other depicts him in older age.
Gmail drafts flash only when there is a subject. While drafting an email, leave the subject blank. If you really need it, say to recognize a draft among a list of drafts in progress, start the email body with the subject. Once the draft is done, enter the subject, and send it off.
Ah ha! I was wondering why I'd never noticed this 'draft saved' thing despite high sensitivity to extraneous stimuli. I always write the subject line last--it's the hardest part to compose, after all.
Balking a bit at those claiming 'draft saved' is useful information. Is it actionably useful, such that you'd behave differently (and more optimally) than you would without the message? If not, it seems like 'useful' just means 'technically true' or 'theoretically useful to someone, maybe' here, and as it's not necessarily helpful to be reminded of all true things at all times, that seems like a low bar for a new distracting stimulus to clear.
I want to know whether or not my drafts are being saved, because if they're not, I want to stop typing and fix my internet connection so I don't lose the text I've written and have to start over.
However, there's no need for anything to be flashing about it. We have local storage in browsers now, so you can save the text even if the network goes away. And even if you are only saving to the network, better to have a green "online" indicator, and not make it flash unless something happens to change that.
(Now, in practice I'm like NormalAnomaly up above -- my brain mostly tunes out things that flash predictably like that. And I don't trust software authors to be competent, so I get some value from an indicator that flashes every time something good happens -- which is harder to fuck up -- instead of one that I have to trust will change when something good fails to happen.)
Yes--it's good to know when your heart stops beating, but I think it's lucky and not a coincidence that the mechanism by which we know this isn't constant awareness of the beating of our hearts. And tech has far less excuse for producing human-hostile systems than our own biology does, imo.
Google basically kills your ability to write within five words of your internet connection going down anyway so there's no need to flash a little "all clear on the western front" every ten seconds.
It’s useless as there’s nothing you can do about it, either way. If there’s a browser crash and your draft is saved up until the last ten words when you get back in then that’s great news. Hurray for google engineers.
If I’m worried that my typing won’t be saved, I’ll open a separate file and copy/paste over there occasionally. Knowing that it’s saved is therefore actionable by saving me that effort, and the associated cognitive load of constantly deciding whether I should be doing that.
With respect, some feedback: low-effort personal gripe posts like this[1] lower the signal-to-noise ratio of ACX, and make it less pleasant to browse. I would like to see fewer of them.
[1] Subjectively, I would put the "block you on Twitter" post in the same category, even though it did include include some genuine insight about the incentives of journalists versus regular people.
Also, I realized that it's kind of bogus to complain about a Substack I'm not paying for, so I just (re-)subscribed monthly (not sure I how I was ever unsubscribed).
I realize this is exactly the wrong incentive, but whatever. ;)
I appreciate your advice and subscription, but the Twitter block post is among my top 10% most read/liked, and this post is also shaping up to be, so I think you're outvoted.
To weigh the preference of one reader against those of many others shouldn't imply that posts are optimizing metrics, especially given this post has a specific purpose—to get designers to stop using flashing elements.
Anyway, I agree with Anon’s sentiment but think eliminating annoying flashing is worth it.
Optimising for engagement has not exactly made the internet a better place.
Is it a surprise both posts score highly? They're easy reads, in the sense they took little concentration to read, and on topics anyone can have an opinion about.
(To avoid being purely negative: I'm really enjoying the Asterisk project overall, and hope it keeps going.)
I never understand this use of signal to noise, I mean what is being said is all signal if what it is trying to convey is what it is read as conveying.
I would add the nav bar that appears and disappears based on how you scroll to the list of offenders. Not only does it pop on and grab your attention, but if you scroll down one click too far and have to scroll up one line, it pops on, covering the exact line you were trying to read. I have custom CSS loaded for sites I frequent (including SubStack) to remove that useless element.
This, a thousand times this. I do a similar CSS thing, though I try to de-sticky the bar instead of removing it. Even then, some sites make it hard to find the offending element in the DOM, with other garbage layered on top of it. Drives me up the wall.
This post is current at the top of hacker news, and the top comment is “And as I scroll down and read the article you present me with a popup to subscribe, alienating and enraging me.”
Makes me imagine writing a "every web page is bloated now, please stop"-type post on Substack, the page that is currently chugging on my laptop as I write a text comment.
I remember you originally disabled the default Substack pop-up. Since then they invented a new type of subscription pop-up that shows up as someone starts to scroll down thru a post. Perhaps since you didn't specifically ask them to disable this new one, it's still enabled
Hi Nero. I work at Substack, and I'm helping troubleshoot this issue. Could you tell me what device and application you're using when this happens, and what page it happens on. If you're viewing in a web browser, please could you refresh and try again. Thanks for your help!
If you access the site for the first time (in a new incognito mode window for example) and scroll down for a little while, a substack pop up appears with a subscribe to newsletter with an email entry pop and a continue reading below that in a harder to read color.
I have Scott's level of difficulties with websites or applications that have differently-formated information menus on the same screen at the same time.
For example, if you've ever tried to maintain a website in Wordpress: the "Posts" screen at login will have pop-ups from your plugins that appear in a white box and in a certain formatting (I think it's different for each plug-in), then you've got different kinds of posts in a hyperlink-style menu on a horizontal strip across the screen, then just below that you've got drop-down menus (in a new formating style), then below that, looking like it's a column that lines up with the drop-down menus (but not connected) is a list of your posts. Meanwhile on the left side of the screen you've got a "dashboard" with a verticle list on the left side of screen. Click on any option on the dashboard and another verticle list pops out with slightly smaller fonts and spacing.
All of this is murder on people who have difficulty making small short regular eye-movements. I hate it so much. And so much of our tech is structured like this.
Yeah, this is annoying. I'm unable to watch as I type into a brower address bar—every key stroke updates the options in an annoying drop down menu that can't be disabled. I'll typically either close my eyes or look at the wall to my left.
Empirically I'll pay at least an extra $20 not to use Frontier's website (ie, I once got a United flight that cost $20 more than Frontier, just to avoid Frontier's website), which gets to the point of so-bad-it's-funny in terms of web design. I mean, they really do everything to maximize website awfulness, not just the popups and flashing things, but that was a very stark financial illustration of what web design is worth to me.
Of course, Frontier's bad web design is meant to wring money out of people drop by drop, and I assume it's succeeding there to such a high degree that it doesn't matter how many people avoid them just for the web problems.
Just today I was annoyed, after going to the local news station's website (as I often do) to read the weather bulletin, examine the 7-day forecast, and enjoy the future radar feature, to have that morning's TV weather spot come up as a video it was difficult to close as the "x" disappeared into the radar background. I have demonstrated my fealty to the station. Why are you ruining my experience of your content? Why should the TV spot override the material presented by the same person who made the TV spot?
But that was as nothing compared to trying to cancel a streaming service and "add-on" that I had unwisely decided to take a free trial flyer on. About twenty minutes into the free trial, the thought of watching anything on Hulu/Starz became depressing and I moved to cancel. To do this you "toggle" between a check mark and a plus sign and an x, which come and go, appear and disappear. Doh, there it goes back again! Got it! No, fool, you missed it again! Oh, better luck next time!
I vaguely heard about that, and - ironically - as a practiced Amazon free-trialer, once a year for both myself and elderly parent, I find their cancellation process a breeze! It's nothing to this Hulu-with-add-on.
Anyone out there with strabismus or amblyopia and have this kind of difficulty just from using software that has a lot of menus, ribbons, and pop-ups? And also hate lots of colors and low contrast?
I really miss the old days when word processor menu options were words (!!) in dropdown menus. Most ribbon icons are almost completely illegible to me - like I have to verbally describe an icon in my head to figure out what it might mean, every single time.
I know pictographic writing systems technically work, but...if I were Chinese I'm pretty sure I would have dyslexia.
Hide as many icons as you can and use the search/command prompt to activate. In Google it's Alt+/ or just clicking on "help" then start typing. In Microsoft it is Alt+Q or clicking on the search bar on top. It has access to everything in the toolbar as well as all of the menus as far as I have seen, including options normally nested under other items.
I've even started to let hotkeys fade from memory other than undo/redo and bold/italics/underline. Easier just to hit Alt + / and then type "filter view" or "pivot table" or whatever.
Doesn't work when I don't know the name of the thing I'm looking for. The whole point of a GUI is that users aren't supposed to *need* to memorize some abstruse code to use it.
(The pictograms have been there for a long time, but they flattened them out, removed most of the color and skeuomorphic cues, and took away the text dropdowns that used to work as backups.)
I haven't bothered with Google Docs really because I have 365. Maybe I'll try it.
Yeah, check out Google Docs / Sheets. If you like menus you can have menus. I use both but aside from very specific use-cases for Microsoft 365, G-suite just has a lot more useful tools and conveniences. (query function in sheets, google apps script, referencing other documents easily, calendar/gmail integration, etc)
But I'll also throw out that's the home tab of the ribbon which has the most common buttons. And even then, in Excel's home tab 17/39 buttons have text names on them and other tabs have nearly 100% text labels. Now sure, left/right/center alignment don't have the name alignment on them (even though it is in the ribbon tab group), but after familiarizing yourself with the most common commands for awhile, I still argue in a text-based environment the easiest way to access them is just hitting alt + q align (or alt + q left). For most things I've ever wanted to do I've just guessed at what I'd call it and usually been pretty right.
A tool I like for these kind of things is Tampermonkey - it's an extension that lets you run arbitrary bits of code on specific webpages to modify their behavior. Obviously this is most useful if you're a programmer who can write their own scripts, but there do exist some decent repositories of scripts out there, like https://greasyfork.org . (Or if you know a web developer these things are generally quick to write)
Granted, for just blocking stuff the adblock 'block specific elements' tools probably work well enough in a lot of cases, but tampermonkey scripts are a lot more flexible. (IIRC some people use this sort of script to put back the like buttons on this site...)
Yes, I came here to say this. I will write custom CSS to force flashing website elements to not flash. If custom CSS doesn't work, I will write custom JS to do it. If I can't do it with custom JS, I will nice the bowser window to position the flashing thing off-screen, which works a surprising amount of time (using Alt-Space M Arrowkeys if necessary). If I can't do it with that, I'll just avoid using the website. If I really have to use the website, I will position an Always-On-Top window like Task Manager to cover the offending element, though by this stage I'd probably just put up with it if it's "small text change" rather than "autoplay video" or "bouncing 'notification' icon".
Also try Javascript Manager. It works by blocking javascript for sites like your Jewish law web site but would probably break interactive sites like gmail.
You don't need an extension to disable Javascript (and especially not one from a website that looks that seedy, IMO). It's a pretty standard feature built into most web-browsers, e.g. with Chrome it can be configured here: chrome://settings/content/javascript (This doesn't highlight as a link, but you can copy it into your browser bar)
After disabling javascript many (if not majority) not necessarily interactive websites become unusable. In fact many websites become unusable even after blocking external javascript (like with regretfully discontinued umatrix, which I still use after installing it many years ago), because they are using standard libraries pulled from CDN's. Besides, it does not solve all problems with nausea inducing (or simply distracting) web design since you can easily make animations, background changes, blinking elements, parallax efects and others using pure CSS.
I've been having good experience with ScriptSafe, which also blocks JavaScript, but on the level of per-origin-site so that I can do things like allow YouTubes range of video servers while disabling their ad-servers.
A browser extension on a site covered in Sponsored Links and hosted on a domain called “free business apps dot net” — what year is this? — doesn’t help with its credibility.
NoScript (https://noscript.net/) does the same thing, but it’s open source, vetted, and included in Chrome’s and Firefox’s extension libraries.
Thank you for posting this. Even thought this annoyed me, I was not even aware.
I assumed these annoyance as a fact of life—as opposed to something that I can avoid (e.g. by migrating from services) and change (I design user interfaces, so I will take this into account).
Sometimes we forget that we have agency in this world, but you need to be aware first. In other words, mindfulness predates change.
“As long as you keep typing, the ‘Saving Draft’ button flashes in the upper left corner every few seconds.”
I find it bizarre anyone could care about this. I like reassurance my draft is getting saved! I’ve lost it on at least one occasion. There are people who are bothered by this? Really!?!
After I read Scott's piece I thought that maybe my browser or something was saving me from these plagues. But I checked, and yep, "draft saved" is blinking on and off in both gmail and Substack draft pages. I never noticed it even once! But I have a bunch of other sensory sensitivities, so I get it. (I sleep with 2 white noise machines running plus the best earplugs I can find stuffed into my ears, and a thick mask plus a piece of cloth over my eyes).
Yes. Extremely. When something moves or changes in my peripheral vision against an otherwise static scene, my eyes instantly try to focus on it. This is completely involuntary, it happens before I'm even consciously aware of the stimulus, and I have no conscious control over it.
(It actually happens even when I don't consciously perceive the stimulus at all. I'll notice my eyes jumping and have a vague sense that something just flashed, but have absolutely no idea what it was and only a vague impression of where it was.)
Every time this happens, it resets my working memory. If I'm reading, I have to start over from the beginning of the sentence, and sometimes the paragraph; if I'm trying to follow complex mathematical or logical reasoning, I may have to go back even farther.
I would prefer a less annoying alternative. For example, if a warning about possibly unsaved changes appeared automatically when you start editing, but only disappeared if you *clicked* on it (even if the state is actually already saved). Or with some time limit, like the page may be saved each 5 seconds, but the status changes only after the page was saved for 1 minute.
In other words, the problem is when the page is unsaved, but there is no problem when the page is saved but you were not notified about it soon enough.
If you’re on a shaky connection, then not having notification that it’s saved may drive you to do inefficient things to stay safe, like opening a text editor and copy/pasting there frequently. Having an invisible net under you while you’re doing circus arts makes you play it safe, which is a cost. You want to be able to see the net, so you will take appropriate risks.
Instead of displaying "saved/unsaved" information automatically every second, it could be available on request. Click a "Save" button, and then a message is displayed after the document is saved. If the document was already saved, the message appears immediately after clicking the button.
This gives you the safety, without constant flashing.
I think the reason I’m not bothered by “draft saved” type UI elements is that they’re responding to my interaction with the page. Like, it doesn’t bother anybody that when you type a “A”, a little “A” flicks into visibility on the screen. That’s something you did. Well, the “draft saved” thing is the same, just on a slight time delay. It’s reporting that it finished the task your keystroke assigned it. I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me.
Also, somebody should mention that web companies often thoroughly A/B test features like this, and won’t deploy one to the whole user base before they’ve collected exhaustive metrics describing the effect it has on user engagement. They are also well aware of how many people are switching to ProtonMail after a new UI feature comes out. For a feature like the “draft saved” thing, which doesn’t make them any money except via making the user experience better, you can bet it adds more value overall than it subtracts.
Maybe they're going to build that soon. But it's probably a harder feature to build than the "draft saved" notification is, because it (probably) requires adding a field to some backend database of user preferences. It's a full stack task, not just a front end UI thing.
Every feature you might build always has the drawback that it costs company resources that could be devoted to something else. If people are asking for it, I'd expect "build a 'turn off draft saved notification' checkbox option" is on the future roadmap somewhere. But it may not be high priority.
As Eric Lippert has said, every feature starts with a score of -100 points; every toggle needs to be designed, implemented, tested, translated, and signed off on. It introduces additional surface space for bugs and makes the application more complex. Plus, too many toggles means endless pages of settings that confuse people.
I had never noticed the "Draft saved" thing on gmail before. I am unbothered but understand your frustration with it.
One strategy I piloted that I thought I would share: you can just give your email the subject "Draft saved" until you're done, and then change it to what you actually want. There's still a millisecond where it goes to "Draft saving..." but this would get rid of most of the flashy/blinky thing.
I have a low tech suggestion for you Scott. "Draft saved" is on the upper left on both the Substack and gmail drafting page. Get a small piece of very opaque paper and fold it sharply in half, & drape it with the fold on top so that it covers only the part of your screen with the fucking "draft saved" blinkers. I'm not bothered by blinkers, but I cannot stand seeing my face on the screen when I'm video conferencing. It's not that I'm critical of my appearance -- well I *am,* but that's not the problem in this case -- it's that watching myself smile and open and close my mouth as I talk makes everything seem sort of derealized and fake, like I'm an actor. So I keep little folded pieces of paper near the laptop to cover my onscreen mug!
If you are bothered by having whatever else is in the upper left of the screen covered by the paper, use a transparent piece of plastic, and the stick a little piece of opaque paper just to cover the crucial spot.
Would not work for me because of one of my sensory sensitivities, which is to color: hate the eye-catching colors sticky notes come in. But yeah, for Scott a simpler solution unless he too hates bright pink and yellow.
Google Meet lets you minimise your video feed, maybe that's an option in whatever you're using, too, and just a hidden UI element? (For Google Meet, you need to hover over your own video feed to see the minimise option, for example.)
Not sure if this came up yet, but the photos of the Rabbis are actually of the same Rabbi--Rav Ovadia Yosef. Just photos of him at different ages. No idea why the website creator decided to have it flip between the two, but honestly more curious about why you were on a halacha website.
(For example, is it okay to render breadcrumbs on Sabbath? Does the answer change if they were rendered the previous days and stored in the server cache?)
Huh. I thought I hated flashing elements, but by that I mean -flashing- elements, ones that change all the time. I never even noticed the "Draft saved" thing in Gmail, not that I write messages in Gmail very often. I don't mind that. What I mind is ones that are constantly changing, or jiggling around, which is done specifically to attract attention.
I guess this comes from different levels of sensory filtration. Me and seemingly most people aren't bothered by the draft saved, which is designed to be unobtrusive. Scott has mentioned in other posts that he lives in quiet part of town and hates parties and seems to have a bunch of sensory sensitivities.
I'm normally super annoyed by "saving..." indicators, roamresearch has what I think is a good compromise; It's just a circle that's orange when there are unsaved changes, green when save is complete. I don't notice it changing unless I look at it.
As much as I approve of this message, it's not going to accomplish anything if you insist on framing it as "everyone." You are the only person I've ever encountered who feels as strongly and consistently about this as I do. I'm shocked that the survey figure for "would stop using" was 16%; I suspect that a large fraction of that 16% were thinking of more extreme cases, and would be able to ignore e.g. the Gmail/MS Word save messages, but we might just be an extremely unrepresentative sample on this particular point.
If you don't have a strong philosophical objection, presenting it as an accessibility issue is a more effective strategic approach. I'm almost certain that the inability to tune out moving/changing stimuli is strongly correlated with autism and/or ADHD. You could probably test that hypothesis fairly easily with your survey data.
There wasn't that much correlation with autism when I checked on the survey.
I also hate framing things as disability/accessibility issues. It sounds like a plea for charity to some kind of specific subset of bizarre people, rather than saying "everybody is different, for your own good stop doing useless things that drive some proportion of your users away". I would feel equally strongly about this if there were no correlation with any known mental condition.
I figured you might feel that way. I sympathize, and I used to complain about this stuff in universal terms too.
But companies are perfectly happy to sacrifice some minority of users to drive more engagement from the remaining majority, which is what they think they're doing with this stuff. They only 'care' if they're convinced that the annoyed minority is a threat to their revenue, either directly (if we're disproportionately content creators or community builders) or indirectly (if we're a sympathetic group that could cause a PR problem if we complained too loudly).
Yeh, if they get 10% to sign up to some email subscription they may not care about the 16% who leave the site, or the rest who are just annoyed but read on.
I challenge "useless" - in this thread alone, there are a few people who like seeing the "Draft saved" message. In your defense, though, Google could make it say "Draft saved - <message subject>" rather than switching between the two every N seconds.
Not sure how forcing people who dislike it to tolerate a feature drives engagement. Make it the default, driving engagement with those who tolerate it (really?), and let the ones who would lose engagement opt out.
Every additional opt out button makes things worse for anyone who is trying to find a different setting to change, and also for anyone who disabled it without realizing that it actually benefitted them more than it hurt them.
At least part of the answer here is the bad tech incentives - tech companies tend to inventivise doing things regardless of whether it's a good idea. Flashing elements allow more complications, and "added draft saved notifier to Gmail app, driving a 5% improvement in gerrymandered metrics" looks much better on your perf review than "kept Gmail boring but functional after realizing it was more usable that way", or even "added option to disable the draft saved notification feature that my coworker just added and wrote a whole doc about how much it improves his gerrymandered metrics".
I don't have that problem in gmail because, like Christopher McCann, I use the HTML version of the site. Appending ?ui=html to a gmail URL will get you there, after you click past a warning saying "please don't do this".
Yes. But you could have red mapping to 'worst' and green mapping to 'best' say. And it would be more intuitive to a Western Audience accustomed to stoplights. Or you could use the spectrum. Or whatever. The categories are ordinal. The assigned colors would be more intuitive if they reflected that.
The halacha website feels the need to constantly scroll through pictures of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (who they've also adorably made their little favicon!) because otherwise their readers might be tempted to not vote for his political party, Shas.
Here is one of the many campaign ads prominently featuring the ghost of Ovadia Yosef campaigning on his party's behalf (I want a Youtube playlist, honestly):
Also, they want to emphasize that "[a]ll the Halachot on this site are derived from the halachic rulings of our leader, glory of the generation, Maran Rabbeinu Ovadia Yosef zt”l, who was considered to be the generation’s most accepted and reliable Posek (Halachic authority) based on the testimonies of the greatest rabbis of the previous generation, including the great Geonim, Harav Ezra Attia, Harav Mordechai Sharabi, Harav Efraim Ha’Kohen, and many others."
If not for the flashing elements, you might forget that the rulings came from glory of the generation, Maran Rabbeinu Ovadia Yosef zt”l, which would basically be misinformation and/or plagiarism.
Obligatory Firefox proselytism : Firefox has a "read mode" integrated that removes the interface of the website when you try to read an article. It's very useful and can also be used to bypass paywalls (for example on the nyt, go to an article, unable lecture mode and reload the page, tadaa)
Annoyingly it doesn't have the option of setting the background to pure black, darkish gray is the best it can do. This "paleish gray on darkish gray" design paradigm is omnipresent these days for some reason, and I hate it unreservedly. Thankfully Dark Reader fixes most of these issues, but sadly doesn't work with FF reader view.
Pure white text on pure black is painfully high contrast for a certain subset of people, so you instead see things like the grey on grey effect. Ideally it would be options like "Cyan on charcoal" or "Gold on black" but at that point you've gone past a single toggle option and into the realm of complex theme selections.
The most annoying part of it is that this option is often excluded even when a selection is available. The reader mode in Mozilla offers 4 settings, for example.
Bad pizza graph color scheme, otherwise good post. The number in green should be "slightly annoyed", the one in orange "will give up on the site". I know, I know, it's there in the legend, but come on!
AdBlock Plus started selling the ability to show you ads anyway, and a variety of other missteps. These days I do not recommend it to anyone; uBlock Origin is both 'pure' and works much better than ABP ever did.
>I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey . . .
I'm not sure that survey question is fair and balanced. Three out of four options state that you are annoyed by flashing elements. Only only option is (barely) positive. Then you add the three options to show that the vast majority is annoyed. That is not a good methodology. A better question would include has many positive options (don't notice at and don't care) as negative once. A 'no opinion' option would have been good as well.
Speaking for my self, once I concentrate on typing I do not register the other elements. Either I don't see it at all, or it doesn't perturb me one bit. I'd still keep the OCD option open.
I agree. I’m really focused on whatever task at hand that all the LOOK AT ME strategies used by designers generally don’t get my attention unless I’m bored and even then my brain generally filters out stuff I consider noise and not signal. It’s odd, because I consider myself a detail-oriented person....but it needs to be a detail I consider relevant.
I don’t even look for “draft saved” anymore- I just assume they saved the draft. I don’t know why they even have that design element.
Over here in the EU the law requires consent for cookies, so a lot of websites show a pop up from the bottom after load. Often this has two buttons - all cookies, or minimum required cookies. There’s also some text about why they want you to click all. Some have a third option to modify cookies. Often when trying to dismiss the pop up and hit accept all, I hit that, which brings up a full screen cookie management page.
Here was my experience yesterday. I am linked to a url (from the daily express I think). Accept cookies popup comes up, I accidentally click the modify cookies. Spend a second on that to get rid of it. Back to webpage. A popdown asks me if I want to download the app at the same time as a floating page on the bottom right shows some video of something. This is both intrusive and eats up screen estate. I try and get rid of the video but they are designed to have the tiniest x button possible. Inevitably I go to the video page. I go back to the article. The app pop down and floating video are still there, this time a different ad.
I start to read the article, which is slow to load anyway as it needs to load a dozen or so of those ads that now come both within and at the bottom of the articles, often taking up more screen estate than the article, often flickering or running previews.
The progressive loading of these ads slows the scroll which is itself annoying but within a few seconds of scrolling another floating window appears asking me to sign up for the newspaper.
Reader: I didn’t sign up for the newspaper and I did not read the article.
But! The express probably don’t care. They are making money from a few PPV ads, and I clicked on the video which is probably revenue to them. I also engaged with the cookies. From a metric point of view I’m a satisfied and engaged, and revenue producing, customer. They probably don’t even measure “scroll to bottom”.
Personally I abandon reading the page as soon as I reach that point where the auto-play video pops up. It just stops being worth it to me and also I would strongly suspect there is further malware/spyware that is going on under the hood with a site that rude.
Actually cookie popups are potentially dangerous. I am so used to clicking yes at the cookie popups, that I once clicked by mistake yes to the popup (on mobile) which asked me to agree to receive notifications, and it could be something far worse.
Unrelated point, but you should seriously consider using ublock origin, AdBlock is itself a closed sourced advertising and data collection platform, it will strike deal with companies to display ads and will not block agressively enough.
Ublock gives a better experience (fewer ads) and open source.
I don't mind the "Draft saved" thing, because I get a little weird about obsessively saving files to make sure nothing is lost, but the other shit enrages me. It has reached the point where I do a good 85% of my web browsing on the computer where I have adblockers turned on. I used to look at the Internet on my phone. I don't do that much anymore.
This is a great option that deserves more attention.
All modern devices have a built-in setting for enabling "reduced motion." If you set it, then it will reduce/disable unnecessary animations across your operation system, including any websites that support it.
It probably won't work for everything (the Gmail "draft" text still displays, for example) but it should provide across the board improvements if you're sensitive to motion/flashing.
There's a really interesting question to be dug into, about what the product incentives are within big tech companies, especially where the user is not making the primary purchase decision. One of the things I've noticed is that Google seems to be generally trending towards consistently worse UI, and I suspect that there's just no pressure to make things better for users, because the bureaucracy isn't really built for that. I've been wondering if that problem is related more to scale (big enough company means the internal incentives tend to be all bureaucratic) or if there's an additional cultural force of some sort (desire for designers to make things look aesthetically pleasing to their own eyes, desire for engineers to make changes that are functional) that exacerbates it.
Any website that needs revenue from the website itself will trend towards ugliness, as revenue comes from advertising and the more in your face the better.
Any website that’s trying to get you to buy their own product - see Apple - will be much cleaner.
I don't use Apple stuff much, but I've noticed that Amazon isn't clean at all - but it's at least moderately resistant to overly offensive noise. I think Apple might be the strongest example, though of a big company optimizing a website for something that is at least related to making users happy, because Amazon is 100% designing it's website towards topline sales (and probably tolerating increased returns rates into the bargain)
Thank you for writing about this! I don't understand why everyone else isn't grabbing their pitchforks over today's heinous web design practices. Maybe it's because we don't know where the product managers and web designers live. I'm in the camp that will stop using a site that has items like: flashing anything, ads that follow you down the screen as you scroll, or "exit intent popups", the most pathetically desperate and annoying mechanism ever invented. Just because something is possible to implement doesn't mean it's a good idea!
I think I'm more sensitive to lights than most, so that may explain it.
On a related topic, do we have to have "hover everything", so that A) you have to move your mouse over the screen to find out what UI elements are available, and B) no matter where you try to place your cursor out of the way, some "on hover" element pops up to block your view? My big question is: DO THESE PEOPLE EVEN TRY OUT THEIR OWN WEBSITES? Who is actually demanding these features? Put this crap on your website and I'll remember you. Not only will I avoid buying your products, I'll seek to badmouth you every chance I get.
The developers who code these websites up installed an adblocker ages ago and only see the "cleaned up" version of the sites they write until a newly hired QA member shows up and complains until someone teaches the new guy how to install an adblocker.
I don't understand how hover isn't as deprecated as <blink>. It flat out *does not work* on mobile, and everyone and their mother are going mobile-first or mobile-only.
> They haven’t. I can no longer write things on Gmail - I have to compose on Notepad and then copy-paste to the Gmail window - because they’ve made it look like this:
As a heads up: you can also switch to hit "switch to HTML view" in the bottom right corner of the screen when gmail loads up in your browser to stop this from happening. Since you're using Notepad anyway, it's not feature-reduced.
I think we should also talk about the new message notifications. For example on Twitter chat groups, or Discord. If it's not blinking, at least there is a blue dot and maybe a number calling for your attention.
Google probably don't want you to use their email interface. It makes no money for them. You can buy a gmail address but it is expected that most power users will use it with Outlook or a similar email app.
I stopped using gmail long time ago because it became too cluttered and annoying for a power user. It probably works for majority who sends only an occasional email and that leads people to use all other google services (showing adds etc.).
I have a GMX web email account, https://www.gmx.co.uk/ because it is free, the interface is fairly slick, and one can have a short email address. For example, I bagged jrq@gmx.com
The only irritating feature is that it logs one out automatically after an hour or so, even on a private PC when one has no wish to log out. (It apparently makes no distinction between a public and private PC.) On one's next login, it also has the cheek to pop up a fussy message saying one should log out properly!
Flashing ads are an irritation, more so when they feature disagreeable or offputting images. Incessant recent ads for an ear wax removal product comes to mind (unfortunately), although mercifully that now seems to have gone away.
I also see loads of ads for life insurance and funeral services, featuring wrinklies who look as old as Methusaleh and have clearly spent their declining years and possibly their entire lives working or basking in the sun. I shouldn't complain, as I'm no spring chicken myself, and ageism is a Bad Thing, but do we really need constant reminders that our days are numbered?
But the web UI feature that drives me completely potty, and compared to which flashing ads pale into insignificance, is dynamic page extensions that throw the display completely out of vertical alignment each time when the slider bar is used.
It seems that nobody in the history of the world has yet figured out a way to extend a page while leaving unmoved the content already displayed. I'm not talking about a slight jog, which would be bad enough in itself, but a massive flurry of movement after which one's place is completely lost.
Another minor irritation is a horizontal bar that slides down from nowhere and covers content when one pans the page down with the slider bar, so one has to overshoot and slide the bar back up slightly to tuck the bar away again. It must have seemed such a smart idea to whoever invented it, but it would have been better if they had kept their idea to themself!
I'd be shocked if any changes to the interface on such a central product as Gmail didn't go through A/B testing. If it passed, it means the net effect on engagement couldn't be substantial. Maybe they had bad metrics, or the effect is unobservable (e.g. annoyance/hate, not leaving the platform, though maybe they also had users rate the experience). Or maybe the weak positive effect for most users beat the negative effects for the small subset.
Save your sanity and use reader mode in FireFox - I'm sure there are extensions for other browsers, safari too has it natively integrated IIRC.
It gives you large font (customizable), simple UI, no complex flashing elements and distracting stuff as *well* as Dark Mode. All with a click of a button :)
One reason why I use Firefox (Chromium-based browsers also offer this) is to use the extension uBlock Origin, which lets you select an element of a page and block it. It used to work in Safari too, but Apple has denigrated extensions and offers just a few weak apps for ad blocking that barely work at all. It can be found at:
and manual installation instructions are there too, just scroll down. It can also be installed through the official add-on stores. The element blocking part is especially useful for me since I am using a 13" MBA, and a few banners across the bottom and top of a page mean I get to see just a few inches of a page, like looking through a letterbox. The Globe & Mail site is dreadful for this, and is quite usable once I have permanently removed the banners.removed
Ublock origin is awesome, but I find that often I actually want the complement of its element-zapping feature. That is, I don't want to zap element X, I want to zap "everything *outside* element Y" (where Y is whatever div contains the actual content of the page).
FF's reader mode is nice, but doesn't work on all pages, and sometimes misses an opening paragraph or two when it does work.
This is only one element of the fad of intrusive and bloated design that began with pop-up windows and has snowballed ever since.
Funny enough, it seems like the very existence of front-end and UI/UX designers as an occupation in the web space immediately made these problems much worse than they were. Between the use of enormous unnecessary design frameworks, CSS animations and integrated javascript, etc., the experience of using most sites is so much slower and worse than flat HTML used to be.
The default position seems to be that everybody has broadband so it doesn’t matter if you need to load megabytes and megabytes of scripts and frameworks and stylesheets every time you click something, and because it’s new and sexy tech it’s okay to animate everything and move elements based on cursor or window or viewport position. Of course they never count on latency, or errors in their own code, or conflicts between different elements they’ve injected, so reading a page with a few paragraphs of information you actually want becomes a trial, requiring you to install four or five different types of ad- and nuisance-extinguishing plug-in just to render pages more or less readable.
My latest favorite atrocity is Wikipedia (not that it can be trusted anymore) has enforced pop-up link previews on every wiki link that appear when you hover but don’t disappear when you move your cursor away. It’s an actual ‘screw you for attempting to read the page you’re on’ feature.
It seems to me that companies used to do usability studies as part of the engineering side, but when they settled on a good UI, that didn't leave anything for managers to do, so they brought in arts-degree UX "designers" to have them tweak everything constantly and look busy.
Something that may help with some sites is to configure your device to [prefer reduced motion](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion). This allows web designers to use a `@media (prefers-reduced-motion)` block to not show the animations you've indicated a preference to not be shown.
This is a fairly modern feature that designers have to go out of their way to use, but it does work in some places.
I'm convinced that UI designers etc. invariably suffer from a fatal flaw - they are not the intended user of the product they are designing. Thus we have flashing N.B. that are unhelpful, LMS that give instructors tendonitis given every task takes multiple clicks/swipes on different location of the screen (I'm looking at you Blackboard), etc. .... I could go on forever and a day about this.
First off - Text headers changing to communicate functionality are not what that survey question addresses.
Secondly - Disabling that isn't a choice, it's a tradeoff. Is the percentage of people irritated by it larger or smaller than the portion that will worry that there is no "save draft" button? I suspect that feature was added based upon feedback along the way, so what we are seeing is (at least to some degree) the result of a complex balancing act. One that does not combine well with "you can't please all of the people, and you can't put everything into an options menu".
Even if you did put it in the options menu, I suspect the number of people who disable it because they thought they dislike the flash but end up worse off because they don’t know if it’s saved, is larger than the number of people who actually benefit it from being turned off.
I think it is not uncommon for people to be mistaken about their first impression about whether they on net benefit from a UI feature or whether it is net negative for them. There are plenty of things that work that way. (There are also surely many people and features for which the opposite is true. I'm not at all convinced of which features go which way, but at least one reason why Google hasn't allowed people to disable it could be that their usage data suggests that this is one where people are likely to be mistaken about their preferences.)
This may be tangential, but speaks to the choices made by software designers needing "something to do". When I taught college math, the portal platform was built on D2L, and customized by the school's programming team. Their operation appeared to consist of meetings that always concluded with "ok, add another screen", with all hands raised.
The (corporate) Pearson software was even worse, with anything useful hidden in a labyrinth of links. I ended up coding my own website, and just adding problems and docs to it.
probably worth considering that the median ACX reader is likely to be rather more autistic than baseline and hence more sensitive to stimuli, skewing the results
This has been going on since Netscape Navigator implemented a blink element for some reason.
See also: Pretty much every restaurant website ever. I do not want animated text, I do not want fancy skeuomorphisms, and I certainly do not what a soundtrack.
For me the unifying principle seems to be that I don't like GUI elements to move.
So ... MY primary sadness is when a page is coming up and keep re-rendering as images arrive (because the HTML which could have specified width and height did not ...). This make using the page very tough until it has 'settled down.' And I can't be sure when it has settled down.
BEST is when there are *control* elements such as buttons moving around. Microsoft's Outlook client for Windows (non-web!) does this as part of the send-an-email process -- the "send" button moves while I am trying to press it!
I am annoyed, but much less so, by an image that changes (such as at the Jewish Law site). I'd prefer not, but this isn't a deal breaker.
Same with status text changing (though I'd prefer an icon in a fixed location to change or something like that).
Scott, is your problem with 'flashing' or with ANY dynamic change to the page you are using/viewing?
I believe that website is showing you two pictures of the same person, just at different ages? Or, like, definitely two visibly closely related individuals.
Genuine flashing elements would/do bother me but I don't agree that gmail and Substack "draft saved" stuff counts. Possibly this is because I'm constantly paranoid that my draft is -not- being saved and enjoy the visual placebo of it always being there in the corner but I'm also mostly confident my brain filters out stuff like the little product text on the AdBlock window.
I actually started out agreeing with the piece but then was surprised that you included the saving draft icon on Substack in the same category as seizure causing rabbi flashes. Inferences from your poll might therefore be invalid. I hate flashing but don’t place it in that category. Other people have pointed this out, but I want to keep harping on it because really that feature is one of the things that makes Substack amazing and I hope no one listens to this post.
I'm surprised there's no mention of ads that re-load themselves and cause the text you're reading to jump around and re-flow. And often these ads aren't even visible on the page, so it's totally pointless aggravation. Its the equivalent of some yanking a magazine out of your hands while youre reading. It's shockingly rude, and shocking how common this is. Lately I just ragequit.
I find them so irritating I use a whole stack of adblockers, flashblockers and image-blockers to browse the internet. Even still images distract from the text, so in order to see any kind of image in my browser, I have to do a slightly annoying two-step temporary authorization to make the image load. This works pretty well and makes the internet experience overall far less irritating, infuriating, and overstimulating. Text-only for the most part.
I have a friend whose school-age daughter has photosensitive epilepsy, and she says to check her daughter's websites for flashing elements before she can let her daughter visit them. If they're for a school assignment and have flashing elements, she has to print out screenshots for her daughter.
Since the same things also tend to trigger seizures in susceptible people, I do wonder how programs get away with having things like blinky notifications that can't be disabled, particularly if the program is anything that might possibly be used in a business setting-- seems like a good way to run afoul of disability accommodations.
I will not, and cannot use programs or websites with blinky elements that cannot be blocked or disabled, and even where they can be.... if they make it difficult it is mostly not worth the hassle.
How do you deal with the blinking cursor in notepad? Is that not a flashing element? I was thinking like flashing banner adds, not tiny things like "draft saved". I mean like popup ads that cover text and play commercials for video games. I would have voted not bothered if asked about all but the first example in this post.
I suspect that in some cases people say they wouldn't use a website with things like this, but in practice it's just the opposite. The company I work for has one of the most annoying popups I have ever experienced. If your mouse ever comes close to switching tabs, a big window pops up saying "Wait before you go please give us your email address!" I despise it, and as soon as I was able I pulled the metrics to show that it was a pointless annoyance.
And then I found out that it is incredibly good at getting people to give us their email address. Probably the single most effective method we use for adding people to our newsletter. My spirit was crushed.
Operating systems have accessibility setting to reduce motion, which is available to the websites and if they respect it, they should disable/reduce animations.
I have a different set of issues, somewhat overlapping, that also annoy me.
Some partial solutions:
- Write custom CSS for websites. Adblock works by deleting an element. But you can also style it so that it is smaller, or is hidden. You can then inject it with an extension like stylus.
- Using some "reader mode" type of extension, which deletes extraneous non-text elements. Would have worked for your jewish site.
- Writting some custom javascript and injecting it into the website when loading it. E.g., Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter has some annoying elements, so I redirect it to the archive.is version, apply a readability plugin and then inject some stuff to get rid of the rest of annoying stuff.
- Use the custom frontends others have written. There is a small movement of people annoyed at dark patterns who write better frontends. You can use an extension like libredirect to use a better frontend if one exists: https://libredirect.github.io. For a while it looked like there was going to be a semi-organized "simple web" effort, but it feels pretty anarchic now.
Personally I'm cheating a bit, because I use a custom browser, so when I encounter something that annoys me, I make some small tweak and recompile. But I think you can get like 99% of the benefit of what I'm doing with Firefox extensions (Google doesn't want people to be able to block ads, because that's kind of their whole business, and has castrated adblockers with their Manifest v3 extension proposal for Chrome).
Also, uBlock Origin is better than AdblockPlus & others, because at some point AdblockPlus sold out and you should switch.
So, call to action:
- Switch to Firefox. Make yourself acquainted with its reader mode.
- Install the Ublock Origin and libredirect extensions
- Install Stylus, and learn to tweak css for the websites that you most visit
* Web pages that use mounds of javascript to duplicate functionality that already exists in html, like forms.
* Bonus points if the form tries to prettyprint or otherwise 'help' me type in them.
* Double bonus points if your links are not actually links, but onclick javascript redirectors.
* Pages that override browser keyboard shortcuts. E.g. Github thinks it's funny to make ctrl-k go to their search-github box instead of my browser's searchbar.
* In fact, pages that override *any* browser UI behavior. Right now, substack is doing something wonky such that hovering on the article text doesn't show a selection cursor.
* Triple bonus points if said overrides appear to exist *specifically* to break browser behavior, e.g. by making C+P difficult.
* CSS popups. There's a reason all browers have popup blocking now, and it's not because a second window was involved.
* *Massive* decorative elements, such that I can only see a tiny fraction of the actual page content at a time.
* Obfuscated element classes/ids that make it hard to identify and nuke offenders.
* Anything that breaks Reader Mode or RSS/Atom feeds, making it hard to view content outside your shitshow of a site.
Maybe you can adblock your way out of *some* of these things. For example, in uBlock Origin you can use CSS selectors that match on a *substring* of a class of a visual element instead of the whole class (which nowadays contains randomly-generated parts to make it harder to block).
In particular, Substack has this annoying popup on text selection (people who select text while reading it have probably noticed it already). Normally, the only CSS class that I can block is .pencraft, but that ends up destroying the main page of the blog (almost everything there has .pencraft attached). But if I block substack.com##.pencraft[class*="selection_popover"], it only covers those .pencraft elements that also have selection_popover in their class name, which for now seems to only include the annoying selection popup thingy.
If some of your annoyances have partially randomly generated class names but also have predictable parts in them, this could work for you too.
Unlikely. Apple is king of flashy design choices that are intuitive to the designers and forced on everyone else. They're minimalist mostly when it comes to hiding functionality behind unhinted gestures and seemingly unrelated apps.
I…don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Apple’s design is *never,* and never has been, “flashy” or garish. Certainly not in the sense of having things *actually flash*! The closest you can come to saying Apple’s software design has been “flashy” is with things like the slowmo Minimize function (which has since been removed).
You certainly don’t have to like Apple’s esthetic, but the things Scott is complaining about is just exactly the sort of thing that Apple has been careful to never do
I must be in the middle: the flashing banner ads *really* bother me, but I barely notice a little flickering “draft saved.” I was a little surprised to find out that was what you were talking about.
For calibration, my answer on the survey is “they annoy me quite a bit.”
Cosigned, but am willing to accept that we might be the weird ones!
The flashing banner ads are intolerable; I use the “reader” view on mobile Safari to get rid of them, and if that doesn’t work I don’t go to that website.
....but I don’t even notice the “draft saved” business.
Fund my (hypothetical) web company/companies and I'll 'just' re-implement all of the important/useful software and hire Edward Tufte to design all of the UIs!
(Semi-seriously – I have an absurd number of personal/side projects that are basically this. I even use a few of them!)
Super-related (and somewhat serious): while I love (like) some (web) designers VERY much, I promise that I will NEVER hire any as full-time employees to entirely avoid the temptation to generate make-work for them that then causes COSTLY and TERRIBLE superfluous changes to the UIs of any of my sites/apps.
I'm another survey respondent who said "flashing things on websites annoy me intensely", because never in a million years would I have thought the question was describing autosave status indicators.
I will throw my hat in the ring as someone who is really bothered by the more obvious elements, but barely notices the Gmail-style ones. If this post is a memetic hazard and I can no longer ignore them, I’m going to be very mildly annoyed!
100% agree and I think the entire internet has gone downhill. So many sites refuse to load now with adblockers on, and the whole internet has gotten worse. Any random news site will have 3 flashing banners and pop-ups every few seconds or if I move my mouse off screen. I thought we figured this out with web 1.0 in the late 1990s that it is terribly bad user experiences to have loads of flashing things or moving elements of any kind on your website.
I'm in the camp of...run away and close the tab immediately if it is annoying with constantly changing banner ads, video pop ups in the corner at all and usually with ads, etc. The scroll down ones are super super annoying as well with the huge 1/3 of the page banner you have to fight with actively, scrolling up and down before it minimises into a smaller banner.
My conclusion is...I guess you don't want visitors on your website. If I need to click through 3 pop ups in different parts of the screen, fight scroll with the top banner to see the content, and then it all flashes at me constantly...they clearly hate their users and don't want any visitors to their website. I'll immediately close it and never go back, my blacklist of sites grows everyday.
To me the big cost of this 'draft saved' is that it is a distraction. It breaks your train of thought and concentration. When you're deep in a flow state and some small text in your visual field keeps flicking back and forth, it is a distraction.
This isn't as directly annoying as the flashing banner ads, but it does make it harder to draft messages. I know many authors and creative types talk about using focused writing apps with no distractions, no notifications, etc. Why? because Word, gmail, blogging sites, etc. are all unusable.
Most modern web design seems intended -- consciously or otherwise -- to establish control of the user's client and thereby their attention. Instead of providing content for the user to view as they choose, sites build the "viewer" into the page, with a mix of javascript and CSS. At that point, the browser is no longer your client. The purported website itself is the client for a bespoke, single-vendor API backing it -- an API inevitably incompatible with any other site, to maximize the costs of third-party client-writers.
The result is that you can't easily view content from many providers in the client of your choice; it's "use their client" or "write your own" (in the form of CSS hacks or whatever). And, business pressures being what they are, that's fine by most of the providers. Their content doesn't actually matter. Their content is bait. The actual purpose of such sites is to feed users' attention into a chipper shredder, then use the output to fertilize a cash garden.
As legitimate content producers continue to migrate to ever-more-consolidated single-vendor platforms, things get progressively worse. When youtube or facebook enshittify their platform, that enshittification is inherited by all the relatively-innocent producers that rely on them for hosting. Which is how ACX ends up with subscription popups that neither Scott nor his readers wanted or will ever want. But what can one do about that? The entity responsible for the bullshit is not the entity writing the content! I can't boycott Substack without boycotting Scott! I can hack the site CSS to remove the bullshit...but I have to do that separately for every site on the Internet.
I don't think there's a fix for this. Any set of browser features that allows a website to provide its own interface will be abused to control the user's use of that interface. And all monolithic platforms (youtube, facebook, substack, et al) will try to make it hard for either users *or* authors to respond to enshittification with a middle finger.
(note how many services provide a desktop client, but forbid third-party clients. This is not for security, no matter what they say. It's because they want their users to be a captive audience.)
There might be some hope on the author side of things. In principle, instead of an author posting their content directly to platform X using X's tools, they could generate an authoritative RSS/Atom feed (with whatever tools they choose); and then (separately) host a site consuming that feed on their platform of choice. Said site would act as the official, default UI -- the equivalent of astralcodexten.substack.com -- but disgruntled users could directly consume the authoritative feed if desired. Being a dependency of the official site, such a feed would be relatively reliable. And if, later, the platform host enshittifies its UI in ways the *author* doesn't like, they could migrate elsewhere with minimal transition cost.
Note that this would be the reverse of the typical structure where the site is the authoritative source of content and the feeds a secondary, often-neglected feature.
The details of that suggestion aren't important; the important part is the separation of UI from content. There has to be a site-independent way of querying the content without the chrome. Otherwise, both authors and users are at the mercy of the platform's developers. We've seen what they do with that power, and it's produced an Internet that is increasingly Out To Get You. Every year, my arsenal of browser armor grows. It's a necessary thing, to keep the web tolerable.
But it shouldn't be.
(how does one do links in substack comments? I wrote about this on LW a few years ago, not sure how to link it)
This happens because of typical-mind-fallacy on the part of PMs. There is a substantial group of people who aren't bothered by little spinners and indicators. They're like the speedometer on your car's dashboard...just fades into the background when you're not using it.
Then there are a bunch of people who can't stand them. If your product leadership doesn't contain those people it goes wrong. They'll never even notice it. And it won't actually impact metrics that much in the medium term, just slowly erode the joy a segment of people feel in using your product over years until they can't wait to use something else. Oops!
Scott, you should really start using uBlock Origin.
Funny, whenever people talk about an adblocker, they NEVER mean Adblock, except those people who don't know better.
That would be like if there was a very bad brand of refrigerators called Fridge™, and whenever somebody said something like, "at home, we have a fridge", and people with a Fridge™ would think: "hey, I have one of those" and never find out there was this new type of fridge that worked waaaay better and was not secretly spying on you.
I think the real lesson of this post is how people can answer "yes" to a question where the survey maker's concept of that question is different from most users, leading to an analysis built on false assumptions.
No one else has addressed the Halachic website specifically, so as your most Orthodox Jewish reader, here you go:
The Halachic website you found is specifically for Sefaradi Jews. The "two Rabbis" it is flickering between are Rav Ovadia Yosef as a younger person, and Rav Ovadia Yosef as an older person. He is quite the personality cult person. Modern-day Mizrachi (Middle Eastern, subsection of Sefaradi) Jews have a tendency to really go in for the flashing lights, in general. My husband and I were just speculating on why this is. We think it's partly due to the fact that they are relatively poor, and therefore tend to like gaudy decorations more.
Here are some nice pictures and videos of small Sefaradi synagogues in Israel:
In short, it is very likely that the Sefaradi readers of this site actually do see the flickering images as a sign of how nice the website is - they have similar things in their Synagogue!
Next time you want to look up an obscure Halachic text, check out www.halachipedia.com/
Or the best source is Pninei Halacha: https://ph.yhb.org.il/en/. This is widely accepted as the hottest new thing in Halachic literature.
Both of these are oriented towards giving a more organized, bigger picture view of Halacha, including both Ashkenazi and Sefaradi sources.
Flashing elements need to be make or break things for a given activity and even then they should be show stoppers, not matters of course. No alarm that goes on forever is an alarm anymore, and it's one of those Norman-door annoyances for me, a guy who talks about Norman doors. Flashing must convey information, like an old timey lighthouse (the light rotating has a known period that tells you where you are if you know what you are looking at! They are being replaced with electronically controlled lights that simply flash at preset rates, but spinning around is an alternative way of creating a digital signal that works in all directions.)
This, and also sites that change the text selection behavior. Substack is the latest offender, adding a pop-up "Restack quote" whenever I select anything. Look, if I wanted to "restack" this, I'd copy the quote I wanted and click the button at the bottom of the post.
Just let me do my neurotic constantly-selecting-and-deselecting-the-paragraph-I'm-reading thing in peace.
Just to be clear, I said that I was significantly annoyed by flashing elements, but I would never have considered any of these to be flashing elements. I was thinking ye ould <blink> tags.
Regarding "draft saved": I don't mind it when I am working on an email where the main bottleneck is typing. But when I spend time coming up with which words to write, it is annoying. (And I think this generalises to other sites.)
I think a more interesting extension of this post would be about attention-manipulating design in general - including in physical spaces.
Examples (note that I suffer from these things more than average, so this might not be universally hated):
- TV in restaurants (as opposed to sport bars). I always try to sit such that it isn't in my field or vision.
- static adds that suddenly switch to something else (both on websites and in physical spaces). Make it much harder to do longer chains or thought (such as when trying to ro research while waiting for a plane).
- supermarkets playing adds from speakers while you are in the store. (Some czech stores have their own "radio" which is just play adds for their products and silly songs.)
- excessive "information messages" on public transport. For example, British railways' "See something that doesn't belong? See it, say it, sorted!" indeed makes me hate them with passion and caused me to always travel with noise-cancelling headphones.
Random thought:
- These things generally sound like something that should be illegal, but aren't yet. Is it because we don't view attention as a resource? Or that many people don't value it? Or that we haven't acknowledged that attention can be manipulated or taken from us?
- It is interesting that we now have rules against electronic spam, but less so about physical spam and attention spam in physical spaces.
- I sometimes use a "replacement by human" test: For example, would we find it socially acceptable for a British Railway employee to walk up to me every 3 minutes and go "Do you see something that doesn't belong? ..."? No, definitely not. That suggest that the automated recording is over the line also.
As a proud member of the 16% that avoids using websites if they're too visually distracting, I sometimes use TamperMonkey to remove visually distracting indicators. For example, presentations in google slides have an especially annoying "saving..." icon that I remove with: https://gist.github.com/rbalicki2/4ef8429d9577e965d12513695346df7a
The biggest problem on websites is pop-ups. The worst offender being the cookie message, which manages to be both completely useless and extremely irritating at the same time. But I find all pop-ups of any kind annoying.
Was trying to figure out why "draft saved" doesn't bother me when most flashing/changing elements in websites do. Then I remembered that I hardly ever look at the screen when I'm typing. Learning to touch type is probably about the same amount of effort as switching email clients?
I also get annoyed by ads, though not quite to this extent. That said, as long as flashing elements are rendered in your browser (rather than in a dedicated app like Gmail on Android), you as the end user have ultimate control over them, including the power to remove them.
For instance, my adblocker of choice is uBlock, and its element zapper and element picker modes can be used to remove arbitrary elements on websites. However, sometimes it's not obvious exactly what to remove, or how to adjust the filter to be sufficiently general. In that case, if you don't want to put in the time to learn and experiment with uBlock's filter syntax etc., that seems like a good use case to hire someone on a website like Fiverr to create the filters for you.
Or: I don't like the YouTube home feed, so I have an addon which removes it (called Block YouTube Feed").
Or: I don't like sponsor segments in Youtube videos, so I have an addon which skips them (called "SponsorBlock for Youtube").
The spectrum of flashing element annoyingness is immense. When I took the survey I probably picked one of the two middle options, because I was imagining the constantly-moving video ads you get on some websites, or even worse, the popups that move around the screen. Stuff like the "draft saved" notifications in Gmail gets dropped several layers of visual processing before it hits my consciousness and I couldn't care less about it.
Yeah, this is an interesting one of those "shared human experiences" things. I was agreeing wholeheartedly with the first part, but I've never found stuff like "draft saved" to be a problem - it's usually pretty unobtrusive, and it's keeping me informed of useful program state. It never would have occurred to me to think of flashing banners and "draft saved" to be in the same category of thing.
Likewise. Even though flashy elements on webpages annoy the bejeezus out of me, I had to go check Gmail to figure out what was being talked about here, because I've never even noticed this element's existence. That said, I'm all for optionality and configurability on such things. As a person who's often bothered by stuff in my environment that others find innocuous (or even desirable), I feel for those who can't tolerate this.
In a perfect world, everything would be configurable. Unfortunately, every configuration option costs money, defects, and additional user confusion. Every option must be weighed against both its own individual cost in testing, and its impact on interrelated tests, which increase exponentially as you add interrelated options. Each increases the chances of introducing a defect. And each configuration setting you add increases the difficulty of using you configuration options by both making it harder to find the option you're looking for, and making the overall options experience overwhelming rather than simple.
As usual, everything is tradeoffs. And most users want you to make *their* thing the thing that other things get traded off against -- because what they want is obviously what most people would want, or what's best for your product.
Absolutely. Note that MS-Word always includes an easy-to-use Word Count feature because a professional journalist with 2,500 words to write cares much more about their word count than I ever will.
Back when rocks were squishy and people read magazines, there was a consistent pattern that any word processor that neglected or hid Word Count got a bad review in PC-World, because the (nearly always) guy writing the review was a professional journalist with 2,500 words to write.
I'm glad William Codex wrote this blog post, since I also had no idea a nd I actively believed that you need some animation (AKA "juice") to keep things interesting
I'll make sure there's a 100% juice-free mode for any apps I write in the future, haha
For me the solution that I usually pick to that kind of problem is "move the window so the annoying thing is off the edge of the screen". Then I forget about it until next time.
Agreed, I didn't think today I would wake up to learn something I barely notice like "draft saved" was intrusive to some. Interesting to know.
Yup. The Jewish Law site and the stupid video ad thing would be annoying to me, but text changing is fine.
I'm in the same camp as Scott, I find elements like "draft saved" very distracting. It just straightforwardly feels like an accessibility issue to me - if 1% of your users have a bad experience / cannot use your product because of sensory issues, that is bad and you should go fix that! At least with e.g. colourblindness you can ask someone for help on the rare occasion it poses a problem.
Oh, I definitely agree--if there's a contingent who want to turn it off ideally it would be possible to turn off. The problem is (speaking as a software engineer though not one who ever worked on Gmail in particular) that there are 57,292 little usability/accessibility/quality of life improvements that 1% of the userbase want, and none of them will ever happen because the developers are spending half their time keeping the infrastructure working and the other half migrating off of deprecated dependencies.
A product where every option that 1% of users want is configurable is also a nightmare in several ways:
- There's a combinatorial explosion of ways you could have it configured, so it's not possible to test all of them. This leads to situations where certain combinations of options result in totally broken behavior, that was working at one point but someone made a change and didn't test it under your setup.
(An example from my job - when GDPR was new and we introduced options for which cookies were enabled, the site would crash if you enabled advertising cookies but disabled functional cookies, which no one had thought to test because, why would a user do that?)
- Users won't understand what all the options do and will feel overwhelmed, and will end up in undesirable states. Even the developers and support people will often be confused.
-Options that once made sense often become irrelevant, because the feature being configured has changed enough. Now you have a config option laying around the codebase that no one remembers what it was supposed to do and you can't really figure it out from the code because it's changed so much.
I work on a software product with a lot of configuration options, and we are always trying to have fewer of them. Convincing or forcing all users to switch to the same option and then deleting the option is generally seen as a win.
I'm wondering what a screen reader would think of constantly changing text.
Perhaps there's a tag to say "only repeat this once" (or maybe "don't read this out"?).
But in this case, if 5% of your users are on unstable connections and really want to know whether their draft is saved, you can’t accommodate both.
sure you can. you can make the draft saved indicator optional as a user setting.
That has problems of its own. Each setting clutters up the preferences panel or whatever, making other setting marginally harder to find, and it expands the number of combinations of settings that your test matrix should cover.
On this particular issue, there's probably room for a keyhole solution that fine-tunes the feature so it works for both sets of users. For example, they could add some sort of de-bounce feature so the "draft saved" text doesn't get displayed until it's been stable for a second or two.
When the draft fails to save, flash in big red letters DRAFT FAILED TO SAVE, ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO TYPE.
Also, force a check upon navigation if they have unsaved data to confirm they want to discard.
Same, I was imagining flashing GIFs, pop up ads, or video ads on a non video page. Those things annoy me a lot. But the examples in the post barely register for me.
I guess I'd have to see the rotating rabbis in motion to judge, but the autosave notification doesn't bother me at all.
I agree.
When I answered the survey, I thought it was about banner ads and the like. I was picturing elements from the first website I coded, back in 1998, which was a hellscape of blinking text, GIF animations and colors that could scar you for life.
When I occasionally have a hand in designing websites today, I consider flashing GIFs and videos that are meant to grab your attention and tear you away from the main content, to be border-line evil. And I put them in an entirely different category of things than helpful, little status markers or signals that update based on the users' own input, or animations that illustrate/explain something.
In fact, I find *lack of feedback* to be a much bigger, and still all too common, annoyance. Not knowing whether my document/draft/progress is saved, for example. Or not knowing that I've timed out, and will lose my entire 2500-word rant to customer service when I click "Submit" … (That may be a feature, not a bug.)
It's interesting to discover how opinions differ. Now that I know some people get this annoyed, I'll probably think more carefully about how to do stuff like that in the future – hiding it more, making it optional, or otherwise getting the best of both worlds.
(As for screenshoting animations and movement for use in a post – not that Scott will ever need that feature again considering this post – Dropbox Capture and Giphy Capture are both good, at least on the Mac. And adding a gif or video to Substack should be as straightforward as adding any other image.)
Yeah, I was one of people who voted "won't use" in the survey, but when I selected that I was thinking in the range of things like Scott's first example at minimum, up to the infamous "punch the monkey" ads of yesteryear. I never even noticed until now that the "Draft Saved" thing existed.
Same here. I had to open up gmail to confirm that it actually changed dynamically. To my eye it is a very subtle indication that the page hasn't crashed. It just feels like a different class of things to animated banner ads which I agree are annoying. The jewish rabbi website (who must be very confused about the surge of traffic they're getting) is just over the line of annoying, but even that is mild.
I agree wholeheartedly. The jewish law thing or popups are incredibly annoying, but I actually like things like the draft saved animation. Makes me feel secure that my browser hasn't crashed or my internet disconnected and just makes the interface feel more snappy and responsive.
I agree; I like the draft saved notification.
100% Agreement. I don't have any problem ignoring things like the "drafted saved" message. It is pictures that piss me off.
I tried composing a gmail and nothing flashed except the caret that says where you will type. And that actually should!
It’s funny how personal this is. I don’t mind and actually sort of like the Draft Saved notifications, but it irritates me no end when a website’s title changes in the tabs list. One is something that might be important (if I got an actual message or something), and one is an interface thing when I’m already ignoring the entire interface to write my email
Oh yeah, website titles changing in the tabs list almost never happens so when it does it makes me go "?!?!?" for a second.
Ublock Origin doesn't have the flashing text problem, and it's generally recommended over AdBlock Plus these days, after some controversy about AdBlock letting some ads through.
+1 on Ublock Origin. It's got a lighter footprint, cleaner and more unobtrusive UI (no flashing elements!), and doesn't have any history of bad behaviour.
Thirded on uBlock Origin.
More details: Adblock Plus has an "acceptale ads" program. It's supposed to allow "unintrusive" ads. Sounds reasonable. Then, at some point, it started deciding whether an ad is acceptable based not so much on whether it's unintrusive, but whether the advertiser pays the company behind Adblock Plus protection money. uBlock Origin has no such program; the only reason Adblock Plus can pull this off is that it's the best-known ad blocker, and most people don't realize what it's doing. Adblock Plus is developed by a for-profit company, uBlock Origin is community-developed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190613005724/https://medium.com/@trybravery/please-stop-using-adblock-but-not-why-you-think-13280e76c8e7
> the only reason Adblock Plus can pull this off is that it's the best-known ad blocker
The reason I use Adblock Plus and not uBlock Origin is that ABP's UI for blocking an element is easier to use.
At least turn off the acceptable ads thing then; it's on by default, but it can be turned off. (Though ABP's behavior disqualifies them in my mind regardless of whether it's a bit more convenient in some way.)
If i ever find their acceptable ads annoying I will.
I don't dislike ads, I dislike annoying ads.
How about ads that aren't annoying, but didn't pay the racket?
I'll never see them to find out if i should allow them, will I?
(I agree that ABP's practices could be seen as unethical, but I don't care.)
I love that little eyedropper tool so much
+1 to the recommendation
Ha ha, I can't even imagine using anything but uBlock origin, so my brain just assumed that's what he was talking about, and didn't even notice it was Adblock.
Yeah, Scott, uBlock Origin has been way better than Adblock for... 8 years? Long time. Install it everywhere on your phone and computers, and hate online life a little less.
+1. Ublock Origin has been better than Adblock Plus for a *very* long time now.
Once AdBlock Plus sold out (gradually, beginning around 2011) there was a hunt for a successor. It turned out to be uBlock Origin and by 2016 most people (who were aware of the problem) had switched over. uBlock Origin has been the standard recommendation ever since.
I'd like to note: If people are still using LastPass the standard recommendation is to replace it with BitWarden now, for a variety of reasons.
Would you elaborate on the LastPass thing?
The reason I switched was their Firefox extension was leaking lots of memory. But they also got hacked a few times, once somewhat seriously, and they got bought out by a private equity firm.
The effort to switch password managers is low so there is no reason to put up with this kind of stuff. There are a ton of good alternatives, even native browser managers, but I'm confident that BitWarden is the consensus pick.
Also LastPass has more functionality locked behind a paywall. I used to pay them in the early days but now I get the same stuff with BitWarden for free.
Thanks!
I am considering a password manager (not using one atm, but I'm looking at my options). Thing is, I'm not interested in cloud storage; I want it all local. In that case, LastPass getting hacked is not a problem, right? And if my googling so far hasn't misled me, Bitwarden doesn't offer me that option in a straightforward manner?
EDIT: nvm, I was thinking about KeePass when I read LastPass. That's the one I was looking at.
Any password manager is better than not using one. If you don't want cloud storage, look at KeePass; but really, cloud storage is immensely useful here, to ensure your passwords are synced across devices.
There are KeePass extensions that will store the password file in your choice of cloud (OneSrive, GDriive, Dropbox etc)
Using a password manager has always seemed to me like putting all your eggs in one basket. Even a good one could get subtly hacked, or stop working just when you needed it.
Using a bad one would be like asking a passing fox to look after your eggs while you left town for a few days.
Bitwarden is open source. If you really want a pure local experience, in theory you could just run the server part in a local docker container. If you want to use it with multiple devices and sync in between them, you don't have to use their own SaaS offering, you can host it yourself at home or on a VPS (although that is kind of of cloud as well, of course, given that "cloud" has evolved to mean basically "data center that I don't own").
Interestingly I switched from LastPass to BitWarden last year without collecting any information from the consensus, just by trying out ~4 alternatives when I was tired of LastPass's interface.
Good to know great minds think alike. (Or is it idiots seldom differ?)
Yes, seems like Scot is one of today's lucky ten thousand!
https://xkcd.com/1053/
Came in to the comments to also recommend Ublock. Far superior as a service.
I've been enjoying ScriptSafe, which is a general javascript-blocker instead of specifically ads.
It gives me more detailed information about websites work at the tradeoff of having to identify the legit parts of sites and enabling them.
Serious question, don't you see using blocking software as stealing from the very content creators you are using?
As annoying as I find ads, or paying for popsicles, I would never walk into a grocery store and steal a popsicle because I find it annoying to need to pay.
Just because stealing is technologically easy doesn't mean it is right. And just to be clear I hate advertising. If I was dictator part of the platform of my economic policy would be shirking the amount of ads people see by ~90%. But I am not dictator.
Stealing a physical good, and declining to exchange data with server B every time I exchange data with server A, are not the same. The presence of instructions in the HTML provided by server A that would direct a naive browser to engage in such an exchange with server B does not constitute a contract to obey those instructions. The supposition that the entity operating server A may depend on a certain number of naive browsers obeying those instructions to continue to operate is immaterial. You might as well call it theft to order off the dollar menu at a fast food restaurant without purchasing a heavily marked-up soft drink; perhaps the business model and the continued existence of the restaurant depend on people purchasing the profitable sugar water along with the loss-leader miniburgers, but a business plan that relies on certain customer behavior does not impose a moral duty on customers to behave that way. Actual theft, leaving someone else with less because you took it from them without compensation or consent, is a violation of the implicit contract of the marketplace, in addition to being prohibited by law and the moral intuition of the vast majority of people. Comparing ad blocking to theft is preposterous.
I don't even find ads themselves all that annoying. I ad block because I fundamentally object to the premise that I should feel obligated to, say, call up the window repair shop being advertised at the park and tell them that I'm in this park at this time and I saw their advertisement, even though I have no interest in their services. I especially object to the premise that choosing not to do so is stealing from the park because the park derives revenue from the shop in exchange for the advertisement. Having my browser engage in this behavior on my behalf behind the scenes doesn't make it any less intrusive.
Look I am very down on advertising. But I just disagree that.
>Stealing a physical good, and declining to exchange data with server B every time I exchange data with server A, are not the same.
Sure they are the same in the relevant moral way we are discussing.
We as a society have norms/expectations that people posting things online and run ads are trying to pay for their content with your attention to the ads.
If I am running a charity race for cancer, and as part of the race everyone need to wear a jersey with 15 sponsors on them, you are an asshole if you cover up all the sponsors with tape. End of story.
If you want the content that X website is offering, take the content on the terms the website is offering. If you don't like those terms, don't steal from them, but just abstain, like a big boy with some self respect.
> We as a society have norms/expectations that people posting things online and run ads are trying to pay for their content with your attention to the ads.
Remove the word "online". Advertising wasn't born with the World Wide Web. When newsprint media ran ads, did you consider it theft to ignore the full-page advertising spread when flipping through to page A29? When watching broadcast television, did you never get up for a bathroom break or a snack during commercials? Did you tell your children to be big boys if they didn't pay rapt attention to the mattress store jingle? After all, you're receiving content that's being paid for with your attention! When visiting a movie theater, do you always make sure to arrive twenty minutes early so that you can catch all of the pre-show cinema advertising? Those local businesses keep the magic of the theater alive! How could you respect yourself if you didn't?
If you did in fact behave in the above manner, then I have to respect you for your devotion to your principles; though I hope we can at least agree that this would not be what most of our society considers normal.
If not, what is it about being online that changes the relevant moral principles for you?
I'll highlight one thing that's different about online advertising: in print and broadcast media, the advertisement is delivered along with the content. Nothing is asked of the consumer other than to consume the content as it's served up. When online advertising is done this way, I don't block it. The old SSC site had some sidebar banners served from the SSC server; I think one of them was for something called Beeminder? I won't say I paid conscious attention to them as intentional compensation for the content Scott was providing me with, but I didn't take any steps to not-notice them. (Though it still wouldn't have been theft if I did, any more than it would be theft to discard the full-page advertising spread in a newspaper without reading it. Once the content is in my hands, physical or virtual, I have the right to read or not read it how I wish.)
But the bulk of online advertising is not done like this. The bulk of online advertising is the equivalent of asking me to call up the advertising company and tell them when and where I saw their advertisement. We as a society do not have a norm that such requests must be honored. A restaurant is free to put out a sign reminding its patrons to leave a five-star review on Yelp, and patrons are just as free to decline to do so, and I doubt you would find very many people who would consider that morally equivalent to theft.
This isn't about how down I am on advertising, or even on internet surveillance (though, yeah, I'm down on both). This is about what businesses should and should not be allowed to demand of their patrons. Pay for what you take or damage: yes. Conduct yourself appropriately while on premises: yes. Compelled speech to third parties: no.
(Of course, if you enter into an explicit contract with terms that compel your speech, yeah, abide by the terms of the contract or don't agree in the first place. But a browser fetching a webpage doesn't establish a contract, at least in the moral sense. IANAL but I hope it doesn't in a legal sense either—yes yes "terms and conditions" but those are generally unenforceable in the interesting cases, as I understand it.)
This position implies that prospective advertisers, collectively, have a moral right to shut down any content provider, by simply refusing to bid for that site's ad space. I don't think that such a framework leads to the sort of society I prefer to live in.
Websites that I cannot/will not use clutter up my search results and crowd out competition. If a company doesn't offer some content, a likely alternative is that some other company will. Or even a volunteer. In a very real sense, companies are (at least sometimes) taking something away from me by putting up a webpage. So what about the imaginary contract in *my* head that says they shall not do that?
The problem is not even advertising per se, it is that most advertisements are actually scams. And many others slow web sites down to the point that it is essentially impossible to use many websites on mobile devices, even if they nominally have a mobile version. Many people would literally not be able to use the internet at all without an ad blocker.
Most websites aren't presenting it as an exchange, ads in return for content
It's free content with optional ads
Refusing to look at the ads on a free content site isn't any morally different than refusing to click on the ads on a free content site
Perhaps the people who program all these sites to flash hate their jobs and don't want to do them, and also know that there's no disincentive for them to spite their employers by making the web pages awful.
I think it's more that they don't want their effort to be ignored or overlooked so they deliberately make the effect as obtrusive as possible.
This doesn't seem that implausible, actually. There's incentive there.
Yeah, I didn't think of that. At the current rate of things in order for a website team lead to be able to tell anyone is working, he will have to open a browser and instantly die of epilepsy.
Seriously, programmers are not putting this stuff up unless requested to do it by a product or marketing team.
It's a post about blinking rabbi gifs; the commentariat seems less serious than usual.
FWIW, I didn't mean to imply that programmers are unilaterally doing this. I just meant that I can see how there actually is non-zero incentive for the people who *do* make such design decisions to make the change more noticeable in a way that draws attention to their project or contribution.
That's a common problem in video game design, where an often used feature that's ostensibly meant to be unobtrusive fluff instead takes up much more time and space than reasonable, without an option to skip it. Think those Hearthstone pack opening animations.
Speaking as someone who works on UI for a living, UI design is just difficult; even in the best of cases.
There's just a ton of conflicting priorities: it needs draw people's eyes to interactive bits, and indicate the current state of what's going on, and also look visually appealing, and meet business needs (which often conflict with what the user wants - is it surprising that the adblock extension has a 'flashing' donate button?), and needs to be "accessible", which is its own laundry list of eyes to cross and tees to dot.
You're never going to please everyone: If they removed the "Draft Saved" indication, there'd be people asking where the button to save a draft is (not knowing it autosaves).
The 'obvious' answer is "make it an option", and in many cases that's a good choice, but that adds complexity to the UI, and that's more work and options are exponential in complexity: if there are five on/off options, you now have thirty two different combination behaviors that you need to test, so you have to be careful what functionality becomes optional.
There are several things going on here, at least for the "draft saved" style elements. One part is what NormalAnomaly said about "flashing elements" being a concept the covers a lot of ground. Almost everyone finds things like the switching Rabbis at least a little bit annoying, but the "draft saved" type elements are much smaller and less obtrusive. The people who are seriously bothered by the latter are probably relatively few in percentage terms despite being many millions of people in absolute terms, making them easy for dev teams to overlook.
Another is that these elements actually do convey information. And the people working on the product are going to be a lot more interested in when and whether a draft gets saved than ordinary users are. So they'll tend to see them as useful status indicators rather than a random distracting blinky thing.
A lot of these things have been around for a while and used to behave differently, but other stuff has changed so the same design for the element has a different effect. The draft saved status label in Gmail used to change slowly and less frequently, so it wasn't particularly blinky, and draft saved were infrequent enough that it was more useful to have a signal of when it's safe to close the window without losing the last several words you wrote. But as connections have gotten faster, draft saves have become more or less instantaneous most of the time and Google has configured it to try to save more often, so the same behavior of updating the label in real time comes off as blinky. What's probably warranted is either to hide the label by default (as it has lost most of its utility) or at least de-bounce it a bit, either by hiding it while you're actively typing and only showing it when you've paused for a second or two, or by leaving the status as "saving draft" until it's been saved with no further updates for a second or two. Knowing how these products tend to be run, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a task in the backlog to do this, and it would be relatively simple to implement, but it isn't seen as a priority and never floats high enough in the task backlog for it to actually get done.
This is starting to remind me of that video of the woman crying while a man puts all of the blocks through the same hole in the bucket lid.
I do all of my longest insightful writing in the substack comment field which doesn't autosave. If it gets long I ctrl-a ctrl-c it if I get called away (before leaving the browser tab). I'm also on mobile right now as we speak, with a bluetooth keyboard or sometimes talk to text. I haven't written a work email that was worth autosaving in at least ten years. if I'm going to write anything important i do it in sublime text. When I write these comments I mostly don't even look at the screen while I type, and only proofread at the end. I say all of this autobiographical text-entry information to conclude that as a percentage of users I must be in some tiny fraction of a percent that no UI designer could ever possibly care about.
> But as connections have gotten faster
I just got back from a long weekend in the Scottish Highlands, and my phone was basically unusable for most of that time even when I supposedly had signal. Even for some apps which could in principle have done all the work I needed locally. Please, I implore you, think of your users with slow or intermittent connections.
My current team at my current employer does. I'm currently involved in design discussions on how to improve one particular aspect of user experience for desktop and fast-mobile users without breaking the experience for slow-mobile users. For this particular feature, CPU usage is more of a concern than bandwidth, but bandwidth constraints (not just for "phone in the Scottish Highlands" use cases, but sometimes also for desktop usage in countries/regions with bad infrastructure) have also been a major concern on other features/products I've worked on at the same company.
Other companies I've worked at have been more sanguine about such things, sadly. Sometimes because it's purely a desktop product targeted at a user base with good infrastructure access (e.g. large-company corporate IT tools), and sometimes because of a strategic decision to focus just on users with decent connections.
> My current team at my current employer does.
Yay!
> not just for "phone in the Scottish Highlands" use cases, but sometimes also for desktop usage in countries/regions with bad infrastructure
Oh yeah, I found Dan Luu's post https://danluu.com/web-bloat/ eye-opening in that regard.
for google etc, I think these UI elements are designed as "heartbeat", letting users know the site is live. for the large banners, it just might be aestethic - but low status aesthetics.
If you remember the start of personal websites, flashing blinking elements were RAD. It's something that appeals strongly to a subsection of the population that also does not go on ACX, like the olden ones and the children, who either delight in sensory overload, or need a kind of feedback when inteacting with technology.
I like that concept of “heartbeat”. I’ve found myself looking for it sometimes to figure out if my connection died, at least subconsciously.
Which is itself an annoying UI element: Things which are supposed to be there as heartbeats, to show that the site is live, but are actually some sort of animated image, or blinking tag implemented in the browser, or other thing which wouldn't actually stop if the site wasn't live any more.
The programmers don’t design and release the websites themselves, stuck in a cubicle, with no input from the CEO, marketing or sales etc. the design comes from the top and nothing is released to production without executive agreement.
Oh you sweet summer child.
Maybe I'll spend my retirement writing a book about how software development *actually* works.
But why take it out on the customers? The only time I hated my employer enough to want to spite them, I named a bunch of their new servers after Icelandic volcanoes, such as fagradalsfjall and hromundartindur. (I drew the line at accented letters, as that would have been too much of a giveaway, and Unicode was less supported back then.)
These are great server names. And I believe Chapelle has the most famous answer to the question of why treat the customer this way...
In case anyone is as suspicious as I, Hromundartindur is an actual Icelandic volcano, as confirmed by a one-sentence-long Wikipedia entry that appears to exist only for the sake of those needing confirmation that Hromundartindur is an actual Icelandic volcano.
Yes, there's an online interactive catalog at https://icelandicvolcanos.is/?volcano=HRO
I imagine that most people who answered your survey were not at all imagining a single text element changing to indicate status, and were instead imagining annoying flashing banner ads, like you mentioned at the start of the post.
Along the same lines as the "just use protonmail" gmail support comments, I will throw in a recommendation for uBlock Origin over Adblock Plus. Mostly due to the "acceptable ads" fiasco, but your screenshot of the ABP interface also looks covered in, well, ads, to upgrade and share on social media and install it on all your devices. The UBO interface is mostly buttons to block things in various ways.
(Copying over all your custom filters should be straightforward)
I think on the survey, people may consider flashing elements to be things like banner ads or newsletter sign ups, so that may skew numbers. At least, I wouldn't consider the Saving Draft stuff to be what the question was asking about.
On a side note, consider using uBlock Origin instead, it has no flashing and doesn't have the controversies that Adblock does.
Edit: Ha, looks like everyone has the same thought.
If you're interested in some of what is known about causal effects of ads on websites, I cover a lot of material in my banner-ad page: https://gwern.net/ad
For the most part, I never even notice this kind of stuff. I had no idea about the flashing Google drafts message, even though I use GMail for both work and personal use. On the other hand, the alternating rabbi photos would probably annoy me.
>And speaking of AdBlock, its interface looks like this:
What you want is uBlock Origin. And also possibly NoScript.
One note: you're using AdBlock Plus instead of uBlock Origin and should stop that. ABP in 2016 started allowing certain ads and is more resource intensive while having fewer features. uBO is also open source.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/19/business/media/adblock-plus-created-to-protect-users-from-ads-opens-the-door.html
I don't know if design is getting worse, but I've noticed an increase in my "wow, you are doing something so annoying I literally don't want to use your site" reactions these days.
It's gotten to the point where I'll open the dev console and delete/hide the offending element rather than put up with it.
I've been doing that for years now. I'm up to about 400 lines of CSS in Stylish and around 20,000 user rules in UBlock Origin, and I still add at least 5-10 per day.
Sadly I haven't found a solution for 'unsticking' elements without hiding them on mobile, which makes Substack infuriating to use.
I've found this: https://github.com/t-mart/kill-sticky recently and it's been amazing.
The extension ekill is handy for this. It's useful if you have a visual element you want to remove, but don't want to create an Adblock rule for it. It's similar to xkill for X11. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/ekill/
What I would love is an Android web browser that doesn't let video autoplay so that all of my data isn't wasted on bullshit. Is there one?
The Brave browser is capable of turning off auto play and looks available on android.
Thank you! I will check it out
The Brave browser can also be configured to automatically block GDRP cookie consent pop-ups, which I find indespensible when traveling in Europe.
While UBlock origin is certainly the ultimate solution for those who want to control everything, Brave does a good job of blocking 99 percent of what I want blocked without breaking most web sites using a very simple interface (shields up/down with blocking standard/aggressive/disabled) and community supported block lists.
There is a Brave rewards program you can use to get "paid" to see ads via BATs (basic attention tokens), but you can completely disable it (which I do, the value I place on my basic attention vastly exceeds what any sane advertiser would want to pay).
The Brave browser can also be configured to automatically block GDPR cookie consent pop-ups, which I find indespensible when traveling in Europe.
While UBlock origin is certainly the ultimate solution for those who want to control everything, Brave does a good job of blocking 99 percent of what I want blocked without breaking most web sites using a very simple interface (shields up/down with blocking standard/aggressive/disabled) and community supported block lists.
There is a Brave rewards program you can use to get "paid" to see ads via BATs (basic attention tokens), but you can completely disable it (which I do, the value I place on my basic attention vastly exceeds what any sane advertiser would want to pay).
I usually attempt to use the mobile version of the site if I can. It's usually cleaner.
Cannot stand flashing anything. I leave. Period. Extreme "green" in your chart.
Pretty sure I said the flashing mildly annoyed me, but I was very much thinking of the Jewish Rabbis. The Draft Saved indicator is so small, and practically the same color as the background, that it doesn't bother me. And I had to open Adblock to see it was doing that, I tune that part of the board out entirely. (Granted, that means whatever it's supposed to be doing, it isn't doing it.)
Thinking about it, I think videogames with loading screens still benefit from changing the text on them; if nothing else it tells you the thing hasn't frozen. So there are situational exceptions.
Perhaps the idea is that when you’re trying to do one thing, there shouldn’t be anything distracting you from it, but when you’re just waiting and watching, you actively want it to do something to show that it’s working.
Those things drive me nuts. If there is something moving on the page, I can't read the text. Luckily, most browsers support reader mode which really helps. I also keep a post-it note handy to block things.
For technical control freaks, I've been told the answer is Stop the Madness, but I haven't tried it yet.
Does Stop the Madness exist for platforms other than Mac and iOS? I don't see it.
I've been using the Togglific add-on for Firefox on desktop, but it doesn't catch everything and is an "overkill" button for when a page is ridiculous with it. Other than that I mostly have to use uBlock Origin's eyedropper / element zapper tool.
I don't think so. There may be an alternative for the Windows and Android worlds.
Ages ago, Pippin Barr put out his It's As If You Were Doing Work web page. Like work, it's full of meaningless tasks and ridiculous interruptions. Now, it seems every web site is like that.
https://pippinbarr.com/itisasifyouweredoingwork/info/
Flashing ads exist to maximize revenue in basically the way you'd expect. If you get paid per impression and an impression needs 5 seconds then you can get 12 ads in a minute. They also increase attention paid to the ads (which is generally quite low for banner display ads). While you find it annoying the adnets want to make money more than they want to please you. Though I expect they'll decrease as we're increasingly training users to expect to pay for content and as ad rates go down.
Flashing interface elements exist because people expect feedback on their actions. Action and reaction. If you don't give them a reaction then they think nothing happened. There's no permanent way to display it because it has to show up in response to the action. Meaning it has to change in some way on the action and then un-change to wait for new actions. If you have a different solution to this I'd be interested in hearing it. Making it an option takes some extra work but should be doable if there's enough demand people will actually switch over it.
Also, remember the median internet user is not extremely online and generally needs some degree of assistance/guidance. Accessibility and ease of use is almost considered synonymous with good design.
I think the feedback issue is a lot easier than that. As a user, I’m happy to assume everything is working fine unless the app tells me it isn’t. That’s how the problem was generally solved for years.
If I’m on a plane, I need a message from the crew to put an oxygen mask on, I don’t need a "the plane is still flying" announcement every 20 seconds.
More modern planes do have an interface that informs you the plane is still on course continuously on the tv monitors. And even ancient ones have flashing symbols in those lights that tell you about whether you can get up or need to put on your seat belts.
Do you have an example of a site that years ago didn't provide reactions to user actions to confirm something was occurring? I can't think of any even previously.
I worked on google docs years ago and 90% certain it didn’t have the "saving your changes now" message at the time. It had three things:
- A one-time popup telling new users why there is no save button
- A yellow banner if it failed to save due to connection issues
- A popup if you were trying to close the page with not-yet-saved changes
You were the only one who read the popup about no save button. No one ever does. For normal use, assume no one had any way of learning that and were accordingly frustrated when they wanted to save.
And that's why it changed.
Nobody needs to know that something is being cached to disk every so often. This isn’t in response to the input, the displayed text is the response to user input, it’s something the engineering team has decided and the design team has surfaced. In general software is writing to the disk all the time, which you can measure with some command line utilities. You don’t need to know.
Whether the auto save is working is something that you probably do want continuous feedback on, if you might be drafting something long and don’t want the cognitive burden of worrying it might be lost.
If you’re in an airplane, you always have constant information that the plane is still flying, through the noise and vibration. But think about an elevator - there are occasional elevators that move so slowly and quietly that you worry that it’s stuck. You don’t want that.
There is an obvious way to fix that, if indeed you need constant reassurance that things are working as they are intended to work. Provide no attention-grabbing feedback if auto save is on, and a sudden and continuous banner alert if auto-save capability is lost.
Blinky lights need only be used to alert you that something’s gone wrong, and in fact are more effective in drawing your attention that way. When your status light is constantly blinking, it trains you to ignore state changes in the interface.
That doesn’t work though, because when the connection is lost is precisely when they can’t send the alert.
There’s a reason cursors blink, but in a relatively unobtrusive way.
Gdocs immediately kills your ability to edit within a handful of words of the internet going off, so you're wrong.
Not true and hasn't been true for years. Offline editing is a majbr feature.
a) It is extremely easy to automate an alert that only appears on failure to save to server; it is just as easy as automating an alert when you successfully save to the server.
b) A lot of cursors don’t blink. It’s only a convention that most word processor cursors don’t blink, it’s not universal, and as far as I can tell the main reason a cursor that inserts text blinks is to further distinguish it from a cursor that overwrites text, which is really the original word processor cursor style. But it’s really unnecessary to distinguish them in that way and my favored word processor for long form writing does not have a blinking cursor.
They can poll client-side to see if connection is lost, but still only alert you when it is.
Yes. I see plenty of “you are offline” banners. That said bring online iaht what Kenny wants but reassurance that his text is saving.
I get that to an extent, I hit cmd-S a lot.
“Flashing interface elements exist because people expect feedback on their actions”
Somehow, mysteriously, people know that drafts are saved in offline email clients without being told they’re saved every 175 milliseconds.
The idea that constant feedback on nonessential background tasks is required because of my 70 year old Aunt Sally is absurd. Aunt Sally expects no feedback whatsoever besides that for her immediate actions. She grew up typing on a keyboard or writing longhand. The only feedback she wants is the letters appearing, and she doesn’t want anything on the screen but the page she’s writing!
Dialectics to the rescue, I guess.
By which I mean, you're probably both correct in a way. People didn't need to be told the software on their computer does things in the background because the expectation is that computer software works. People do need and expect feedback on dynamic websites because they're quick to learn those are fundamentally unreliable.
The solution should be to ditch dynamic websites (for standalone programs when complex features and/or real-time responsiveness are needed, and for static websites for when they're not), but that would require correcting the paradigm the entire industry has been built upon, so it will refuse to do so.
I really love that sometimes this blog just covers really specific personal complaints. Very humanizing. Zero irony btw, I also hate flashing elements.
This post made me realize how often I will look at the wall while typing if it's remotely long and I'm typing quickly. It's probably related.
That said, I am another person who wouldn't consider "draft saved" to be a flashing element on the survey, so I don't have it as bad as Scott.
I'm surprised this article doesn't seem to consider the massive selection bias inherent in the ACX survey, and assumes that 16% of survey respondents equates to 16% of all internet users. That seems like complete nonsense to me; people who like to read 10,000 word book reports are not remotely representative of the average person. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the average person likes those sorts of flashing text elements, and including them gets them more users.
(That doesn't explain why there isn't an option to turn it off though.)
Nothing worse than Facebook's messaging popups which flash to indicate that the other party is typing. It's the visual equivalent of phone music interrupted by "Your call is important to us..."
I'm working on an antidote:
https;//conntects.net
It's not finished yet, but I can safely guarantee that it won't flicker, because I hate writing JavaScript. I'm writing a social networking site in which every url is a genuine page. No infinite scrolling. No gigantic JavaScript framework upload. Instead of a single-page JavaScript app pulling in data, actual server served pages include just enough JavaScript to do whatever dropdown menus, etc. are needed on the page.
If you want to see what's new, you need to refresh the home page.
Social media is frying our brains.
But connecting with geographically dispersed friends is useful...
I don't mind a changing element as long as it is doing something useful. Reporting that my current draft has been saved is useful information.
I recall keeping the lights of my modem within view back in my BBS days. The pattern could tell me if I was connected yet, or still connecting, or if a file transfer was full or half duplex or just stuck. I normally hate flashing elements, but that had enough utility that I would bear it.
Both images showcase Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the preeminent authority in Sephardic Jewish law. One image captures his younger years, while the other depicts him in older age.
Web banner flickers,
In Gmail, a draft takes root,
Different, yet alike.
Are you pronouncing "different" as two syllables?
Almost all Americans nearly or completely elide the middle syllable when speaking quickly, i.e., “diff’rent.”
Now, again, again
The blinky info kills me
"FML" I cry.
Gmail drafts flash only when there is a subject. While drafting an email, leave the subject blank. If you really need it, say to recognize a draft among a list of drafts in progress, start the email body with the subject. Once the draft is done, enter the subject, and send it off.
Interesting, thanks!
Ah ha! I was wondering why I'd never noticed this 'draft saved' thing despite high sensitivity to extraneous stimuli. I always write the subject line last--it's the hardest part to compose, after all.
Balking a bit at those claiming 'draft saved' is useful information. Is it actionably useful, such that you'd behave differently (and more optimally) than you would without the message? If not, it seems like 'useful' just means 'technically true' or 'theoretically useful to someone, maybe' here, and as it's not necessarily helpful to be reminded of all true things at all times, that seems like a low bar for a new distracting stimulus to clear.
I want to know whether or not my drafts are being saved, because if they're not, I want to stop typing and fix my internet connection so I don't lose the text I've written and have to start over.
However, there's no need for anything to be flashing about it. We have local storage in browsers now, so you can save the text even if the network goes away. And even if you are only saving to the network, better to have a green "online" indicator, and not make it flash unless something happens to change that.
(Now, in practice I'm like NormalAnomaly up above -- my brain mostly tunes out things that flash predictably like that. And I don't trust software authors to be competent, so I get some value from an indicator that flashes every time something good happens -- which is harder to fuck up -- instead of one that I have to trust will change when something good fails to happen.)
Yes--it's good to know when your heart stops beating, but I think it's lucky and not a coincidence that the mechanism by which we know this isn't constant awareness of the beating of our hearts. And tech has far less excuse for producing human-hostile systems than our own biology does, imo.
Google basically kills your ability to write within five words of your internet connection going down anyway so there's no need to flash a little "all clear on the western front" every ten seconds.
It’s useless as there’s nothing you can do about it, either way. If there’s a browser crash and your draft is saved up until the last ten words when you get back in then that’s great news. Hurray for google engineers.
But you don’t need to know that as you type.
If I’m worried that my typing won’t be saved, I’ll open a separate file and copy/paste over there occasionally. Knowing that it’s saved is therefore actionable by saving me that effort, and the associated cognitive load of constantly deciding whether I should be doing that.
With respect, some feedback: low-effort personal gripe posts like this[1] lower the signal-to-noise ratio of ACX, and make it less pleasant to browse. I would like to see fewer of them.
[1] Subjectively, I would put the "block you on Twitter" post in the same category, even though it did include include some genuine insight about the incentives of journalists versus regular people.
Also, I realized that it's kind of bogus to complain about a Substack I'm not paying for, so I just (re-)subscribed monthly (not sure I how I was ever unsubscribed).
I realize this is exactly the wrong incentive, but whatever. ;)
I appreciate your advice and subscription, but the Twitter block post is among my top 10% most read/liked, and this post is also shaping up to be, so I think you're outvoted.
I didn't really mind this post, but I'm slightly disturbed by the implication that you are fully optimising for most read/liked.
We've all seen where that road ends.
“Fully optimizing” is really too strong here.
To weigh the preference of one reader against those of many others shouldn't imply that posts are optimizing metrics, especially given this post has a specific purpose—to get designers to stop using flashing elements.
Anyway, I agree with Anon’s sentiment but think eliminating annoying flashing is worth it.
Optimising for engagement has not exactly made the internet a better place.
Is it a surprise both posts score highly? They're easy reads, in the sense they took little concentration to read, and on topics anyone can have an opinion about.
(To avoid being purely negative: I'm really enjoying the Asterisk project overall, and hope it keeps going.)
I never understand this use of signal to noise, I mean what is being said is all signal if what it is trying to convey is what it is read as conveying.
I think for some the "signal" here is: "learn new thing". Hearing about personal gripes often isn't that. So it is "noise" in that context.
> Hearing about personal gripes often isn't that.
“Boomer yells at clouds”
I would add the nav bar that appears and disappears based on how you scroll to the list of offenders. Not only does it pop on and grab your attention, but if you scroll down one click too far and have to scroll up one line, it pops on, covering the exact line you were trying to read. I have custom CSS loaded for sites I frequent (including SubStack) to remove that useless element.
This is the absolute worst thing about Substack. It's even worse than the popup to subscribe that folks are complaining about down below.
This, a thousand times this. I do a similar CSS thing, though I try to de-sticky the bar instead of removing it. Even then, some sites make it hard to find the offending element in the DOM, with other garbage layered on top of it. Drives me up the wall.
I chose my avatar image in the hopes that it would be seen as an obvious bug that they would be allowed.
Clearly that approach has failed.
It just looks like a purple circle to me; should it look like something else?
Interesting: does https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_64,h_64,c_fill,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc8ad5d03-df94-4738-9300-e7faab556255_32x32.gif show up “properly”?
No, just looks like a purple square. I might have some anti-animation plugin I've forgotten about.
It's a snippet of a dazed lemming from the old game. Either way, I'll change it now.
It’s a GIF (Substack app on iOS)
To me it looks like a grey/white circle.
It looks more beige.
I've read only a few sentences. And I have to ask, can you ask commenters not to have blinking or changing icons... The round thing next to your name.
+1
You have a popup to subscribe which enrages me you hypocrite.
Wait, I do? Has anyone else seen this? I thought I disabled it.
you absolutely have a popup to subscribe
This post is current at the top of hacker news, and the top comment is “And as I scroll down and read the article you present me with a popup to subscribe, alienating and enraging me.”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36501657#36502081
Makes me imagine writing a "every web page is bloated now, please stop"-type post on Substack, the page that is currently chugging on my laptop as I write a text comment.
I remember you originally disabled the default Substack pop-up. Since then they invented a new type of subscription pop-up that shows up as someone starts to scroll down thru a post. Perhaps since you didn't specifically ask them to disable this new one, it's still enabled
Thank you for telling me. I think I've disabled it now. Can someone who was previously seeing it confirm?
It still appears after you scroll down the page
Weird, I've disabled everything relating to that on my settings page. Might be a bug. I'll email Substack.
Hi Nero. I work at Substack, and I'm helping troubleshoot this issue. Could you tell me what device and application you're using when this happens, and what page it happens on. If you're viewing in a web browser, please could you refresh and try again. Thanks for your help!
My Experience: Windows 10, Google Chrome
If you access the site for the first time (in a new incognito mode window for example) and scroll down for a little while, a substack pop up appears with a subscribe to newsletter with an email entry pop and a continue reading below that in a harder to read color.
Hi NMS, thanks for helping us troubleshoot this issue. Please could you refresh your browser and let me know if it's still happening to you.
Thanks, it doesn't seem to be happening anymore as far as I can tell. Tried it on Windows Edge and Chrome.
Thank you, NMS - I appreciate you testing that and getting back to me!
Maybe you should have mentioned it before the rage stage?
Anyone out there with amblyopia or strabismus?
I have Scott's level of difficulties with websites or applications that have differently-formated information menus on the same screen at the same time.
For example, if you've ever tried to maintain a website in Wordpress: the "Posts" screen at login will have pop-ups from your plugins that appear in a white box and in a certain formatting (I think it's different for each plug-in), then you've got different kinds of posts in a hyperlink-style menu on a horizontal strip across the screen, then just below that you've got drop-down menus (in a new formating style), then below that, looking like it's a column that lines up with the drop-down menus (but not connected) is a list of your posts. Meanwhile on the left side of the screen you've got a "dashboard" with a verticle list on the left side of screen. Click on any option on the dashboard and another verticle list pops out with slightly smaller fonts and spacing.
All of this is murder on people who have difficulty making small short regular eye-movements. I hate it so much. And so much of our tech is structured like this.
Yeah, this is annoying. I'm unable to watch as I type into a brower address bar—every key stroke updates the options in an annoying drop down menu that can't be disabled. I'll typically either close my eyes or look at the wall to my left.
Yes, when Chrome added pictures to that drop down menu, I had to look Will Smith in the eyes every time I started typing "will it rain tomorrow".
I've changed to Firefox and have not looked back.
Empirically I'll pay at least an extra $20 not to use Frontier's website (ie, I once got a United flight that cost $20 more than Frontier, just to avoid Frontier's website), which gets to the point of so-bad-it's-funny in terms of web design. I mean, they really do everything to maximize website awfulness, not just the popups and flashing things, but that was a very stark financial illustration of what web design is worth to me.
Of course, Frontier's bad web design is meant to wring money out of people drop by drop, and I assume it's succeeding there to such a high degree that it doesn't matter how many people avoid them just for the web problems.
Just today I was annoyed, after going to the local news station's website (as I often do) to read the weather bulletin, examine the 7-day forecast, and enjoy the future radar feature, to have that morning's TV weather spot come up as a video it was difficult to close as the "x" disappeared into the radar background. I have demonstrated my fealty to the station. Why are you ruining my experience of your content? Why should the TV spot override the material presented by the same person who made the TV spot?
But that was as nothing compared to trying to cancel a streaming service and "add-on" that I had unwisely decided to take a free trial flyer on. About twenty minutes into the free trial, the thought of watching anything on Hulu/Starz became depressing and I moved to cancel. To do this you "toggle" between a check mark and a plus sign and an x, which come and go, appear and disappear. Doh, there it goes back again! Got it! No, fool, you missed it again! Oh, better luck next time!
Amazon's getting got by the FTC for it being too many clicks to unsub. Unironically, report them.
I vaguely heard about that, and - ironically - as a practiced Amazon free-trialer, once a year for both myself and elderly parent, I find their cancellation process a breeze! It's nothing to this Hulu-with-add-on.
Anyone out there with strabismus or amblyopia and have this kind of difficulty just from using software that has a lot of menus, ribbons, and pop-ups? And also hate lots of colors and low contrast?
Hate: Microsoft Word, Wordpress
Love: DrudgeReport, F.Lux darkroom mode.
So-So: Excel (yah grids!)
I really miss the old days when word processor menu options were words (!!) in dropdown menus. Most ribbon icons are almost completely illegible to me - like I have to verbally describe an icon in my head to figure out what it might mean, every single time.
I know pictographic writing systems technically work, but...if I were Chinese I'm pretty sure I would have dyslexia.
Hide as many icons as you can and use the search/command prompt to activate. In Google it's Alt+/ or just clicking on "help" then start typing. In Microsoft it is Alt+Q or clicking on the search bar on top. It has access to everything in the toolbar as well as all of the menus as far as I have seen, including options normally nested under other items.
I've even started to let hotkeys fade from memory other than undo/redo and bold/italics/underline. Easier just to hit Alt + / and then type "filter view" or "pivot table" or whatever.
Doesn't work when I don't know the name of the thing I'm looking for. The whole point of a GUI is that users aren't supposed to *need* to memorize some abstruse code to use it.
They just need to memorize what category or geographical location that feature is in?
If you want full drop-down menus oriented in columns, google suite still has them.
Although Microsoft 365 has the ribbon instead of drop-down menus most of the icons have text on them, so it's just a 2-dimensional menu.
The bigger problem is that there are just so many options.
If you want to describe what a feature does and see what it's called there's never been a solution for that in-app (until Bard/GPT gets integrated).
>They just need to memorize what category or geographical location that feature is in?
No, quite the opposite. Microsoft's ribbon menus offer decent verbal hints to tell you the general geographic location, but choosing a specific option requires either reading pictograms or memorizing shortcuts. https://images.bit-tech.net/content_images/2014/02/why-the-microsoft-office-ribbon-is-still-ru/ribbon%202013s.jpg
(The pictograms have been there for a long time, but they flattened them out, removed most of the color and skeuomorphic cues, and took away the text dropdowns that used to work as backups.)
I haven't bothered with Google Docs really because I have 365. Maybe I'll try it.
Yeah, check out Google Docs / Sheets. If you like menus you can have menus. I use both but aside from very specific use-cases for Microsoft 365, G-suite just has a lot more useful tools and conveniences. (query function in sheets, google apps script, referencing other documents easily, calendar/gmail integration, etc)
But I'll also throw out that's the home tab of the ribbon which has the most common buttons. And even then, in Excel's home tab 17/39 buttons have text names on them and other tabs have nearly 100% text labels. Now sure, left/right/center alignment don't have the name alignment on them (even though it is in the ribbon tab group), but after familiarizing yourself with the most common commands for awhile, I still argue in a text-based environment the easiest way to access them is just hitting alt + q align (or alt + q left). For most things I've ever wanted to do I've just guessed at what I'd call it and usually been pretty right.
A tool I like for these kind of things is Tampermonkey - it's an extension that lets you run arbitrary bits of code on specific webpages to modify their behavior. Obviously this is most useful if you're a programmer who can write their own scripts, but there do exist some decent repositories of scripts out there, like https://greasyfork.org . (Or if you know a web developer these things are generally quick to write)
Granted, for just blocking stuff the adblock 'block specific elements' tools probably work well enough in a lot of cases, but tampermonkey scripts are a lot more flexible. (IIRC some people use this sort of script to put back the like buttons on this site...)
Yes, I came here to say this. I will write custom CSS to force flashing website elements to not flash. If custom CSS doesn't work, I will write custom JS to do it. If I can't do it with custom JS, I will nice the bowser window to position the flashing thing off-screen, which works a surprising amount of time (using Alt-Space M Arrowkeys if necessary). If I can't do it with that, I'll just avoid using the website. If I really have to use the website, I will position an Always-On-Top window like Task Manager to cover the offending element, though by this stage I'd probably just put up with it if it's "small text change" rather than "autoplay video" or "bouncing 'notification' icon".
Also try Javascript Manager. It works by blocking javascript for sites like your Jewish law web site but would probably break interactive sites like gmail.
https://js-manager.freebusinessapps.net/
You don't need an extension to disable Javascript (and especially not one from a website that looks that seedy, IMO). It's a pretty standard feature built into most web-browsers, e.g. with Chrome it can be configured here: chrome://settings/content/javascript (This doesn't highlight as a link, but you can copy it into your browser bar)
True. It's just more convenient to click one button on the toolbar to turn javascript off/on. I've used this extension for years without issues.
After disabling javascript many (if not majority) not necessarily interactive websites become unusable. In fact many websites become unusable even after blocking external javascript (like with regretfully discontinued umatrix, which I still use after installing it many years ago), because they are using standard libraries pulled from CDN's. Besides, it does not solve all problems with nausea inducing (or simply distracting) web design since you can easily make animations, background changes, blinking elements, parallax efects and others using pure CSS.
I've been having good experience with ScriptSafe, which also blocks JavaScript, but on the level of per-origin-site so that I can do things like allow YouTubes range of video servers while disabling their ad-servers.
A browser extension on a site covered in Sponsored Links and hosted on a domain called “free business apps dot net” — what year is this? — doesn’t help with its credibility.
NoScript (https://noscript.net/) does the same thing, but it’s open source, vetted, and included in Chrome’s and Firefox’s extension libraries.
Thank you for posting this. Even thought this annoyed me, I was not even aware.
I assumed these annoyance as a fact of life—as opposed to something that I can avoid (e.g. by migrating from services) and change (I design user interfaces, so I will take this into account).
Sometimes we forget that we have agency in this world, but you need to be aware first. In other words, mindfulness predates change.
“As long as you keep typing, the ‘Saving Draft’ button flashes in the upper left corner every few seconds.”
I find it bizarre anyone could care about this. I like reassurance my draft is getting saved! I’ve lost it on at least one occasion. There are people who are bothered by this? Really!?!
After I read Scott's piece I thought that maybe my browser or something was saving me from these plagues. But I checked, and yep, "draft saved" is blinking on and off in both gmail and Substack draft pages. I never noticed it even once! But I have a bunch of other sensory sensitivities, so I get it. (I sleep with 2 white noise machines running plus the best earplugs I can find stuffed into my ears, and a thick mask plus a piece of cloth over my eyes).
Yes. Extremely. When something moves or changes in my peripheral vision against an otherwise static scene, my eyes instantly try to focus on it. This is completely involuntary, it happens before I'm even consciously aware of the stimulus, and I have no conscious control over it.
(It actually happens even when I don't consciously perceive the stimulus at all. I'll notice my eyes jumping and have a vague sense that something just flashed, but have absolutely no idea what it was and only a vague impression of where it was.)
Every time this happens, it resets my working memory. If I'm reading, I have to start over from the beginning of the sentence, and sometimes the paragraph; if I'm trying to follow complex mathematical or logical reasoning, I may have to go back even farther.
> I like reassurance my draft is getting saved!
I would prefer a less annoying alternative. For example, if a warning about possibly unsaved changes appeared automatically when you start editing, but only disappeared if you *clicked* on it (even if the state is actually already saved). Or with some time limit, like the page may be saved each 5 seconds, but the status changes only after the page was saved for 1 minute.
In other words, the problem is when the page is unsaved, but there is no problem when the page is saved but you were not notified about it soon enough.
If you’re on a shaky connection, then not having notification that it’s saved may drive you to do inefficient things to stay safe, like opening a text editor and copy/pasting there frequently. Having an invisible net under you while you’re doing circus arts makes you play it safe, which is a cost. You want to be able to see the net, so you will take appropriate risks.
Instead of displaying "saved/unsaved" information automatically every second, it could be available on request. Click a "Save" button, and then a message is displayed after the document is saved. If the document was already saved, the message appears immediately after clicking the button.
This gives you the safety, without constant flashing.
I think the reason I’m not bothered by “draft saved” type UI elements is that they’re responding to my interaction with the page. Like, it doesn’t bother anybody that when you type a “A”, a little “A” flicks into visibility on the screen. That’s something you did. Well, the “draft saved” thing is the same, just on a slight time delay. It’s reporting that it finished the task your keystroke assigned it. I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me.
Also, somebody should mention that web companies often thoroughly A/B test features like this, and won’t deploy one to the whole user base before they’ve collected exhaustive metrics describing the effect it has on user engagement. They are also well aware of how many people are switching to ProtonMail after a new UI feature comes out. For a feature like the “draft saved” thing, which doesn’t make them any money except via making the user experience better, you can bet it adds more value overall than it subtracts.
That falls short of explaining why they resist making it optional, with the default being “on”.
Maybe they're going to build that soon. But it's probably a harder feature to build than the "draft saved" notification is, because it (probably) requires adding a field to some backend database of user preferences. It's a full stack task, not just a front end UI thing.
Every feature you might build always has the drawback that it costs company resources that could be devoted to something else. If people are asking for it, I'd expect "build a 'turn off draft saved notification' checkbox option" is on the future roadmap somewhere. But it may not be high priority.
As Eric Lippert has said, every feature starts with a score of -100 points; every toggle needs to be designed, implemented, tested, translated, and signed off on. It introduces additional surface space for bugs and makes the application more complex. Plus, too many toggles means endless pages of settings that confuse people.
I had never noticed the "Draft saved" thing on gmail before. I am unbothered but understand your frustration with it.
One strategy I piloted that I thought I would share: you can just give your email the subject "Draft saved" until you're done, and then change it to what you actually want. There's still a millisecond where it goes to "Draft saving..." but this would get rid of most of the flashy/blinky thing.
I have a low tech suggestion for you Scott. "Draft saved" is on the upper left on both the Substack and gmail drafting page. Get a small piece of very opaque paper and fold it sharply in half, & drape it with the fold on top so that it covers only the part of your screen with the fucking "draft saved" blinkers. I'm not bothered by blinkers, but I cannot stand seeing my face on the screen when I'm video conferencing. It's not that I'm critical of my appearance -- well I *am,* but that's not the problem in this case -- it's that watching myself smile and open and close my mouth as I talk makes everything seem sort of derealized and fake, like I'm an actor. So I keep little folded pieces of paper near the laptop to cover my onscreen mug!
If you are bothered by having whatever else is in the upper left of the screen covered by the paper, use a transparent piece of plastic, and the stick a little piece of opaque paper just to cover the crucial spot.
Sticky notes.
Would not work for me because of one of my sensory sensitivities, which is to color: hate the eye-catching colors sticky notes come in. But yeah, for Scott a simpler solution unless he too hates bright pink and yellow.
Google Meet lets you minimise your video feed, maybe that's an option in whatever you're using, too, and just a hidden UI element? (For Google Meet, you need to hover over your own video feed to see the minimise option, for example.)
Not sure if this came up yet, but the photos of the Rabbis are actually of the same Rabbi--Rav Ovadia Yosef. Just photos of him at different ages. No idea why the website creator decided to have it flip between the two, but honestly more curious about why you were on a halacha website.
Looking for mitzvot about web design, probably.
(For example, is it okay to render breadcrumbs on Sabbath? Does the answer change if they were rendered the previous days and stored in the server cache?)
Huh. I thought I hated flashing elements, but by that I mean -flashing- elements, ones that change all the time. I never even noticed the "Draft saved" thing in Gmail, not that I write messages in Gmail very often. I don't mind that. What I mind is ones that are constantly changing, or jiggling around, which is done specifically to attract attention.
I guess this comes from different levels of sensory filtration. Me and seemingly most people aren't bothered by the draft saved, which is designed to be unobtrusive. Scott has mentioned in other posts that he lives in quiet part of town and hates parties and seems to have a bunch of sensory sensitivities.
I'm normally super annoyed by "saving..." indicators, roamresearch has what I think is a good compromise; It's just a circle that's orange when there are unsaved changes, green when save is complete. I don't notice it changing unless I look at it.
If I agreed with you any more on this topic, we would spontaneously enter into a Vulcan mind-meld.
As much as I approve of this message, it's not going to accomplish anything if you insist on framing it as "everyone." You are the only person I've ever encountered who feels as strongly and consistently about this as I do. I'm shocked that the survey figure for "would stop using" was 16%; I suspect that a large fraction of that 16% were thinking of more extreme cases, and would be able to ignore e.g. the Gmail/MS Word save messages, but we might just be an extremely unrepresentative sample on this particular point.
If you don't have a strong philosophical objection, presenting it as an accessibility issue is a more effective strategic approach. I'm almost certain that the inability to tune out moving/changing stimuli is strongly correlated with autism and/or ADHD. You could probably test that hypothesis fairly easily with your survey data.
There wasn't that much correlation with autism when I checked on the survey.
I also hate framing things as disability/accessibility issues. It sounds like a plea for charity to some kind of specific subset of bizarre people, rather than saying "everybody is different, for your own good stop doing useless things that drive some proportion of your users away". I would feel equally strongly about this if there were no correlation with any known mental condition.
I figured you might feel that way. I sympathize, and I used to complain about this stuff in universal terms too.
But companies are perfectly happy to sacrifice some minority of users to drive more engagement from the remaining majority, which is what they think they're doing with this stuff. They only 'care' if they're convinced that the annoyed minority is a threat to their revenue, either directly (if we're disproportionately content creators or community builders) or indirectly (if we're a sympathetic group that could cause a PR problem if we complained too loudly).
Yeh, if they get 10% to sign up to some email subscription they may not care about the 16% who leave the site, or the rest who are just annoyed but read on.
I challenge "useless" - in this thread alone, there are a few people who like seeing the "Draft saved" message. In your defense, though, Google could make it say "Draft saved - <message subject>" rather than switching between the two every N seconds.
This objection would be more reasonable if Google did not make the feature mandatory.
Not sure how forcing people who dislike it to tolerate a feature drives engagement. Make it the default, driving engagement with those who tolerate it (really?), and let the ones who would lose engagement opt out.
Every additional opt out button makes things worse for anyone who is trying to find a different setting to change, and also for anyone who disabled it without realizing that it actually benefitted them more than it hurt them.
Lots of settings menus now have a search feature up top, which is good design.
At least part of the answer here is the bad tech incentives - tech companies tend to inventivise doing things regardless of whether it's a good idea. Flashing elements allow more complications, and "added draft saved notifier to Gmail app, driving a 5% improvement in gerrymandered metrics" looks much better on your perf review than "kept Gmail boring but functional after realizing it was more usable that way", or even "added option to disable the draft saved notification feature that my coworker just added and wrote a whole doc about how much it improves his gerrymandered metrics".
Yeah, whatever happened to having bad ideas fail the A/B test?
(Nice accidental coinage “inventivize”. I wonder what it ought to mean?)
Mailing list pop-ups on your site alienates and enrages users
It was added without my knowledge or consent and I think I've gotten it taken down.
I still get it if I visit the page in a fresh browser
I don't have that problem in gmail because, like Christopher McCann, I use the HTML version of the site. Appending ?ui=html to a gmail URL will get you there, after you click past a warning saying "please don't do this".
As long as we're on the subject of UI, could I just say that the color coding of your pie chart is non-intuitive?
100% agree, should be reverse
The colours map to labels 🤷♂️
Yes. But you could have red mapping to 'worst' and green mapping to 'best' say. And it would be more intuitive to a Western Audience accustomed to stoplights. Or you could use the spectrum. Or whatever. The categories are ordinal. The assigned colors would be more intuitive if they reflected that.
The halacha website feels the need to constantly scroll through pictures of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (who they've also adorably made their little favicon!) because otherwise their readers might be tempted to not vote for his political party, Shas.
Here is one of the many campaign ads prominently featuring the ghost of Ovadia Yosef campaigning on his party's behalf (I want a Youtube playlist, honestly):
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2022/10/WhatsApp-Video-2022-10-27-at-6.30.28-PM.mp4?_=1
Also, they want to emphasize that "[a]ll the Halachot on this site are derived from the halachic rulings of our leader, glory of the generation, Maran Rabbeinu Ovadia Yosef zt”l, who was considered to be the generation’s most accepted and reliable Posek (Halachic authority) based on the testimonies of the greatest rabbis of the previous generation, including the great Geonim, Harav Ezra Attia, Harav Mordechai Sharabi, Harav Efraim Ha’Kohen, and many others."
If not for the flashing elements, you might forget that the rulings came from glory of the generation, Maran Rabbeinu Ovadia Yosef zt”l, which would basically be misinformation and/or plagiarism.
Does the Talmud have any guidance about whether to add flashing elements to websites?
"Does the Talmud have any guidance about whether to add flashing elements to websites?"
Hillel says, "That which is hateful to you, do not do unto your fellow," but Shammai says "All that is legal HTML, CSS and Javascript is permitted."
Obligatory Firefox proselytism : Firefox has a "read mode" integrated that removes the interface of the website when you try to read an article. It's very useful and can also be used to bypass paywalls (for example on the nyt, go to an article, unable lecture mode and reload the page, tadaa)
How do you access it?
As the previous comment said, it's a button next to the url, it looks like a rectangle with lines on it
So do Safari and Brave. It’s a button on the right of the URL bar.
Annoyingly it doesn't have the option of setting the background to pure black, darkish gray is the best it can do. This "paleish gray on darkish gray" design paradigm is omnipresent these days for some reason, and I hate it unreservedly. Thankfully Dark Reader fixes most of these issues, but sadly doesn't work with FF reader view.
Pure white text on pure black is painfully high contrast for a certain subset of people, so you instead see things like the grey on grey effect. Ideally it would be options like "Cyan on charcoal" or "Gold on black" but at that point you've gone past a single toggle option and into the realm of complex theme selections.
The most annoying part of it is that this option is often excluded even when a selection is available. The reader mode in Mozilla offers 4 settings, for example.
Bad pizza graph color scheme, otherwise good post. The number in green should be "slightly annoyed", the one in orange "will give up on the site". I know, I know, it's there in the legend, but come on!
Very true!
AdBlock Plus started selling the ability to show you ads anyway, and a variety of other missteps. These days I do not recommend it to anyone; uBlock Origin is both 'pure' and works much better than ABP ever did.
>I used to think I must be the only person who worried about this; maybe it was a weird OCD thing. But I asked about it on the ACX survey . . .
I'm not sure that survey question is fair and balanced. Three out of four options state that you are annoyed by flashing elements. Only only option is (barely) positive. Then you add the three options to show that the vast majority is annoyed. That is not a good methodology. A better question would include has many positive options (don't notice at and don't care) as negative once. A 'no opinion' option would have been good as well.
Speaking for my self, once I concentrate on typing I do not register the other elements. Either I don't see it at all, or it doesn't perturb me one bit. I'd still keep the OCD option open.
I agree. I’m really focused on whatever task at hand that all the LOOK AT ME strategies used by designers generally don’t get my attention unless I’m bored and even then my brain generally filters out stuff I consider noise and not signal. It’s odd, because I consider myself a detail-oriented person....but it needs to be a detail I consider relevant.
I don’t even look for “draft saved” anymore- I just assume they saved the draft. I don’t know why they even have that design element.
Over here in the EU the law requires consent for cookies, so a lot of websites show a pop up from the bottom after load. Often this has two buttons - all cookies, or minimum required cookies. There’s also some text about why they want you to click all. Some have a third option to modify cookies. Often when trying to dismiss the pop up and hit accept all, I hit that, which brings up a full screen cookie management page.
Here was my experience yesterday. I am linked to a url (from the daily express I think). Accept cookies popup comes up, I accidentally click the modify cookies. Spend a second on that to get rid of it. Back to webpage. A popdown asks me if I want to download the app at the same time as a floating page on the bottom right shows some video of something. This is both intrusive and eats up screen estate. I try and get rid of the video but they are designed to have the tiniest x button possible. Inevitably I go to the video page. I go back to the article. The app pop down and floating video are still there, this time a different ad.
I start to read the article, which is slow to load anyway as it needs to load a dozen or so of those ads that now come both within and at the bottom of the articles, often taking up more screen estate than the article, often flickering or running previews.
The progressive loading of these ads slows the scroll which is itself annoying but within a few seconds of scrolling another floating window appears asking me to sign up for the newspaper.
Reader: I didn’t sign up for the newspaper and I did not read the article.
But! The express probably don’t care. They are making money from a few PPV ads, and I clicked on the video which is probably revenue to them. I also engaged with the cookies. From a metric point of view I’m a satisfied and engaged, and revenue producing, customer. They probably don’t even measure “scroll to bottom”.
Personally I abandon reading the page as soon as I reach that point where the auto-play video pops up. It just stops being worth it to me and also I would strongly suspect there is further malware/spyware that is going on under the hood with a site that rude.
Actually cookie popups are potentially dangerous. I am so used to clicking yes at the cookie popups, that I once clicked by mistake yes to the popup (on mobile) which asked me to agree to receive notifications, and it could be something far worse.
Unrelated point, but you should seriously consider using ublock origin, AdBlock is itself a closed sourced advertising and data collection platform, it will strike deal with companies to display ads and will not block agressively enough.
Ublock gives a better experience (fewer ads) and open source.
I don't mind the "Draft saved" thing, because I get a little weird about obsessively saving files to make sure nothing is lost, but the other shit enrages me. It has reached the point where I do a good 85% of my web browsing on the computer where I have adblockers turned on. I used to look at the Internet on my phone. I don't do that much anymore.
Switching off JavaScript on at least one mobile browser can also help. Often gets past subscription gates, too.
Did anyone mention prefers-reduced-motion yet? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion
This is a great option that deserves more attention.
All modern devices have a built-in setting for enabling "reduced motion." If you set it, then it will reduce/disable unnecessary animations across your operation system, including any websites that support it.
This link describes how to enable it for iOS/Android/macOS/Windows: https://scholar.harvard.edu/ccwilcox/blog/how-reduce-motion-various-operating-systems
It probably won't work for everything (the Gmail "draft" text still displays, for example) but it should provide across the board improvements if you're sensitive to motion/flashing.
Thanks, I just tried that; hopefully it’ll help!
There's a really interesting question to be dug into, about what the product incentives are within big tech companies, especially where the user is not making the primary purchase decision. One of the things I've noticed is that Google seems to be generally trending towards consistently worse UI, and I suspect that there's just no pressure to make things better for users, because the bureaucracy isn't really built for that. I've been wondering if that problem is related more to scale (big enough company means the internal incentives tend to be all bureaucratic) or if there's an additional cultural force of some sort (desire for designers to make things look aesthetically pleasing to their own eyes, desire for engineers to make changes that are functional) that exacerbates it.
Any website that needs revenue from the website itself will trend towards ugliness, as revenue comes from advertising and the more in your face the better.
Any website that’s trying to get you to buy their own product - see Apple - will be much cleaner.
I don't use Apple stuff much, but I've noticed that Amazon isn't clean at all - but it's at least moderately resistant to overly offensive noise. I think Apple might be the strongest example, though of a big company optimizing a website for something that is at least related to making users happy, because Amazon is 100% designing it's website towards topline sales (and probably tolerating increased returns rates into the bargain)
so true!!!
Thank you for writing about this! I don't understand why everyone else isn't grabbing their pitchforks over today's heinous web design practices. Maybe it's because we don't know where the product managers and web designers live. I'm in the camp that will stop using a site that has items like: flashing anything, ads that follow you down the screen as you scroll, or "exit intent popups", the most pathetically desperate and annoying mechanism ever invented. Just because something is possible to implement doesn't mean it's a good idea!
I think I'm more sensitive to lights than most, so that may explain it.
On a related topic, do we have to have "hover everything", so that A) you have to move your mouse over the screen to find out what UI elements are available, and B) no matter where you try to place your cursor out of the way, some "on hover" element pops up to block your view? My big question is: DO THESE PEOPLE EVEN TRY OUT THEIR OWN WEBSITES? Who is actually demanding these features? Put this crap on your website and I'll remember you. Not only will I avoid buying your products, I'll seek to badmouth you every chance I get.
The developers who code these websites up installed an adblocker ages ago and only see the "cleaned up" version of the sites they write until a newly hired QA member shows up and complains until someone teaches the new guy how to install an adblocker.
The QA would test the product, including the popups, mandated by the business. The developers would presumably also test this as they build it.
Neither devs nor QA decide on what the website looks like, except in tiny startups.
I don't understand how hover isn't as deprecated as <blink>. It flat out *does not work* on mobile, and everyone and their mother are going mobile-first or mobile-only.
Great point, Brendan. They have to build a hover-free website for mobile, so they're expending unnecessary effort in order to annoy us.
> They haven’t. I can no longer write things on Gmail - I have to compose on Notepad and then copy-paste to the Gmail window - because they’ve made it look like this:
As a heads up: you can also switch to hit "switch to HTML view" in the bottom right corner of the screen when gmail loads up in your browser to stop this from happening. Since you're using Notepad anyway, it's not feature-reduced.
I think we should also talk about the new message notifications. For example on Twitter chat groups, or Discord. If it's not blinking, at least there is a blue dot and maybe a number calling for your attention.
Google probably don't want you to use their email interface. It makes no money for them. You can buy a gmail address but it is expected that most power users will use it with Outlook or a similar email app.
I stopped using gmail long time ago because it became too cluttered and annoying for a power user. It probably works for majority who sends only an occasional email and that leads people to use all other google services (showing adds etc.).
I have a GMX web email account, https://www.gmx.co.uk/ because it is free, the interface is fairly slick, and one can have a short email address. For example, I bagged jrq@gmx.com
The only irritating feature is that it logs one out automatically after an hour or so, even on a private PC when one has no wish to log out. (It apparently makes no distinction between a public and private PC.) On one's next login, it also has the cheek to pop up a fussy message saying one should log out properly!
Flashing ads are an irritation, more so when they feature disagreeable or offputting images. Incessant recent ads for an ear wax removal product comes to mind (unfortunately), although mercifully that now seems to have gone away.
I also see loads of ads for life insurance and funeral services, featuring wrinklies who look as old as Methusaleh and have clearly spent their declining years and possibly their entire lives working or basking in the sun. I shouldn't complain, as I'm no spring chicken myself, and ageism is a Bad Thing, but do we really need constant reminders that our days are numbered?
But the web UI feature that drives me completely potty, and compared to which flashing ads pale into insignificance, is dynamic page extensions that throw the display completely out of vertical alignment each time when the slider bar is used.
It seems that nobody in the history of the world has yet figured out a way to extend a page while leaving unmoved the content already displayed. I'm not talking about a slight jog, which would be bad enough in itself, but a massive flurry of movement after which one's place is completely lost.
Another minor irritation is a horizontal bar that slides down from nowhere and covers content when one pans the page down with the slider bar, so one has to overshoot and slide the bar back up slightly to tuck the bar away again. It must have seemed such a smart idea to whoever invented it, but it would have been better if they had kept their idea to themself!
I'd be shocked if any changes to the interface on such a central product as Gmail didn't go through A/B testing. If it passed, it means the net effect on engagement couldn't be substantial. Maybe they had bad metrics, or the effect is unobservable (e.g. annoyance/hate, not leaving the platform, though maybe they also had users rate the experience). Or maybe the weak positive effect for most users beat the negative effects for the small subset.
Save your sanity and use reader mode in FireFox - I'm sure there are extensions for other browsers, safari too has it natively integrated IIRC.
It gives you large font (customizable), simple UI, no complex flashing elements and distracting stuff as *well* as Dark Mode. All with a click of a button :)
One reason why I use Firefox (Chromium-based browsers also offer this) is to use the extension uBlock Origin, which lets you select an element of a page and block it. It used to work in Safari too, but Apple has denigrated extensions and offers just a few weak apps for ad blocking that barely work at all. It can be found at:
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock#ublock-origin
and manual installation instructions are there too, just scroll down. It can also be installed through the official add-on stores. The element blocking part is especially useful for me since I am using a 13" MBA, and a few banners across the bottom and top of a page mean I get to see just a few inches of a page, like looking through a letterbox. The Globe & Mail site is dreadful for this, and is quite usable once I have permanently removed the banners.removed
Ublock origin is awesome, but I find that often I actually want the complement of its element-zapping feature. That is, I don't want to zap element X, I want to zap "everything *outside* element Y" (where Y is whatever div contains the actual content of the page).
FF's reader mode is nice, but doesn't work on all pages, and sometimes misses an opening paragraph or two when it does work.
This is only one element of the fad of intrusive and bloated design that began with pop-up windows and has snowballed ever since.
Funny enough, it seems like the very existence of front-end and UI/UX designers as an occupation in the web space immediately made these problems much worse than they were. Between the use of enormous unnecessary design frameworks, CSS animations and integrated javascript, etc., the experience of using most sites is so much slower and worse than flat HTML used to be.
The default position seems to be that everybody has broadband so it doesn’t matter if you need to load megabytes and megabytes of scripts and frameworks and stylesheets every time you click something, and because it’s new and sexy tech it’s okay to animate everything and move elements based on cursor or window or viewport position. Of course they never count on latency, or errors in their own code, or conflicts between different elements they’ve injected, so reading a page with a few paragraphs of information you actually want becomes a trial, requiring you to install four or five different types of ad- and nuisance-extinguishing plug-in just to render pages more or less readable.
My latest favorite atrocity is Wikipedia (not that it can be trusted anymore) has enforced pop-up link previews on every wiki link that appear when you hover but don’t disappear when you move your cursor away. It’s an actual ‘screw you for attempting to read the page you’re on’ feature.
It seems to me that companies used to do usability studies as part of the engineering side, but when they settled on a good UI, that didn't leave anything for managers to do, so they brought in arts-degree UX "designers" to have them tweak everything constantly and look busy.
Ivan Ilych would have had something to say here....
Like "don't stand on a chair to try and fix it"?
Something that may help with some sites is to configure your device to [prefer reduced motion](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion). This allows web designers to use a `@media (prefers-reduced-motion)` block to not show the animations you've indicated a preference to not be shown.
This is a fairly modern feature that designers have to go out of their way to use, but it does work in some places.
I'm convinced that UI designers etc. invariably suffer from a fatal flaw - they are not the intended user of the product they are designing. Thus we have flashing N.B. that are unhelpful, LMS that give instructors tendonitis given every task takes multiple clicks/swipes on different location of the screen (I'm looking at you Blackboard), etc. .... I could go on forever and a day about this.
First off - Text headers changing to communicate functionality are not what that survey question addresses.
Secondly - Disabling that isn't a choice, it's a tradeoff. Is the percentage of people irritated by it larger or smaller than the portion that will worry that there is no "save draft" button? I suspect that feature was added based upon feedback along the way, so what we are seeing is (at least to some degree) the result of a complex balancing act. One that does not combine well with "you can't please all of the people, and you can't put everything into an options menu".
Even if you did put it in the options menu, I suspect the number of people who disable it because they thought they dislike the flash but end up worse off because they don’t know if it’s saved, is larger than the number of people who actually benefit it from being turned off.
Surely people who would turn it off want it turned off and accept the consequences. The text is still being saved.
I think it is not uncommon for people to be mistaken about their first impression about whether they on net benefit from a UI feature or whether it is net negative for them. There are plenty of things that work that way. (There are also surely many people and features for which the opposite is true. I'm not at all convinced of which features go which way, but at least one reason why Google hasn't allowed people to disable it could be that their usage data suggests that this is one where people are likely to be mistaken about their preferences.)
You are assuming a level of rationality in the userbase that is not supported by empirical data.
I just read the hilarious, fascinating and baffling Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles and the only sour note was all the huge constantly running gif inserts interspersed with the text: https://www.sbnation.com/2014/8/18/5998715/the-tim-tebow-cfl-chronicles
This may be tangential, but speaks to the choices made by software designers needing "something to do". When I taught college math, the portal platform was built on D2L, and customized by the school's programming team. Their operation appeared to consist of meetings that always concluded with "ok, add another screen", with all hands raised.
The (corporate) Pearson software was even worse, with anything useful hidden in a labyrinth of links. I ended up coding my own website, and just adding problems and docs to it.
probably worth considering that the median ACX reader is likely to be rather more autistic than baseline and hence more sensitive to stimuli, skewing the results
This has been going on since Netscape Navigator implemented a blink element for some reason.
See also: Pretty much every restaurant website ever. I do not want animated text, I do not want fancy skeuomorphisms, and I certainly do not what a soundtrack.
When I answered the survey to say flashing elements annoy me I did not mean blinking elements of text, I meant flashing.
For me the unifying principle seems to be that I don't like GUI elements to move.
So ... MY primary sadness is when a page is coming up and keep re-rendering as images arrive (because the HTML which could have specified width and height did not ...). This make using the page very tough until it has 'settled down.' And I can't be sure when it has settled down.
BEST is when there are *control* elements such as buttons moving around. Microsoft's Outlook client for Windows (non-web!) does this as part of the send-an-email process -- the "send" button moves while I am trying to press it!
I am annoyed, but much less so, by an image that changes (such as at the Jewish Law site). I'd prefer not, but this isn't a deal breaker.
Same with status text changing (though I'd prefer an icon in a fixed location to change or something like that).
Scott, is your problem with 'flashing' or with ANY dynamic change to the page you are using/viewing?
+1 to the "Substack annoyingly added a new pop-up interstitial, only for non-subscribers" complaint.
The HP website is worse: a page like https://support.hp.com/us-en/printer-setup/hp-deskjet-2700e-all-in-one-series/2100187844/model/2100709835 will, after about 60 seconds, cover the left half of the screen with a "Tell us what you think!" window that does not have a close button. Which, if you step away from the computer to perform step 1, makes it impossible to read the rest of the directions.
(also, the HP website seems to break saved URLs frequently; hopefully that link stays working for at least a few weeks)
I believe that website is showing you two pictures of the same person, just at different ages? Or, like, definitely two visibly closely related individuals.
Genuine flashing elements would/do bother me but I don't agree that gmail and Substack "draft saved" stuff counts. Possibly this is because I'm constantly paranoid that my draft is -not- being saved and enjoy the visual placebo of it always being there in the corner but I'm also mostly confident my brain filters out stuff like the little product text on the AdBlock window.
I actually started out agreeing with the piece but then was surprised that you included the saving draft icon on Substack in the same category as seizure causing rabbi flashes. Inferences from your poll might therefore be invalid. I hate flashing but don’t place it in that category. Other people have pointed this out, but I want to keep harping on it because really that feature is one of the things that makes Substack amazing and I hope no one listens to this post.
I'm surprised there's no mention of ads that re-load themselves and cause the text you're reading to jump around and re-flow. And often these ads aren't even visible on the page, so it's totally pointless aggravation. Its the equivalent of some yanking a magazine out of your hands while youre reading. It's shockingly rude, and shocking how common this is. Lately I just ragequit.
Amen to that.
I find them so irritating I use a whole stack of adblockers, flashblockers and image-blockers to browse the internet. Even still images distract from the text, so in order to see any kind of image in my browser, I have to do a slightly annoying two-step temporary authorization to make the image load. This works pretty well and makes the internet experience overall far less irritating, infuriating, and overstimulating. Text-only for the most part.
I have a friend whose school-age daughter has photosensitive epilepsy, and she says to check her daughter's websites for flashing elements before she can let her daughter visit them. If they're for a school assignment and have flashing elements, she has to print out screenshots for her daughter.
The flashing elements are a migraine trigger. The internet would be un-usable for me without image/video blockers.
Since the same things also tend to trigger seizures in susceptible people, I do wonder how programs get away with having things like blinky notifications that can't be disabled, particularly if the program is anything that might possibly be used in a business setting-- seems like a good way to run afoul of disability accommodations.
I will not, and cannot use programs or websites with blinky elements that cannot be blocked or disabled, and even where they can be.... if they make it difficult it is mostly not worth the hassle.
How do you deal with the blinking cursor in notepad? Is that not a flashing element? I was thinking like flashing banner adds, not tiny things like "draft saved". I mean like popup ads that cover text and play commercials for video games. I would have voted not bothered if asked about all but the first example in this post.
I suspect that in some cases people say they wouldn't use a website with things like this, but in practice it's just the opposite. The company I work for has one of the most annoying popups I have ever experienced. If your mouse ever comes close to switching tabs, a big window pops up saying "Wait before you go please give us your email address!" I despise it, and as soon as I was able I pulled the metrics to show that it was a pointless annoyance.
And then I found out that it is incredibly good at getting people to give us their email address. Probably the single most effective method we use for adding people to our newsletter. My spirit was crushed.
Yes. It works.
Operating systems have accessibility setting to reduce motion, which is available to the websites and if they respect it, they should disable/reduce animations.
I have a different set of issues, somewhat overlapping, that also annoy me.
Some partial solutions:
- Write custom CSS for websites. Adblock works by deleting an element. But you can also style it so that it is smaller, or is hidden. You can then inject it with an extension like stylus.
- Using some "reader mode" type of extension, which deletes extraneous non-text elements. Would have worked for your jewish site.
- Writting some custom javascript and injecting it into the website when loading it. E.g., Matt Levine's Money Stuff newsletter has some annoying elements, so I redirect it to the archive.is version, apply a readability plugin and then inject some stuff to get rid of the rest of annoying stuff.
- Writting a custom frontend. For example, I find the Effective Altruism Forum and the RoyalRoad pages annoying, so I've parsed them and written my own, at https://forum.nunosempere.com/ and https://royalread.nunosempere.com/ respectively.
- Use the custom frontends others have written. There is a small movement of people annoyed at dark patterns who write better frontends. You can use an extension like libredirect to use a better frontend if one exists: https://libredirect.github.io. For a while it looked like there was going to be a semi-organized "simple web" effort, but it feels pretty anarchic now.
Personally I'm cheating a bit, because I use a custom browser, so when I encounter something that annoys me, I make some small tweak and recompile. But I think you can get like 99% of the benefit of what I'm doing with Firefox extensions (Google doesn't want people to be able to block ads, because that's kind of their whole business, and has castrated adblockers with their Manifest v3 extension proposal for Chrome).
Also, uBlock Origin is better than AdblockPlus & others, because at some point AdblockPlus sold out and you should switch.
So, call to action:
- Switch to Firefox. Make yourself acquainted with its reader mode.
- Install the Ublock Origin and libredirect extensions
- Install Stylus, and learn to tweak css for the websites that you most visit
What makes yours better than the GW EAF version?
- Mine is more minimalistic. Compare https://forum.nunosempere.com/frontpage vs https://ea.greaterwrong.com/ and https://forum.nunosempere.com/posts/p5gRvFBGrg8bR4ofc/ea-uw-madison-s-experience-incubating-cause-specific-uni vs https://ea.greaterwrong.com/posts/p5gRvFBGrg8bR4ofc/ea-uw-madison-s-experience-incubating-cause-specific-uni
- Mine uses exactly the style I like (similar to the one in nunosempere.com/blog), vs just a style that I like a lot (the brutalist theme in GW)
- Mine tries to answer in fewer get requests (generally one), and so I think loads a bit faster, and doesn't have an initial flashing.
Overall the tradeoff is that mine is a lot less featureful, but I've put some thought to make it particularly nice for me personally.
From the major psychotic hatreds department:
* Sticky navbars
* Web pages that use mounds of javascript to duplicate functionality that already exists in html, like forms.
* Bonus points if the form tries to prettyprint or otherwise 'help' me type in them.
* Double bonus points if your links are not actually links, but onclick javascript redirectors.
* Pages that override browser keyboard shortcuts. E.g. Github thinks it's funny to make ctrl-k go to their search-github box instead of my browser's searchbar.
* In fact, pages that override *any* browser UI behavior. Right now, substack is doing something wonky such that hovering on the article text doesn't show a selection cursor.
* Triple bonus points if said overrides appear to exist *specifically* to break browser behavior, e.g. by making C+P difficult.
* CSS popups. There's a reason all browers have popup blocking now, and it's not because a second window was involved.
* *Massive* decorative elements, such that I can only see a tiny fraction of the actual page content at a time.
* Obfuscated element classes/ids that make it hard to identify and nuke offenders.
* Anything that breaks Reader Mode or RSS/Atom feeds, making it hard to view content outside your shitshow of a site.
Maybe you can adblock your way out of *some* of these things. For example, in uBlock Origin you can use CSS selectors that match on a *substring* of a class of a visual element instead of the whole class (which nowadays contains randomly-generated parts to make it harder to block).
In particular, Substack has this annoying popup on text selection (people who select text while reading it have probably noticed it already). Normally, the only CSS class that I can block is .pencraft, but that ends up destroying the main page of the blog (almost everything there has .pencraft attached). But if I block substack.com##.pencraft[class*="selection_popover"], it only covers those .pencraft elements that also have selection_popover in their class name, which for now seems to only include the annoying selection popup thingy.
If some of your annoyances have partially randomly generated class names but also have predictable parts in them, this could work for you too.
Scott, I think what you want to do here is switch over to the Apple ecosystem as much as possible.
Unlikely. Apple is king of flashy design choices that are intuitive to the designers and forced on everyone else. They're minimalist mostly when it comes to hiding functionality behind unhinted gestures and seemingly unrelated apps.
I…don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Apple’s design is *never,* and never has been, “flashy” or garish. Certainly not in the sense of having things *actually flash*! The closest you can come to saying Apple’s software design has been “flashy” is with things like the slowmo Minimize function (which has since been removed).
You certainly don’t have to like Apple’s esthetic, but the things Scott is complaining about is just exactly the sort of thing that Apple has been careful to never do
I must be in the middle: the flashing banner ads *really* bother me, but I barely notice a little flickering “draft saved.” I was a little surprised to find out that was what you were talking about.
For calibration, my answer on the survey is “they annoy me quite a bit.”
Cosigned, but am willing to accept that we might be the weird ones!
The flashing banner ads are intolerable; I use the “reader” view on mobile Safari to get rid of them, and if that doesn’t work I don’t go to that website.
....but I don’t even notice the “draft saved” business.
For Gmail, the Basic HTML version of Gmail doesn't have the annoying "draft saved" animation:
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/1pq68r75kzvdr/?v%3Dlui
Fund my (hypothetical) web company/companies and I'll 'just' re-implement all of the important/useful software and hire Edward Tufte to design all of the UIs!
(Semi-seriously – I have an absurd number of personal/side projects that are basically this. I even use a few of them!)
Super-related (and somewhat serious): while I love (like) some (web) designers VERY much, I promise that I will NEVER hire any as full-time employees to entirely avoid the temptation to generate make-work for them that then causes COSTLY and TERRIBLE superfluous changes to the UIs of any of my sites/apps.
I note that "Click to Remove Element" (a chrome browser plug-in, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/click-to-remove-element/jcgpghgjhhahcefnfpbncdmhhddedhnk) will remove the blinking rabbis.
For the Gmail thing, take part of the adhesive bit of a post-it and stick it over that part of your screen is an option
I'm another survey respondent who said "flashing things on websites annoy me intensely", because never in a million years would I have thought the question was describing autosave status indicators.
I will throw my hat in the ring as someone who is really bothered by the more obvious elements, but barely notices the Gmail-style ones. If this post is a memetic hazard and I can no longer ignore them, I’m going to be very mildly annoyed!
Though it can’t bother me too much. It took [this post](https://www.themotte.org/post/488/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-14/99214?context=8#context) for me to finally make the trivial changes needed to make fandom sites usable. Before that I just…suffered?
100% agree and I think the entire internet has gone downhill. So many sites refuse to load now with adblockers on, and the whole internet has gotten worse. Any random news site will have 3 flashing banners and pop-ups every few seconds or if I move my mouse off screen. I thought we figured this out with web 1.0 in the late 1990s that it is terribly bad user experiences to have loads of flashing things or moving elements of any kind on your website.
I'm in the camp of...run away and close the tab immediately if it is annoying with constantly changing banner ads, video pop ups in the corner at all and usually with ads, etc. The scroll down ones are super super annoying as well with the huge 1/3 of the page banner you have to fight with actively, scrolling up and down before it minimises into a smaller banner.
My conclusion is...I guess you don't want visitors on your website. If I need to click through 3 pop ups in different parts of the screen, fight scroll with the top banner to see the content, and then it all flashes at me constantly...they clearly hate their users and don't want any visitors to their website. I'll immediately close it and never go back, my blacklist of sites grows everyday.
To me the big cost of this 'draft saved' is that it is a distraction. It breaks your train of thought and concentration. When you're deep in a flow state and some small text in your visual field keeps flicking back and forth, it is a distraction.
This isn't as directly annoying as the flashing banner ads, but it does make it harder to draft messages. I know many authors and creative types talk about using focused writing apps with no distractions, no notifications, etc. Why? because Word, gmail, blogging sites, etc. are all unusable.
Most modern web design seems intended -- consciously or otherwise -- to establish control of the user's client and thereby their attention. Instead of providing content for the user to view as they choose, sites build the "viewer" into the page, with a mix of javascript and CSS. At that point, the browser is no longer your client. The purported website itself is the client for a bespoke, single-vendor API backing it -- an API inevitably incompatible with any other site, to maximize the costs of third-party client-writers.
The result is that you can't easily view content from many providers in the client of your choice; it's "use their client" or "write your own" (in the form of CSS hacks or whatever). And, business pressures being what they are, that's fine by most of the providers. Their content doesn't actually matter. Their content is bait. The actual purpose of such sites is to feed users' attention into a chipper shredder, then use the output to fertilize a cash garden.
As legitimate content producers continue to migrate to ever-more-consolidated single-vendor platforms, things get progressively worse. When youtube or facebook enshittify their platform, that enshittification is inherited by all the relatively-innocent producers that rely on them for hosting. Which is how ACX ends up with subscription popups that neither Scott nor his readers wanted or will ever want. But what can one do about that? The entity responsible for the bullshit is not the entity writing the content! I can't boycott Substack without boycotting Scott! I can hack the site CSS to remove the bullshit...but I have to do that separately for every site on the Internet.
I don't think there's a fix for this. Any set of browser features that allows a website to provide its own interface will be abused to control the user's use of that interface. And all monolithic platforms (youtube, facebook, substack, et al) will try to make it hard for either users *or* authors to respond to enshittification with a middle finger.
(note how many services provide a desktop client, but forbid third-party clients. This is not for security, no matter what they say. It's because they want their users to be a captive audience.)
There might be some hope on the author side of things. In principle, instead of an author posting their content directly to platform X using X's tools, they could generate an authoritative RSS/Atom feed (with whatever tools they choose); and then (separately) host a site consuming that feed on their platform of choice. Said site would act as the official, default UI -- the equivalent of astralcodexten.substack.com -- but disgruntled users could directly consume the authoritative feed if desired. Being a dependency of the official site, such a feed would be relatively reliable. And if, later, the platform host enshittifies its UI in ways the *author* doesn't like, they could migrate elsewhere with minimal transition cost.
Note that this would be the reverse of the typical structure where the site is the authoritative source of content and the feeds a secondary, often-neglected feature.
The details of that suggestion aren't important; the important part is the separation of UI from content. There has to be a site-independent way of querying the content without the chrome. Otherwise, both authors and users are at the mercy of the platform's developers. We've seen what they do with that power, and it's produced an Internet that is increasingly Out To Get You. Every year, my arsenal of browser armor grows. It's a necessary thing, to keep the web tolerable.
But it shouldn't be.
(how does one do links in substack comments? I wrote about this on LW a few years ago, not sure how to link it)
This happens because of typical-mind-fallacy on the part of PMs. There is a substantial group of people who aren't bothered by little spinners and indicators. They're like the speedometer on your car's dashboard...just fades into the background when you're not using it.
Then there are a bunch of people who can't stand them. If your product leadership doesn't contain those people it goes wrong. They'll never even notice it. And it won't actually impact metrics that much in the medium term, just slowly erode the joy a segment of people feel in using your product over years until they can't wait to use something else. Oops!
Scott, you should really start using uBlock Origin.
Funny, whenever people talk about an adblocker, they NEVER mean Adblock, except those people who don't know better.
That would be like if there was a very bad brand of refrigerators called Fridge™, and whenever somebody said something like, "at home, we have a fridge", and people with a Fridge™ would think: "hey, I have one of those" and never find out there was this new type of fridge that worked waaaay better and was not secretly spying on you.
Count me among the people surprised that someone as online and nerd-adjacent as Scott is still using deprecated advertition-blockment technology.
Thanks for the tip. Just switched from Adblock to uBlock 👍🏻
Make sure that is uBlock Origin, by Raymond Hill
It is. Thanks.
I think the real lesson of this post is how people can answer "yes" to a question where the survey maker's concept of that question is different from most users, leading to an analysis built on false assumptions.
No one else has addressed the Halachic website specifically, so as your most Orthodox Jewish reader, here you go:
The Halachic website you found is specifically for Sefaradi Jews. The "two Rabbis" it is flickering between are Rav Ovadia Yosef as a younger person, and Rav Ovadia Yosef as an older person. He is quite the personality cult person. Modern-day Mizrachi (Middle Eastern, subsection of Sefaradi) Jews have a tendency to really go in for the flashing lights, in general. My husband and I were just speculating on why this is. We think it's partly due to the fact that they are relatively poor, and therefore tend to like gaudy decorations more.
Here are some nice pictures and videos of small Sefaradi synagogues in Israel:
https://static.timesofisrael.com/www/uploads/2015/08/ohel-moshe-synagogue-8957.jpg - nice neon!
https://youtu.be/E5SAY5izAXM - check out all the purple lighting
In short, it is very likely that the Sefaradi readers of this site actually do see the flickering images as a sign of how nice the website is - they have similar things in their Synagogue!
Next time you want to look up an obscure Halachic text, check out www.halachipedia.com/
Or the best source is Pninei Halacha: https://ph.yhb.org.il/en/. This is widely accepted as the hottest new thing in Halachic literature.
Both of these are oriented towards giving a more organized, bigger picture view of Halacha, including both Ashkenazi and Sefaradi sources.
Flashing elements need to be make or break things for a given activity and even then they should be show stoppers, not matters of course. No alarm that goes on forever is an alarm anymore, and it's one of those Norman-door annoyances for me, a guy who talks about Norman doors. Flashing must convey information, like an old timey lighthouse (the light rotating has a known period that tells you where you are if you know what you are looking at! They are being replaced with electronically controlled lights that simply flash at preset rates, but spinning around is an alternative way of creating a digital signal that works in all directions.)
This, and also sites that change the text selection behavior. Substack is the latest offender, adding a pop-up "Restack quote" whenever I select anything. Look, if I wanted to "restack" this, I'd copy the quote I wanted and click the button at the bottom of the post.
Just let me do my neurotic constantly-selecting-and-deselecting-the-paragraph-I'm-reading thing in peace.
I find substack's editor completely unusable for actual writing for many reasons.
Just write your piece in plain text, using an editor you like (notepad?), copy it into substack, and then tidy it up there.
Just to be clear, I said that I was significantly annoyed by flashing elements, but I would never have considered any of these to be flashing elements. I was thinking ye ould <blink> tags.
Regarding "draft saved": I don't mind it when I am working on an email where the main bottleneck is typing. But when I spend time coming up with which words to write, it is annoying. (And I think this generalises to other sites.)
I think a more interesting extension of this post would be about attention-manipulating design in general - including in physical spaces.
Examples (note that I suffer from these things more than average, so this might not be universally hated):
- TV in restaurants (as opposed to sport bars). I always try to sit such that it isn't in my field or vision.
- static adds that suddenly switch to something else (both on websites and in physical spaces). Make it much harder to do longer chains or thought (such as when trying to ro research while waiting for a plane).
- supermarkets playing adds from speakers while you are in the store. (Some czech stores have their own "radio" which is just play adds for their products and silly songs.)
- excessive "information messages" on public transport. For example, British railways' "See something that doesn't belong? See it, say it, sorted!" indeed makes me hate them with passion and caused me to always travel with noise-cancelling headphones.
Random thought:
- These things generally sound like something that should be illegal, but aren't yet. Is it because we don't view attention as a resource? Or that many people don't value it? Or that we haven't acknowledged that attention can be manipulated or taken from us?
- It is interesting that we now have rules against electronic spam, but less so about physical spam and attention spam in physical spaces.
- I sometimes use a "replacement by human" test: For example, would we find it socially acceptable for a British Railway employee to walk up to me every 3 minutes and go "Do you see something that doesn't belong? ..."? No, definitely not. That suggest that the automated recording is over the line also.
As a proud member of the 16% that avoids using websites if they're too visually distracting, I sometimes use TamperMonkey to remove visually distracting indicators. For example, presentations in google slides have an especially annoying "saving..." icon that I remove with: https://gist.github.com/rbalicki2/4ef8429d9577e965d12513695346df7a
The biggest problem on websites is pop-ups. The worst offender being the cookie message, which manages to be both completely useless and extremely irritating at the same time. But I find all pop-ups of any kind annoying.
Was trying to figure out why "draft saved" doesn't bother me when most flashing/changing elements in websites do. Then I remembered that I hardly ever look at the screen when I'm typing. Learning to touch type is probably about the same amount of effort as switching email clients?
I don't think I'd consider any of those to be flashing elements. Maybe the rabbis, nothing else. I probably said 'very annoying'.
I hate ads, and pop-ups, and bling pong.
I also get annoyed by ads, though not quite to this extent. That said, as long as flashing elements are rendered in your browser (rather than in a dedicated app like Gmail on Android), you as the end user have ultimate control over them, including the power to remove them.
For instance, my adblocker of choice is uBlock, and its element zapper and element picker modes can be used to remove arbitrary elements on websites. However, sometimes it's not obvious exactly what to remove, or how to adjust the filter to be sufficiently general. In that case, if you don't want to put in the time to learn and experiment with uBlock's filter syntax etc., that seems like a good use case to hire someone on a website like Fiverr to create the filters for you.
Or: I don't like the YouTube home feed, so I have an addon which removes it (called Block YouTube Feed").
Or: I don't like sponsor segments in Youtube videos, so I have an addon which skips them (called "SponsorBlock for Youtube").
Etc.