It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.
Just last night I was helping my GF set up an ad for her job on LinkedIn. The UX was terrible. Like awful and basic things like save and exit were completely broken. Meanwhile LinkedIn makes what percentage of their revenue through ads? Same with google ads. It’s like these products that are in a way some of the most valuable products in the planet, are given a junior web dev and a “UX designer” who really doesn’t know anything about UX.
I don't think there is such a thing as perfect UX and I'm not asking for it. I just want them to stop making it worse.
Seriously tho, why isn't this something that a browser can do? Why can't I just split a tab and say all links from the left tab open in the right? Why not be able to scroll through history as a list of such panes like a smalltalk browser or file explorer on a mac? Maybe even a history tree, able to be forked with a click or two. Tree-style tabs are a baby step toward that, but I'm not seeing much interest out there in actually learning how to run.
I would argue that senior engineers, of which I am one, are more of the problem than junior. We build fancy custom components when we should be using the existing ones.
Yes, the (senior) product and design people are part of the problem too.
Something about software engineering has gone wrong nobody thinks much about UX they blindly try to give functionality to the business/ customer requesting it but without considering whats already available and how to maintain status quo as much as possible. But theres also room to make things simple and intuitive.
Google released an AI music studio and their primary UI is literally an AI chat window. I absolutely hate UIs like that.
I visit a site/launch the app I always use with the intent of getting something done quickly, and I find that since the last time I used it someone's rearranged the deck chairs and hidden or removed the functionality I need. Something that should take a minute or two suddenly becomes rage-inducing and eats an entire day.
The Win8 and Metro design disaster is what happens when you give UX free rein, instead of focusing on users they try to start design trends to impress other UX / designers (essential for their career).
I wonder how much of Apples design was basically ‘if you confuse Steve Jobs you’re fired.’ And this acted as a necessary governing force to counteract the need to impress peers.
Metro was a wonderful design for the media player app it was made for. It's great for menu-heavy interactions, not so much for representing stateful things like options and checkboxes and such. Metro isn't the problem, it's trying to shoehorn UIs into it regardless of fit that is.
I don’t agree, but that’s design, people have different opinions. I actually like the Ribbon interface, would have liked it more if they added a search box to it as well but designers hate search boxes.
100% agree, but that is in contention with the desire to invent something new. As a separate discipline where the career trajectory is determined by peers the user becomes less important.
Respect has to be earned, and I don't think anyone (within margin of error) with UX in their job title has earned it. Most of their work consists of shuffling design elements around for its own sake. Sometimes they strike gold (or at least silver or copper), but it never feels like that's done because they target a better design, rather they stumble upon it while making designs whose goal is to be different.
You have to go back to when it was called HIC (Human–computer interaction) to find people who weren't completely brain-dead or ad-pilled when it came to design, did actual work and research trying to make better designs, and thus were at least somewhat respected.
> It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.
This, but for online shops, especially clothing. Horrendously buggy, laggy, with broken navigation (especially when navigating back), filters that don't work on > 95% of online stores. Why they wouldn't fix their primary (or at the very least highest margin) income stream is beyond me, but I've had to abandon so many shopping carts just because the checkout flow is literally broken.
The other day I was visiting intercom support tool
I realized it has morphed into completely unusable tool with so many features that i don't even know what to do inside it anymore.
Same pattern I saw in many other tools and product. As time passes software becomes more and more complex, then a new one comes which simplifies something and then it also morphs into some enterprise behemoth
> that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX
I would have thought it'd be the opposite.
It implies have hundreds of teams and UI / UX often is "scaled" in weird ways where everyone does their own thing and becomes a giant mess.
Everything is "correct" when you slice it enough. So from team A's perspective this might be a gain. When you are a part of a team you only see and own this part. That's your KPI.
Unless there's real and working governance (often very very hard) then it's not happening. To get that governance you need company direction and company buy-in that stops managers trying to push new features fast to infinity.
They make tens of billions, elsewhere to not even care about tiny UX issues like this.
At this point, it will stay broken because the amount of people complaining are not paying but are a tiny amount of people that will end up continuing to live with it.
It's interesting to see that the UX issues that are annoying me when using Azure DevOps are finding their way into GitHub.
In case they are truly chasing Azure DevOps level UX, I would recommend they implement an HTML editor for issues that, depending on whether the user has dark mode or light mode enabled, saves some CSS of the respective mode and makes it unreadable if read within the other mode.
There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon.
*the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked
Alas, GitHub has been plagued by bugs and UX regressions year after year.
I reported a bug last year about being unable to quote code blocks. It's quite a basic yet fundamental feature, right? They acknowledged the bug and moved on. To this day, quoting a block of code is still broken [1].
They simply don't care. I suppose their attention is focused on other subjects...
Anyway, I kind of accepted the "enshitification" of things I used to like. Fortunately, in this case, we can still hack our way around using custom userscripts [2].
Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old
UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab,
as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub
here. This is epic.
Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.
Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.
Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users.
Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out.
Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.
It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.
Just last night I was helping my GF set up an ad for her job on LinkedIn. The UX was terrible. Like awful and basic things like save and exit were completely broken. Meanwhile LinkedIn makes what percentage of their revenue through ads? Same with google ads. It’s like these products that are in a way some of the most valuable products in the planet, are given a junior web dev and a “UX designer” who really doesn’t know anything about UX.
I don't think there is such a thing as perfect UX and I'm not asking for it. I just want them to stop making it worse.
Seriously tho, why isn't this something that a browser can do? Why can't I just split a tab and say all links from the left tab open in the right? Why not be able to scroll through history as a list of such panes like a smalltalk browser or file explorer on a mac? Maybe even a history tree, able to be forked with a click or two. Tree-style tabs are a baby step toward that, but I'm not seeing much interest out there in actually learning how to run.
Split tabs are now in:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/split-view-firefox
Just in case you aren’t aware, Edge can split a tab and open links from the left side on the right.
What’s edge ?
It’s a de-googled spyware app in case you’re looking to diversify your personal information loss portfolio across multiple firms.
I would argue that senior engineers, of which I am one, are more of the problem than junior. We build fancy custom components when we should be using the existing ones.
Yes, the (senior) product and design people are part of the problem too.
We need to build simpler software that works.
Something about software engineering has gone wrong nobody thinks much about UX they blindly try to give functionality to the business/ customer requesting it but without considering whats already available and how to maintain status quo as much as possible. But theres also room to make things simple and intuitive.
Google released an AI music studio and their primary UI is literally an AI chat window. I absolutely hate UIs like that.
UX is really, really hard - and for some reason still not fully respected as a discipline.
Fast track to loss of respect:
I visit a site/launch the app I always use with the intent of getting something done quickly, and I find that since the last time I used it someone's rearranged the deck chairs and hidden or removed the functionality I need. Something that should take a minute or two suddenly becomes rage-inducing and eats an entire day.
The Win8 and Metro design disaster is what happens when you give UX free rein, instead of focusing on users they try to start design trends to impress other UX / designers (essential for their career).
I wonder how much of Apples design was basically ‘if you confuse Steve Jobs you’re fired.’ And this acted as a necessary governing force to counteract the need to impress peers.
Metro was a wonderful design for the media player app it was made for. It's great for menu-heavy interactions, not so much for representing stateful things like options and checkboxes and such. Metro isn't the problem, it's trying to shoehorn UIs into it regardless of fit that is.
I don’t agree, but that’s design, people have different opinions. I actually like the Ribbon interface, would have liked it more if they added a search box to it as well but designers hate search boxes.
Part of UX is leveraging what users are already familiar with.
100% agree, but that is in contention with the desire to invent something new. As a separate discipline where the career trajectory is determined by peers the user becomes less important.
Respect has to be earned, and I don't think anyone (within margin of error) with UX in their job title has earned it. Most of their work consists of shuffling design elements around for its own sake. Sometimes they strike gold (or at least silver or copper), but it never feels like that's done because they target a better design, rather they stumble upon it while making designs whose goal is to be different.
You have to go back to when it was called HIC (Human–computer interaction) to find people who weren't completely brain-dead or ad-pilled when it came to design, did actual work and research trying to make better designs, and thus were at least somewhat respected.
> It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.
This, but for online shops, especially clothing. Horrendously buggy, laggy, with broken navigation (especially when navigating back), filters that don't work on > 95% of online stores. Why they wouldn't fix their primary (or at the very least highest margin) income stream is beyond me, but I've had to abandon so many shopping carts just because the checkout flow is literally broken.
The other day I was visiting intercom support tool
I realized it has morphed into completely unusable tool with so many features that i don't even know what to do inside it anymore.
Same pattern I saw in many other tools and product. As time passes software becomes more and more complex, then a new one comes which simplifies something and then it also morphs into some enterprise behemoth
> that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX
I would have thought it'd be the opposite.
It implies have hundreds of teams and UI / UX often is "scaled" in weird ways where everyone does their own thing and becomes a giant mess.
Everything is "correct" when you slice it enough. So from team A's perspective this might be a gain. When you are a part of a team you only see and own this part. That's your KPI.
Unless there's real and working governance (often very very hard) then it's not happening. To get that governance you need company direction and company buy-in that stops managers trying to push new features fast to infinity.
They make tens of billions, elsewhere to not even care about tiny UX issues like this.
At this point, it will stay broken because the amount of people complaining are not paying but are a tiny amount of people that will end up continuing to live with it.
So it won't be fixed.
It's interesting to see that the UX issues that are annoying me when using Azure DevOps are finding their way into GitHub.
In case they are truly chasing Azure DevOps level UX, I would recommend they implement an HTML editor for issues that, depending on whether the user has dark mode or light mode enabled, saves some CSS of the respective mode and makes it unreadable if read within the other mode.
Great, the UX feature I probably hate the most in Jira, now on Github.
And GitLab, too!
This was exactly my thought. It breaks every bit of intuition I have using a browser, and makes pages run even slower.
It will probably suffer the same fate as the most-upvoted discussion of all time in the GitHub Community repo: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188
no reaction
And they pushed this as every major browser introduced a "Split View" feature...
I get this issue preview on Projects, although I don't like it there either, but as a hook on any issue link is just terrible UX, zero benefits IMHO.
Just improve what you have GitHub. Stop the AI bloatware. You will lose that race anyway, obviously.
I still don't understand what's the point of any full screen popups are
Links should be links. Stop making them into something else.
There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon.
*the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked
There's already something like this for GitHub: https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github
Alas, GitHub has been plagued by bugs and UX regressions year after year.
I reported a bug last year about being unable to quote code blocks. It's quite a basic yet fundamental feature, right? They acknowledged the bug and moved on. To this day, quoting a block of code is still broken [1].
They simply don't care. I suppose their attention is focused on other subjects...
Anyway, I kind of accepted the "enshitification" of things I used to like. Fortunately, in this case, we can still hack our way around using custom userscripts [2].
[1] https://imgur.com/a/github-bug-cant-quote-blocks-of-code-Z9O...
[2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discuss...
It took me a while to realize it was not a bug. Utterly insane that this went through QA.
> Utterly insane that this went through QA.
Big assumption you're making there.
Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab, as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub here. This is epic.
I wish they’d focus on making their platform reliable and more stable.
Why would they care to empower competitors?
Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.
If anyone knows someone at GitHub and can tap them on the shoulder, please ask them to revert this terrible change.
Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.
Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users.
Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out.
Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.
> A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable
A/B testing can’t measure preference, only interaction.
Can you actually show us this research and a/b testing?