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What is a website that you visit regularly despite its technical quality and user experience?

Ben Halpern on April 21, 2018

You want the website to be better because you want the service they are providing, but the tech is objectively crappy.

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István Lantos • Edited

facebook.com, because:

  • Have you tried to find again on the feed, what your friends posted few hours, or maybe few minutes earlier, after refresh? Yep...
  • Lots of fake news...
  • If your page want to be discovered, you have to pay heavily in ads.
  • Still not clear for what they are using our data and what happens when you delete your account?
  • Human moderation of flagged political content means a single person can take down an entire page because of their opposite political beliefs... This is an issue.
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Ben Greenberg

Yes, to all of this. I find the Facebook user experience to be horrible. It's so bloated. Yet, until more of my family and friends move away from it, it's pretty hard to back away if I want to stay connected.

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Eric McCormick • Edited

#NailedIt

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Belhassen Chelbi • Edited

dev.to * coughs *
praise

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Dinesh Pandiyan • Edited

Hey - dev.to has one of the best UX out there.

  • they don't have over-bloated features
  • site loads blazing fast
  • their markdown editor is too damn good
  • responsive page works great and is fast in my mobile
  • they don't have a bloated mobile app and are using service workers effectively

Only thing that's bothering me is that I don't understand the difference between my profile and my dashboard until I open them every time. But that's okay I can live with it.

What else are you looking at in terms of UX?

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Christoph Grabo

The Service Worker/caching could be optimized a bit.

Surely 400+ MB of stored data is not necessary. (And I learned myself how tricky this whole topic is.)

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Divyesh Parmar

Is dev.to a PWA, i opened in my android phone in chrome which asked me to put it on home and since then I've it as an app I've not installed it from the app store.

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Dinesh Pandiyan • Edited

It is. You should check it when you have your internet turned off. You'll be presented with a cool 'no internet' screen.

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Divyesh Parmar

oh yeah they did tell me a joke about Trump being US president, damn now I need to know what is PWA like form the scratch. It really lures me as I'm learning NOde.js/Express.js creating simple web apps, can those directly get translated to PWAs

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Dinesh Pandiyan

PWA is not a new type of app. You add service worker to your/any web app and configure it the way you want your app to behave. It's more of an elaborate config library that can start your app even when there is no internet and a lot more.

You can get started with these examples -
github.com/GoogleChrome/samples/tr...

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K

Often the SPA features don't work on mobile so I have to reload the whole page.

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Dinesh Pandiyan

I've observed it too. Sometimes in mobile, the site get's hung up in the intro screen. Hope this is will be fixed soon.

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Ben Halpern

We're figuring it out gradually 😊

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Sasha Blagojevic

I knew someone was going to write this :D

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Joe Clay

Ultimate Guitar takes an absolute age to load, and their ads are so bloated and memory-leaky that I usually have to kill the process from task manager after going there for any significant amount time. But that's where 99% of the guitar tabs online are, and I'm too lazy to set up an adblocker for one site, so 🤷🤷🤷

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Paula Santamaría

Ultimate Guitar veteran here. I visit the site regularly since 2005 and I can confirm it's one of the worst I've ever seen. The general design of the website hasn't changed in the last 13 years. But yup, most of the guitar tabs can be found there.

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Avalander

Try Brave, it blocks ads by default. I use it whenever I'm navigating to an unchartered part of the net or when I want to use a site that's bloated with ads.

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Joe Clay

I have been meaning to check out Brave for a while :)

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edA‑qa mort‑ora‑y

meetup.com -- bugs that seriously impact the ability to edit events, yet has a good user-base and existing groups.

WhatsApp Web -- poor performance and constantly loses connection, but alas, I have yet to convert everybody I know to using Signal, which has a stable non-web client.

My banks all have shitty sites.

Honourable mention to dev.to, just because I always get the lost connection screen and must press Ctrl+F5 in Firefox.

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Jasper Stephenson

While we're talking about web versions of primarily mobile chat platforms, the web version of Messenger drives me crazy!
It has that classic contenteditable div bug where after typing a few characters it jumps the cursor back to the beginning of the line and you look like an idiot sending "ahye" instead of "yeah." That bug alone makes it next to unusable, even though it otherwise would heavily enhance that service for me.

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James Kelsey

I didn't know about that bug! I thought that was just a slow computer thing when I'm using messenger at work, since that's the only time I've seen it. Absolutely drives me bonkers every time.

I honestly just stopped using it after that bug happened several times in a row one day.

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marcellothearcane

Check out Monzo if you're annoyed with your bank - I hated the UX of my old bank so switched over... Best thing I ever did! 😅

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Rex

Funny, because I made the move to WhatsApp from Signal.

We constantly had problems losing messages on Signal. A friend of ours didn't get some messages and we never found out why.

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Stephanie Handsteiner

reddit.

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Ben Halpern

For me I'll say:

Simpsons World

The site has all the Simpsons episodes. I can watch them legally on-demand. It also has really great extra features like director commentary etc.

But I really wish it were just on Netflix or had a slightly cleaner user experience and fewer bugs. It's just annoying enough to be frustrating, but I love watching classic Simpsons, so it's not like I'm not going to go back.

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Shalvah

Yay! Another Simpsons fan!!

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Sung M. Kim • Edited

😍 A site I enjoy

HackerNews has a pretty old user interface (fonts are too small and texts are all cramped together & don't look hmm polishied IMHO) but visit it daily due to the contents being awesome.

☹️ A site I don't enjoy

Citibank website...

User experience is subpar due to slowness and other weirdness (links don't take you where you want & search results are irrelevant).

And also when a page loads, it prevents a user from clicking anything by showing a transparent layer which covers only 2/3rds of the screen.

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Joe Zack

Yes and Yes!!

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James Kelsey

Many, many US Navy internal websites are just awful. I am glad that the resources they provide are available, but 'project goes to the lowest bidder' is so painfully obvious.

One site in particular that we have to use, for example, loads all of bootstrap 4 at alpha 1, loads the wrong version of jQuery (both .js AND .js.min), then overrides most of the styles of Bootstrap. All of that very seriously impacts the usability of the site when you consider that our at sea internet has the bandwidth of sickly carrier pigeons.

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Aswath KNM

Reddit, stack exchage, Hacker news

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Roger K.

I was going to say your third one and then Reddit too, but that was before their new UI started rolling out. I don't care so much about Stack Exchange; jerks are common there and so I don't hang out at all.

Hacker News and Dev.to are places I hang, so I'm way more fussy about their experience. However while I hear some of the gripes about Dev.to it's way way better than many other of their peers. If this was Dev.to in 10 years I'd still be happy, but if it wasn't for the hackers building great mobile apps for Hacker News I'm not sure I could even still handle using the site; it's just brutal.

Props to the team of volunteers for creating and maintaining Dev.to to such a high standard. Keep pushing the envelope!

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Ben Sinclair

My bank's site. To be fair, all online banking sites are pretty dreadful though. It seems to be the fashion.

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ajv

N26 & Pocopay are awesome in terms of ui/ux/design/cx. If anyone's in Europe, try them out! (just a happy user, not an employee of either 😅)

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Chad Smith

I will say I actually think my banks site and app is actually designed well and has a pretty good UX. They actually look like a modern website/app

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Vincenzo

Are you using nationwide?
The app is amazing the Web interface is crap

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Chad Windham

Maybe not a true response. Because I don't want it to be better. Craig's List is pretty horrendous visually. But it still works pretty good and has an effective UI honestly. I really love Craig's List for their IDGAF mentality with being pretty. They definitely got that motherfuckingwebsite.com/ attitude.

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Dustin King

Youtube, google search, facebook, and smbc-comics.com all misbehave if you increase your system font size on mac, on multiple browsers. Usually it's just having to scroll to the right a little to see everything. Sometimes stuff just gets cut off. Smbc's advertising experience is a bit crappy in general, and on mobile often does shitty things that redirect you to the app store. However, it's a great comic and if I need to kill some time, I can keep myself occupied for a while hitting the "random" button.

Reddit's redesign is ugly (and has the same aforementioned system font issue), so I keep it in legacy mode.

Twitter is pretty well-behaved, except I don't know how their images are supposed to be usable. Vertical memes are especially bad in firefox without pinch-to-zoom.

LinkedIn makes me want to tear my eyeballs out every time I visit it. I'm not sure what it is, but it feels like it's screaming at me.

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Darryl Norris

Reddit!!! If was not for the content I will never visit Reddit.

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Michael "notriddle" Howell • Edited

TaskCluster for GitHub.

My bank has better UX than that nightmare of a CI service. I still haven't figured out how to store a secret so that it's only accessible to my repository.

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michaeltd

slashdot.org/

Those ten lines from "Slashdot Headlines slashdot@newsletters.slashdot.org" have marked me for life.

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BinaryPatrick

The bank that backs the Google store, synchrony, has the absolute worst site. I frequently cannot log in because my password is wrong, even though I use a password manager. Setting a new password, you can't copy paste in, and they have a maximum length that they don't show an error for. They just truncate the text as you type. It's really terrible.

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Eric J. Falgout

Any of the Kinja websites: Deadspin, Lifehacker, Jezebel, The Root, etc. Kinja is their collective sign-in/commenting system and it wrecks havoc on any device that uses touch input. If I attempt to use autocorrect or autofill, it inserts what was typed AND what was autofilled. For example, if I type "stupod", then catch my mistake and put the cursor between the p and the o and select "stupid" from the word menu, it would then display "stupstupidod". Alternatively, if I am typing "approximately", and after typing "appr" I select the word from the menut, it displays "apprapproximately".

Finally, it takes forever to load and render comments and frequently crashes on yhreads greater than 100 comments.

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Erebos Manannán

Twitch and Netflix are really my picks.

Really awful sites in so many ways, drowning you in pointless nonsense, and not even trying to help you find the content you want.

Twitch has really annoying garbage like detaching the video player to a small one when you try to navigate away from a stream you don't want to watch, Netflix e.g. autopauses regularly and then bugs out if you press space to continue instead of clicking the button.

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marcellothearcane

Amazon is surprisingly bad for a site with 50% of ecommerce share globally.

Also Google's lack of responsiveness and their new rounded corners everywhere (especially on the quick search autofill) are awful

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Vincenzo

Old version of reddit desktop, before the redesign was awful

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Anna Simoroshka

For not so long ago, diary.ru
It's old and horrible by today's standard, but my life and my heart had been there for 15 years.
Now I am building a website that could replace it. And it has a better UX, hopefully.

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dotHTM

Twitter.

There is no "Great" client, but each one has some feature that's unique and compelling, even if the rest of the app is mediocre.

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Riccardo Bernardini

Facebook.
It is useful to keep in touch with friends and relatives, but the interface leaves much to be desired: lots of useless bloatware that bloats loading times and make everything slower (unless you have very good connection and CPU), the "notification" part that updates randomly: you see the little number for new notifications, you click on the "world", but there is nothing new (and the number disappears), the page is full of "sensitive areas" and you need to be careful with the mouse, otherwise you'll go to a page you did not want to and it will be almost impossible to come back to the post you was reading.

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Chad Smith

Spirit Airlines. Ok actually I think I'm done with the airlines now fully.

Though their check in system on their website is horrible. It just randomly says if my confirmation number is right. Then if you finally can get checked in and print your boarding pass it will a lot of times not do anything. I have yet to ever receive my boarding pass in an email and you literally have to click print boarding pass on their site multiple times before it gives you something other than a blank page.

Their app is worse. From flat out not loading my fight details with no error message or literally seeing it throw a NullReferenceException, i have yet to ever print out my boarding pass from them without doing it at the airport.

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Joshua Ballanco • Edited

Well, they recently updated, so I guess it doesn't really count, but airliners.net/ used to have an awful experience with discussion threads 100s of comments long that you could only reveal 10 at a time. The community on the site is amazing, though. For a long time it was pay-access only to post on comment threads, so only pilots, FAs, mechanics, and others directly involved in the airline industry would post there. It's still my go-to for anything airline related.

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Ross Henderson

Reddit. Such a terrible design. Even the recovering a password is an absolute pain in the testes.

LinkedIn. Also known as "How not to make a website".

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Abenet

goodreads.com
I love reading and sharing with my friends, but the website and especially the app are a pain to work with.

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Sten

The web app and mobile app of my bank. I can't do without it, obviously but it's absolutely horrendous.

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Sammy Israwi

Any website to pay the utilities bills

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Paul

Someone else said banks. I have to chime in there too, because my bank's website is awful.

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henAutumn

LinkedIn by far. It's like a sensory overload everytime I visit. I usually forget what i was there for and just log out!

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Ian Wilson

runnersworld.com

It has neat articles on all things running but the shitty javascript and advertisements, among other things, kills me.

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Juan Manuel Ramallo

apidock.com, it's extremely low to load :/

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Roman Mikhailov
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Matthew Francis

Any major video streaming website that still uses Flash.

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Faizan Hussain Rabbani

LinkedIn, it has started to become like another Facebook, no offense.

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MYCS

dev.to