UX on websites
Rant time!
So, today I wanted to use IssueHunt. The website allows developers to post tasks and everyone can back the task up with money. So that whoever solves the tasks, gets paid by the backers. If you are someone who wants to solve one of those tasks, you have to search for one that suites you. The site allows searching through the tasks with a paginated list and a component on the left side of the website where you can select your target languages.
This is what the site looks like. The width of my browser window is 960px and is used as follows:
- 128px (13,3%) - Whitespace on the left
- 160px (16,6%) - the filter component
- 30px (3,1%) - whitespace
- 510px (53,1%) - the actual content
- 128px (13,3%) - Whitespace on the right
So about half of the website is content, the rest is mostly whitespace and the filter component. The filter component doesn't even use the height of the site well. It would've been much better at the top, so the full width could be used for the content. This is fine for a fullscreen window, but not for small windows. Oh by the way, responsive design doesn't mean "scales down", it means to accordingly adapt the application depending on your current display size and device.
If you wonder why I'd use such a small browser window, that's becuase I was watching some stuff on YouTube while browsing IssueHunt. And no, I don't want to only do one thing at the same time.
Okay, next is he filtering component. It lists languages that you can
click to select them. It is basically like a list of checkboxes ... unless you
click the first item called All languages
, because that will
deselect all the items below. Since there are many many technologies, not all
of the available items are in that list. There is a secondary mcomponent, that
shows the rest of the languages and allows you to search through them. Just
like the list above, you can select multiple items. Every time you select an
item, the whole site will refresh. Since there is no button to apply the new
filter options, this makes sense. However ... an apply button would have made
more sense.
Oh and the filtering would display any task that fits one of your selected items, which wasn't obvious, since the UI indicated that in no way.
There are other ways to get the same functionallity, but less horrible. Look
at stack overflow for example. If you want to chose your tags, you get a
textfield where you can enter a word and it will show you all available options
that contain the word you have entered and it will even display a little piece
of explanation. If you want to delete one of the tags, you just hit the
X
on one of the tags. The component barely takes any space and does
exactly what it should do.
So far so bad. Now I wanted to look at the actual content, first I looked at the available issues for JavaScript, just to see how many there are. Right below the list is a pagination component:
It uses 180px of the screens width, no matter what the width of
your window is. You got two buttons, one for left and one for right. At
first I thought, that those mean backwards and forward. However, they didn't.
You could've just written first
and last
on them ...
Okay, since the component only displays 3 items, you have no clue how many pages there are, even though there was enough space to display more or even display the first page, the last page and the current range where you are.
After chosing another language than JavaScript, it displayed the same things
again, a 1
, a 2
and ...
. However, after
chosing the second page, the three dots became a 3
. Very confusing
as well. You could have just shown me three items for three pages.
Now this is what the component should've looked like if there were more items, than the page could actually fit:
With this you'd be able to:
- See on what page you are right now
- See and visit the first page
- See and visit the last page
- visit the previous and next page
- See what page you are currently on
Obviously it should always use as much space as possible, in order to show as much content as possible. You could theoretically even allow to jump to a specific page directly, but that's probably useless, since the pages just contain random items and there shouldn't be a reason to go to a specific page.
And if we have enough items to fit them onto the page, just display all items without unneccesarily complicating the component.
So what did we learn? Just because something looks good, that doesn't make it useful. Next time think about your UX before implementing the UI. And yes, I do in fact think, that the site looks visually pleasing.