Marcel Schramm

UX on websites

Written on 8 June 2019 by Marcel Schramm

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. Screenshot of the website

This is what the site looks like. The width of my browser window is 960px and is used as follows:

Not all numbers might add up to the full 100%, but you get the point.

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:

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:

The dream I have

With this you'd be able to:

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.