Another pet peeve is articles or news websites that aren’t clear where they are located. So if I see a website for the Springfield Times (made-up example), it would be nice if it was clear if this was Springfield IL, Springfield MA or whatever.
That one bugs me too. Same with screen shots from social media that either lack a date or only say “X [unit of time] ago”. That is, “3 hours ago” or “5 months ago” or “2 years ago” is meaningless when it’s a screenshot and not updating. In fact, all those examples could easily be for the same post, just screen shot at different times. The only thing you know for sure is the “time stamp” is almost certainly wrong.
Regarding news and tech articles. Not that it entirely fixes the problem, but setting google to search within a date range, say, within the last year or month, usually helps filter out the old stuff. Not always, but usually.
ETA, what I’d really like to see, however, is a way (an easy way, without navigating to other screens) for google to show me results that are at least X [days/weeks/years] old. We’ve all had the problem where you’re tying to read up on something that’s been all over the news for the past few days or weeks. Trying to get some information about it, unrelated to the current news, is difficult.
I’m not sure if this has already been said, but in my line of work I often have to look up what a company does and at least half the time that is not clear at all from the website.
So instead of
“We make widgets, copper and tin mostly, but click here for info on our new golden widget”
it’s
“We are innovation, creativity and performance. We enable our clients to achieve their productivity, reliability and sustainability targets while maximizing customer fulfilment and engagement. Click here and a member of our sales team will contact you.”
I expect to see a restaurant website that claims to be “a leading provider of gustatory solutions, specializing in the synergy of libations and consumables.” Instead of a menu, you’ll have a 30 minute conference call with the waiter, after which you’re still not sure exactly what they sell, or how much it costs.
I’m assuming that the (bad) reason for this is the company is assuming you came to their website after searching for “widgets”. So in theory you know at least part of what they do. Of course, if you’ve got 13 tabs open it would be nice if when you come back to theirs there was an indication of what they do so you remember why you left it open.
Looking at YOU, Reddit! So annoying, just put the fucking datestamp on every post FFS, how difficult can it BE?
I’m generally distrustful of Amazon too, but I think there’s a simpler explanation: Google has spoiled us all with a far better search engine than anyone else has been able to make. I come across this all the time on another message board where people frequently ask factual questions that have been answered ad nauseum, but you’d never find those old threads using the board’s search engine. Google it, even without using site-specific search, and it’ll be in the top five results. It’s definitely not the evil mods trying to lead people astray with an inferior search engine. I also experience this at my job, where unfortunately I can’t use Google to search the private intranet, but I can still often find the proprietary info I’m looking for on the public internet somewhere faster than trying to navigate all the drop-down menus.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
Because they’re not providing what fills the space. They just link to their ad provider, and they populate the space - in unpredictable amounts of area - with their ad.
While ads do it sometimes, that’s not what I was talking about. Just as a quick/easy example. Think about wiki when they’re asking for donations. A banner will appear at the top of every page, but it always takes an extra second to load. Every time I search for something, the search bar gets pushed out from under my mouse and I click on the banner instead.
And by “the date”, we mean “the date when the described events happened”, not “the date the page was last modified”, which, since it’s a dynamically-generated CSS, is the date that the browser accessed the page.
To all of those individuals and organizations that ask us to enter a URL: You can finally drop the “http://” that you always put in there at the beginning. 99.999% of the time we copy and paste the URL from some other website or document on the computer. We practically never, ever just type in a URL manually where it would be any use to fill in the leading http://.
For the remaining .001% of the times when we do need to manually type in the URL, we can type in the http:// ourselves.
Design so that the most common and typical use cases are handled with the least keyboard work.
I do occasionally type in a URL manually. I never bother with the httpetc any longer because the browser always fills it in for me.
I think the only time I bother with the HTTP is when I’m putting in an IP address, otherwise some browsers assume you are looking it up rather than navigating to it.
But that’s not generally being shared on a public web site as an informational address.
What?? That’s just crazy talk, man.
I was on a website the other day where I had to enter my checking account and bank routing numbers. I had the bank website open in another tab, so I could copy and paste the correct numbers onto the page, but it wouldn’t allow that. I had to type in those numbers, even though copying and pasting would have prevented mistyping errors.
Yes, I’ve encountered that exact thing with banking informaiton. It’s a stupid and annoying enough problem that somebody has created a browser extension to fix it. Glad we’re in the pit, because it’s called “Don’t fuck with paste” (firefox) or for Chrome.
The Treasury Direct web-site requires me to enter my password by mouse-clicking on a displayed keyboard.
I assume the theory is to defeat key loggers (which I know are thing - but really, how prevalent were they?), but that seems much less likely an issue then someone standing behind me watching is I click each key.
I mentally imagine “password stolen by keylogger” to be roughly as prevalent as “gas station blows up because of spark from cell phone”.
Not quite. Keyloggers actually exist. No cell phone has ever caused an explosion at a gas station, and it really couldn’t happen. All of the caution stems from when they were new, people didn’t understand the technology, and it scared them.
A better comparison would be a gas station being hit by lightning. That actually does happen.
