I happened to click a link that took me to the associated twitter X account for something I was interested in and was greeted by not one, not two, but four modern day web popups.
I know it’s nothing new. I’ve got a couple of firefox plugins that are usually quite good at hiding this sort of nonsense, but I guess they failed me today (or, I shudder to think, there were even more that were blocked, and this is what got through)
What’s the worst new/not-signed-in user experience you’ve encountered recently?
The web. It was good while it lasted.
robots.txt is the perfect summary of the web era. A plain text file that politely asked web crawlers not to do certain things. Such an innocent time.
Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed
(grumble, unblock, reload)
Verify you are human
(click)
…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)
…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)
…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)
…spin…spin…spin…
Verify you are human
(click)
…spin…spin…spin…
https://privacypass.github.io/ has helped somewhat
Privacy Pass will generate a number of random nonces that will be used as tokens
British people making a double take
Interesting. A quick look at the description makes me think it could help with the inconvenience problem, but probably not with the allowing javascript problem. Still, I’ll have to take a closer look. Thanks for the link.
Edit: Turns out it requires installing a browser extension. From Cloudflare. No thanks, but I’ll give it another look if the protocol ever gets implemented by browsers.
You forgot:
Click all the pictures of buses.
(clicks)
…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of bicycles.
(clicks)
…spin…spin…spin…
Click all the pictures of traffic lights.
(clicks)
…spin…spin…spin…
I have a very hard time believing that these companies are unaware of how auful this shit makes their webpages.
If this were a competent company, I’d say that they’re entirely aware of it and how fucking awful it is, but that there’s a mandate coming from somewhere that the page MUST include x, y and z and so they add x, y and z but usually try to at least make the site usable.
This being Twitter, though, I’m sure it’s because a screaming man-child threw a sink at someone and told them to do it or they’ll be fired and so they did it in the most half-assed obnoxious way they could manage.
Common language used to dismiss bad decisions like this:
- We need to track and meet our metrics for the quarter
- Engagement for $FEATURE is down, so we have to take measures to get people to take notice
- It’s opt-in/opt-out, so it’s the right thing to do
- It’s only a one time thing and then the system remembers1 what the user selected
- Only new users are affected - our power users will put up with it
- It’s just a minor inconvenience, really
- It’s just a website
1 - Oh, did you turn off cookies or clear your cache? Sorry about that.
Pretty sure you just triggered every developer and/or person who had to sit through a product meeting.
Though you missed the last bullet point: Our user surveys showed that people would actually prefer these changes
It’s intentional, they want you logged in so they can track what you’re doing
Anyone can make a good website. It takes a real engineer to make a horrible website that people will use just enough while suffering.
It’s diminishing customer experience creep, except the company doesn’t understand what the user data means. They run A/B tests of different layouts, seeing what kind of feedback each gets to learn more about design choices and users. Each version should get its own feedback and then that data is compiled by data scientists into actionable feedback, things that can be done to improve the website in the direction the company thinks is an “improvement”.
Twitter abandoned those data scientists with the initial layoffs. There is no one to tell them what works and what impacts the customer experience, which is why each time the internal question of “how do we open up for engagement?” they answer it the same way, “Use existing user bases by linking their account to Twitter.” The result is several login requests all looking for the same cookie.
It’s lazy or inexperienced management. Knowing the type of person Elon hires, it’s probably both.
I mean, they kinda don’t. Companies are entities made out of policies guiding how people split up objectives into smaller parts. The more people involved and the more indirect it is, the less coherent it gets
Legal says you need one popup for compliance. Marketing or analytics say you need more users to log in. Elon wants to remind people to call it Twitter.
By the time it filters through managers to the devs, they probably know it’ll be a horrible experience, but what are they going to do? It’s not their job. They’ll get brushed off. There might even be a compelling reason to do it in this way - with this in particular, annoying and intrusive popups are malicious compliance with the EU cookie laws. But everyone seems to be doing it this way - that’s probably what legal is going to recommend rather than interpreting the law themselves
So the problem is the structure. If you want a hierarchy of obedient replaceable cogs, you’ve made sure no one sees the full picture
on top of what others have said - directing you to the app and login - it’s also likely just that teams don’t talk and make decisions that solve their local issue without too much for the whole, and then say “ugh team x solved this so inelegantly! we were forced to do our thing that wasn’t as nice!”
GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA GIVE US YOUR DATA
I will say that the Google Auth prompt in particular is just this huge nuisance and a horrible experience. People should feel stupid for including it in their web experience.
Wait, how can I get rid of google auth pop-ups? I got Ublock but they still come up whenever I go to a reddit page.
Given how intrusive google is, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was kinda forced by them along with some other functionality
I don’t know, but I also don’t know why would anyone willingly choose this UX for their website.
