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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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

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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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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Belhassen Chelbi • Edited

dev.to * coughs *
praise

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Ben Halpern

We're figuring it out gradually 😊

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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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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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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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Sasha Blagojevic

I knew someone was going to write this :D

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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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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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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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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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michaeltd

slashdot.org/

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

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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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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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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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Vincenzo

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

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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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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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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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MYCS

dev.to

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Stephanie Handsteiner

reddit.

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Vincenzo

Old version of reddit desktop, before the redesign was awful

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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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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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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.