I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there?
You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ.
Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes.
Compare this to big box stores like “Home Depot”, “Lowe’s”. I can spend 10-15 minutes just trying to find the right size of screw, board, or whatever using their bloated sites. On mobile it’s even worse.
RockAuto is my favourite website. Incredibly simple and utilitarian, but also quite powerful. You can easily drill down or search for parts, depending on what is more intuitive to you. Price comparison is automatic, and grouped into useful price/quality categories. You can see year/make/model compatibility for a part number once you’ve found it, as well as a brief description, at least 1 picture (usually more), and determine whether it will be shipped from the same warehouse as other parts in your cart. It does all this with 0 friction, from one page, blazing fast on any platform. I end up ordering almost all my car parts there, not because they necessarily sell the best parts but because it’s just so easy to.
I used RockAuto for the first time recently. The site is super dense with info and functionality, but never once did I feel lost or overwhelm. Neither did I feel like anything was missing. Everything I needed to see and do was exactly where it should be. It's so rare for the screen to disappear like that. It's so transparent that I _almost_ can't say it's a joy to use (it's a joy to use!).
FastMail has one of the best-feeling web apps I've ever used. It's incredibly snappy and I never encountered any bugs while using it. They raised the bar for what I thought a web app could achieve.
I think the only thing I really dislike about Fastmail's UI is they've hidden the "Report phishing" and "Report spam" links and they're in two completely different places.
There's a menu bar for the entire email chain, and an "Actions" button for each mail message. Report Spam is only available in the former, and Report Phishing is only available in the latter.
I agree, it's annoying! Maybe someone at Fastmail will see this.
Agree! Only bummer is when I want to create calendar events and reference email details, or vice versa. On desktop it’s easy enough to have two tabs, but on mobile, it’s a pain. I get why it is the way it is, but we are talking about exceptional UX here, and I think there is room for improvement.
How exactly do you imagine displaying those things at the same time on a mobile screen? While I agree it would be exceptional, I also think we shouldn’t expect the impossible.
I don’t know but there is my use case, I would expect a product and design team to figure it out as best they see fit. Or throw it out.
Maybe auto-suggestions as you type into certain fields? You’re typing into the location field of a new event and received a hotel booking receipt email in the last 2 hours, perhaps the address of that hotel could be a smart auto-suggestion? Things like that.
I love fastmail but the webapp does this one thing that drives me crazy: The first (and only the first) email I read triggers a reload of the entire page for some reason. It's pretty quick but very jarring...wish I knew what was going on; anyone else see this?
I'd never used Fastmail and as a sometimes-UI guy, thought I'd check out their 30 day trial to see what all the praise was about. I saw your comment before going, so kept that in mind.
With a brand new user account, I was not at all able to reproduce your issue. I closed the browser and cleared cache and all that, but I did not see an entire page refresh at any point.
Perhaps there's some weird caching issue with your browser, or maybe you've got a browser extension misbehaving? Maybe I'm just lucky? Idk, but hopefully this helps.
I see this.
My assumption is its some kind of html/js cache, local storage across browser sessions maybe. And when you click an email it realizes it needs to update.
I can name multiple Facebook features that have been broken for months. Temporary profile pictures most annoyingly of all. They stopped working close to a year ago. They simply never change back.
The incentive structure doesn’t encourage it. Nobody gets a promotion for going back and fixing issues; it’s all about new initiatives and boosting metrics with new ideas.
The thing that gets me is how slow all of it is. And I’ve programmed against facebook APIs, which are ludicrously performant! Hundreds of megabytes of data in single digit milliseconds total roundtrip.
exactly, one example is there are a lot of programatically absolute positioned divs to break ad-blockers or make them very inefficient, while the performance of the app suffers from many tricks like these as well.
The "feeds" screen in the app has been throwing errors for at least a year ("Feed isn't available right now"). I only try to use the screen because a while back it was the only way to view content in the correct order.
Hate how it loses its place on the page and reloads when you zoom into a picture on mobile. I mean you have to go far out of your way to f’up that bad.
I really wish we had something resembling a "native" UI toolkit, but for the web. Just throw together a couple <button>s or <input type=checkbox>es with absolutely zero additional JS/CSS, but have it actually look & work moderately decent, the way SwiftUI does.
Bootstrap started as something like this, but it both evolved too quickly IMO, and for some reason a generic look on the web is considered bad (by who? marketing? designers? even users as they think lack of distinctive style means lack of developer skills?)
Exactly, and meanwhile relied on jQuery until the most recent major release (3 years ago).
Once you're starting with one framework (no matter how "lightweight"), you can't gradually introduce a different one that better fits your problem domain, you usually have to rip it out & redo at least some parts.
> [...] for some reason a generic look on the web is considered bad [...]
Yeah it is bad. I won't go into specifics but it's horribly bad, and the sheer amount of CSS frameworks out there is evidence enough.
But the main problem isn't even that it looks (&works) ugly, it is also lacking/incomplete as a basic UI toolkit. How long did we wait to have a standardised date picker? Color picker? Where's the progress bar? Context menu? Tab bar? Icons with labels, representing files/objects? Half the other stuff we've had figured out in the 1980s and considered absolutely necessary by 90s?
Fire up Borland Delphi Builder from the 90s and marvel at how easy it was to stitch together a simple UI that looks decent next to every other app that ran on your computer. JS is ~30 years old, and we've been building web apps even before that, there was plenty of time to match it - but we've spent it on churning through frameworks instead.
I myself started programming with Delphi from 90s, but your arguments sound like only a perfect toolkit would be useful. I'd be perfectly happy to have 80% of Delphi 7 VCL in web-native format with a clear defined way to add custom components that fit in. Like color picker, which more often than not needs customization. And not like it was themable back then. WinXP-level theming should be enough.
I like minimal, semantic frameworks like Pico CSS for this. You just give it HTML and it looks really nice. Tools like Bootstrap are great when you need more control but they also encourage more fiddling.
We do have a native toolkit for the web. You put a <button> down, the browser will render a button.
But then some people don't like the button: it's not animated enough for them, the corners aren't rounded enough, the button is too skeumorphic, or not skeumorphic enough, there is too much / not enough white space, etc etc. Everyone has a different idea of what the new button should look like, and we're immediately back to fragmentation.
There are financial incentives to seeming trendy and new, and that requires constant change. The standard <button> may be sturdy and steady and not require three hundred npm packages, but it will never, by definition, look trendy or new.
I would say Project Chicago was maybe one of most consistent UI projects ever executed. Too bad they kept reinventing parts of it, so now we have a mishmash of different UX paradigms, some better, some worse, but certainly inconsistent. At least it’s not macOS though.
There is SO much bloat in all the “modern” UI “culture”. Reinventing things over and over again. Creating entire frameworks for tiny, simple things. And the worst part of web UIs is that (though there have been efforts to address this) there is low regularity between the experiences especially compared to native UI apps where you are purposely restricted to a set of controls which look and behave the same across all apps that use them.
Yes Windows 2000 distracts me from what I want to actually do with a computer, point and click.
It absolutely prevents me from hitting the windows key and hitting the up button twice or three times mattering on if logout is there if my memory serves right after shutdown to get to run and then hit enter or just simply use the arrow keys on the desktop to get to my computer and hit enter which are all things I could do on Windows 3.1 by hitting the alt button to open up the menu or tab to switch between icons in the highlighted thing which are actually all things that I could do on Windows 2000 Windows XP Windows server 2003 Windows Vista Windows 7 Windows 8 Windows 8.1 Windows 10 Windows 11 Windows 98 Windows 95
I've listened through some of the developer commentary on Half Life 2 and Half Life Alyx and the amount of user testing coupled with attention to detail really impressed me. The same can't be said for Steam though :/
> You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have.
There is no point in sanding something that someone else is using hammer and chisel on. FAANGS are the companies of continuously delivered websites, self-updating evergreen software, churners of framework-du-jour that are deprecated sooner than you can say "FAANG". Even if took the time to sand something, it would be replaced by something else the following day.
I have no idea where you got this idea from. Can you give some examples showing that switching to a new framework is a common at FANGs?
Yes, frontend moves quickly and there is a new framework every day. No, most products teams at FANGs are not rewriting frontends in a new framework every year.
My biggest issue with mcmaster's website is that it doesn't provide any sort of navigation hierarchy - if you go into, say, the "rounded head screws" subcategory, there's no option to get back to the general "screws" category besides the browser's navigation buttons.
IMO the biggest issue used to be that it wouldn't tell you the shipping cost until after you ordered. A few years ago they fixed that, but it still only gives you a total cost and doesn't tell you how your ordered is split into different shipments.
I don’t know - I could argue that the user’s browser should be the preferred way to navigate, duplicating it’s functionality is redundant and adds clutter to the interface. It’s at least a defensible position.
Idk. I just visited the site (McMaster) for like 2 minutes and found a few annoying things. I filtered for cotton (o rings). Nothing happens after click for 4 secs. Then it chooses something else to filter on.
Next the animation to get the filtering menu is bugging out. And dragging it down triggers a site refresh.
Mobile games, especially those with microtransactions. They're highly incentivized to offer a satisfying user interface. So as to get more money, of course.
They don’t optimize for satisfying interfaces, they optimize for driving engagement.
I find the aesthetics of free to play games very stressful and unsatisfying (lots of notifications and popular to distract you), but they ARE effective at getting me to click into menus to make those nuisances go away
imo GitHub has to be up there. I think some of the recent changes to search and making the code view more IDE-like are steps backward from a “polish” perspective, but still useful features
GitHub specifically has the issue mentioned in this blog post! It annoyed me so much I had to file it with them three years ago, and it’s still not fixed: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7506
I like the IDE "defined here/used here" features but I wish the page would be faster. It can be quite painful to read code on GitHub. The code view is also broken and unusably slow in some mobile browsers (Firefox) when scrolling horizontally
This sort of problem (speed) is a much overlooked secondary functionality requirement IMO.
You might get amazing UX mocks and wireframes and designs etc from the UX team, and the mockups from Figma or whatever may have user-tested really well, but if there is huge latency in the real implementation then that is a usability-killer IMO, regardless of how polished the UI is.
Azure Standard has an incredibly polished experience for shopping. It's not _perfect_ (if you know where to put your hands you can find a place that isn't perfectly sanded) but the sheer level of smoothness across the transaction flow is unmatched by anything else I have ever had the pleasure of using in the "online shopping" category.
The best UI is no UI. Anyone who tries to design for increased engagement isn't who you're looking for.
I'd look to study lots of internal tools that don't get marketed or outside influences. That would be interesting to find out. Where's the crossover from just enough resources to make it exist and enough resources to leave it as "finished"
Just browsed McMaster. What a clean interface! Very easy to drill in and see what you are looking for. Compare that with the promotion of paid ads on the many major e-commerce platforms.
mcmaster is the most polished ui/ux you know? To each their own but this is a very hackernews comment - it's very much a site for engineers but I can't agree it's a polished UI or UX.
To me: Sense of hierarchy is off, accessibility is meh, there's an enormity of information per page, there's poor use of color and spacing... it could be worse but I can imagine this site giving my designer friends a seizure.
You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ.
Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes.
Compare this to big box stores like “Home Depot”, “Lowe’s”. I can spend 10-15 minutes just trying to find the right size of screw, board, or whatever using their bloated sites. On mobile it’s even worse.