[willio58]

It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.

Just last night I was helping my GF set up an ad for her job on LinkedIn. The UX was terrible. Like awful and basic things like save and exit were completely broken. Meanwhile LinkedIn makes what percentage of their revenue through ads? Same with google ads. It’s like these products that are in a way some of the most valuable products in the planet, are given a junior web dev and a “UX designer” who really doesn’t know anything about UX.

[chuckadams]

I don't think there is such a thing as perfect UX and I'm not asking for it. I just want them to stop making it worse.

Seriously tho, why isn't this something that a browser can do? Why can't I just split a tab and say all links from the left tab open in the right? Why not be able to scroll through history as a list of such panes like a smalltalk browser or file explorer on a mac? Maybe even a history tree, able to be forked with a click or two. Tree-style tabs are a baby step toward that, but I'm not seeing much interest out there in actually learning how to run.

[crtasm]

Split tabs are now in:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/split-view-firefox

[piptastic]

Chrome also has split tabs since Feb '26

right click a link, open in split view

[eMPee584]

KDE's hybrid file / web browser konqueror has had arbitrary tab tiling since 1999 IIRC.. still a gread tool, would just need some love and webextensions support to come back big

[vbezhenar]

I hate that feature and I hate that they keep bloating browser which was lightweight.

Just for the record.

[rafram]

When was Chrome lightweight? 15 years ago?

[shepherdjerred]

Didn't it used to be branded as lightweight?

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/02/google-chrome-birthday/

> I fondly remember the good old days of 2004 when I first started using Firefox as my main browser and thinking how fresh and lightweight it felt compared to the atrocity that was IE. Firefox, sadly, got bloated over the years. So far, Chrome hasn’t put on the same weight

[sethops1]

I also don't understand this feature. Like yo, we heard you like tabs, so we put tabs in your tabs so you can tabulate while you tabulate. Huh?

[em-bee]

i occasionally need to compare two tabs. previously that meant that i had to open those two tabs in separate windows and then use window tiling to place them side by side. setting that up was a lot of work. and also it makes switching windows very hard. each side by side view would add two more windows that all need to be cycled through when i switch windows. and don't try to have more than two of those on a workspace. you'll go crazy switching between them.

with the split view it not only becomes very easy, but the split tabs also keep their position among all the other tabs, so i can keep the view permanently without cluttering up my list of windows. currently i have 5 split views in active use. that number is likely to grow...

[prinny_]

I think it’s a nice feature. I use it to have designs on one part of the screen and implementation on the other. That way I can jump between “designs | implementation” and “PR | swagger” without managing and resizing tabs. Previously I had to jump between tabs and taking into account the newer screens provide a considerable amount of UI real estate there was screen area to utilize.

[pidgeon_lover]

I don't understand why browser-makers don't leave window management to the window manager. Split view has been standard in Windows (and probably Linux?) since 2009. I know Mac doesn't really do split windows without additional software, but that's an Apple-being-awkward problem.

[em-bee]

just putting windows side by side is not enough. i need to be able to treat those two side by side windows as a unit: see how i use it as an example here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47913202

no windowmanager anywhere supports that. even tabs could have been solved by window managers. but then we could not get inactive tabs, and the same is true for the tabs in splitview.

if lack of support for inactive tabs are no issue and if you don't use workspaces much, you could use those as a workaround. but that unfortunately at least gnome workspaces are not flexible enough for that. (i'd need dynamic creation of workspaces without automatic destruction, and i'd need gnome to remember which window goes into which workstation. that used to be a feature on some windowmanagers, but i haven't found any that can distinguish multiple windows from the same app.)

[odo1242]

You might like Zen Browser

[odo1242]

https://zen-browser.app/ - it’s not exactly what you describe but it’s basically redesigned from the ground up for the same interaction model

[xprueg]

Just in case you aren’t aware, Edge can split a tab and open links from the left side on the right.

[loloquwowndueo]

What’s edge ?

[cheschire]

It’s a de-googled spyware app in case you’re looking to diversify your personal information loss portfolio across multiple firms.

[latexr]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge

[userbinator]

It's precisely because they're so big that they can afford to overhire lots of designers, which then obviously need to justify their employment by continually changing things. This isn't a problem with small and tiny companies where "UX designer" might not even be a separate job but the responsibility of someone who will care only enough to make something that works and then leave well enough alone.

[trueno]

i have a really good friend who did the whole UI/UX design bootcamp during the explosion of UX/UI jobs. he did okay, he's probably hopped jobs 2-3 times now and is now without a job.

i actually feel for him, it's definitely one of the career paths that's looked at as excess/waste now while companies slim up to reappropriate money for AI. but i do think there was something there, he was genuinely passionate about what he did and it's just really hard to find work doing it now.

i feel guilty saying this but i've let him talk me through some of what he does, show me how he sees and approaches design (the bulk of what he did was design the interfaces for publicly used webapps and mobile apps) and... idk. i feel like it's all acquired taste and almost a "good app developer will think of these things when they design the front end" and a lot of his insight to me broadly looked like a lot of stuff i would've considered myself as a mere sidequest and my general thought process to deliver a good app. the difference is im building the app and designing the user experience, but his entire career is silo'd to just building the user experience.

im not against breaking out the design to a dedicated resource whether thats one designer or one team who wants to try and maintain a consistent language for a company. i think this has upside to make the design experience not locked to a single developer or developer team, and opens it up to a lot more channels of input. but on the other hand, like it's not the end of the world for me as a developer to come up with a really good design & i personally have never imagined myself not considering UX/UI at every corner when I'm building something. It feels like a second nature to me, there's creative aha moments to it, i think it's generally really good for a developer to step into a users shoes and almost "debug" the experience.

where i think ui/ux has gone off the rails:

- i think it's unduly influenced web design and has been poisoned by marketing. the rise of landing pages for SaaS that say a whole lot of fucking nothing and the crossover with "marketing research". i actually literally can't stand these types of pages, i swear 75% of the time i click around and can never get a straight answer on what the product/service is. examples: https://boomi.com https://www.astronomer.io

- things like OP, issue links opening in popups. changing things for the sake of changing things. such a change is probably "backed by research / surveys" giving the illusion that this was a data driven-decision, making it hard to push back on.... despite on deployment = everyone universally hating it. there seems to be some heavy flaws with the data sampling/collection methods that drive these decisions. i think the field of ux/ui as its own distinguished and defined field needs to undergo a self-awareness evolution here. something that's happened quite a few times in engineering. they really need to scoot back and have one of those "sometimes the best path forward is to not change anything at all" moments collectively and learn to recognize when that is right in front of you

- sometimes (maybe more than sometimes) allowing the business to dictate design is mayhaps not a good thing. i think what im trying to say here is the existence of "hes the ux/ui guy in the department, go talk to him" gives business stakeholders misaligned incentives to just go and push a change that isn't _actually_ user oriented, but is heavily tied into some metric or some other stupid business initiative. actually the more that i think about it this is probably why a lot ui/ux careers exist (give all control of the design over to the business) and that seems like a slippery slope

[glaslong]

The larger the company, the more it will be designed according to internal incentives, and less by people actually using their own product.

[input_sh]

It gets increasingly difficult to design a website properly when you have different teams with different goals each competing to put their little feature front-and-centre, leading to a hacky job on top of a hacky job on top of a hacky job, which in turn hurts the performance until one day someone finally decides to re-think the whole thing from scratch and pisses off >50% of its users in the process that are used to the mess.

It's way easier to nail the UX when you're still in the dozens-of-employees stage of growth and offer like five features in total.

[stephenhuey]

As someone who has built a lot of greenfield UIs while also maintaining old ones (13+ years old SaaS), I recently set up LinkedIn ads and realized the UX is abysmal considering it’s something they’re actually trying to make money from. Maybe—just maybe-I’ve seen such poor UX in a free web app that lacks a maintenance budget. The only reasonable explanation I can come up with is they have a lot of silos within the ad portion of their platform, and each team works on their little corner and no one tries to work with it end to end. Since it’s LinkedIn, this is inexcusable. You go and try to make an ad campaign and then an ad set within it containing some ads, and then come back to it a week later and try to find all these entities you created. You may land on one and take a very long time gritting your teeth and praying for a way click around until you can find another one. What‘s the net drain on worldwide GDP caused by the time-wasting UX of this component of LinkedIn?!

[Zanfa]

> It’s always been interesting to me that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX.

This, but for online shops, especially clothing. Horrendously buggy, laggy, with broken navigation (especially when navigating back), filters that don't work on > 95% of online stores. Why they wouldn't fix their primary (or at the very least highest margin) income stream is beyond me, but I've had to abandon so many shopping carts just because the checkout flow is literally broken.

[re-thc]

> that multi-million and even billion dollar tech companies don’t have perfect websites in terms of UX

I would have thought it'd be the opposite.

It implies have hundreds of teams and UI / UX often is "scaled" in weird ways where everyone does their own thing and becomes a giant mess.

Everything is "correct" when you slice it enough. So from team A's perspective this might be a gain. When you are a part of a team you only see and own this part. That's your KPI.

Unless there's real and working governance (often very very hard) then it's not happening. To get that governance you need company direction and company buy-in that stops managers trying to push new features fast to infinity.

[Bombthecat]

It's more like no one cares about UX. People keep using the product and they keep printing. Why invest in a UX researcher or designer?

[faangguyindia]

The other day I was visiting intercom support tool

I realized it has morphed into completely unusable tool with so many features that i don't even know what to do inside it anymore.

Same pattern I saw in many other tools and product. As time passes software becomes more and more complex, then a new one comes which simplifies something and then it also morphs into some enterprise behemoth

[simonw]

UX is really, really hard - and for some reason still not fully respected as a discipline.

[Polizeiposaune]

Fast track to loss of respect:

I visit a site/launch the app I always use with the intent of getting something done quickly, and I find that since the last time I used it someone's rearranged the deck chairs and hidden or removed the functionality I need. Something that should take a minute or two suddenly becomes rage-inducing and eats an entire day.

[6031769]

Or the feature is still there but they've renamed it to something totally unrelated which you would never guess. Honestly, it's like they are actively trying to lose users.

The most depressing email to receive is "Good news! We've improved our website ..."

[OptionOfT]

I agree, and I think the metrification of UX hasn't helped here.

If you read the old Win32 interface design studies, and Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing, The: Practical Development Throughout the Evolution of Windows" you realize what people click isn't always what they want.

And old UX was ensuring that it was build in a way that what the user clicked was what they wanted.

Now? Since the MBAs came in the UX is another hostile piece of software, trying to trigger you into spending money.

[cjbgkagh]

The Win8 and Metro design disaster is what happens when you give UX free rein, instead of focusing on users they try to start design trends to impress other UX / designers (essential for their career).

I wonder how much of Apples design was basically ‘if you confuse Steve Jobs you’re fired.’ And this acted as a necessary governing force to counteract the need to impress peers.

[chuckadams]

Metro was a wonderful design for the media player app it was made for. It's great for menu-heavy interactions, not so much for representing stateful things like options and checkboxes and such. Metro isn't the problem, it's trying to shoehorn UIs into it regardless of fit that is.

[cjbgkagh]

I don’t agree, but that’s design, people have different opinions. I actually like the Ribbon interface, would have liked it more if they added a search box to it as well but designers hate search boxes.

[Wowfunhappy]

Part of UX is leveraging what users are already familiar with.

[cjbgkagh]

100% agree, but that is in contention with the desire to invent something new. As a separate discipline where the career trajectory is determined by peers the user becomes less important.

[ragall]

These are all symptoms of a larger problem: very few people care about the users, and you have instead classes of workers living in a bubble, working towards either micro-optimizing metrics or trying to achieve what in their minds is the "ideal" product, pushing the latest fashions of their branch.

So UX engineers will unleash the latest fad (see Apple's glass UI, or Material Design, variations of flat gray design, etc...), PMs will insist in dumbing down UIs, engineers will push whatever micro-service architecture because it's "cool" or push for rewrites in Rust / Typescript. At the same time, it's very rare for companies to have a single person (or restricted group of people) with a global view on what the product line is trying to achieve long-term.

[naikrovek]

It really isn’t that hard if you frame it correctly.

Computers are data processing machines with input and output. People today think they are vehicles to show design skill, and that’s not what they are. Focusing on design instead of utility is how you ruin any UI/UX anywhere.

Sites like GitHub do not exist for the designer. Sites like GitHub exist for software developers. Software developers should be calling the shots on that site, not designers.

Ralphlauren.com should be designed by designers. Dieterrams.com should be designed by designers. Etc.

Sites for designers should be designed by people who want to show off their designs.

Sites for data entry and manipulation should be designed for those who use that information. Creatives should stay away from sites like GitHub.

[Telaneo]

Respect has to be earned, and I don't think anyone (within margin of error) with UX in their job title has earned it. Most of their work consists of shuffling design elements around for its own sake. Sometimes they strike gold (or at least silver or copper), but it never feels like that's done because they target a better design, rather they stumble upon it while making designs whose goal is to be different.

You have to go back to when it was called HIC (Human–computer interaction) to find people who weren't completely brain-dead or ad-pilled when it came to design, did actual work and research trying to make better designs, and thus were at least somewhat respected.

[nicoburns]

Most people with UX in their job title these days aren't really UX designers. They're graphic designers that now have UX in their title because that is the fashion.

[userbinator]

They're closer to artists; and of course art isn't practical, it's meant to be artistic.

[drewbeck]

> It’s like these products that are in a way some of the most valuable products in the planet, are given a junior web dev and a “UX designer” who really doesn’t know anything about UX.

What you pay attention to grows. And company's pay attention to those things that move the needle on revenue. For many successful platforms UX doesn't move the needle much anymore (if it ever did). LinkedIn has effectively won their space and a clunky UI isn't going to show up in the numbers.

LinkedIn might have amazing designers on staff, but if leadership isn't prioritizing updates and fixes it won't happen. And leadership won't prioritize it until the problem shows up in the numbers.

[gtowey]

Companies are in it to extract as much value as possible for the least spend. Inside a bigco tech company nothing get engineering time allocated unless there is a monetary ROI attached. Which is why basic usability is neglected while features to sell you things are worked on constantly.

[rvz]

They make tens of billions, elsewhere to not even care about tiny UX issues like this.

At this point, it will stay broken because the amount of people complaining are not paying but are a tiny amount of people that will end up continuing to live with it.

So it won't be fixed.

[giancarlostoro]

Something about software engineering has gone wrong nobody thinks much about UX they blindly try to give functionality to the business/ customer requesting it but without considering whats already available and how to maintain status quo as much as possible. But theres also room to make things simple and intuitive.

Google released an AI music studio and their primary UI is literally an AI chat window. I absolutely hate UIs like that.

[anal_reactor]

Recently I was buying furniture and it quickly became obvious that "Can I actually browse their catalogue?" is a requirement that really narrows down the search.

[nikanj]

The metric for perfect is

-Does it drive more people to the app -Does it maximize time spent on the site -etc

Your idea of perfect is very different than the one LinkedIn is using

[justinclift]

> Does it maximize time spent on the site

That one in particular is super dangerous.

It can incorrectly lead to a process that used to be a 5 second thing suddenly becoming a back and forth 2 hour nightmare, because the metrics show "user spends more time on site".

Though in reality it turned the user from a happy user into a frustrated one whose likely to exit the platform.

Oh, GitHub is probably using a variant of this metric... :)

[codazoda]

I would argue that senior engineers, of which I am one, are more of the problem than junior. We build fancy custom components when we should be using the existing ones.

Yes, the (senior) product and design people are part of the problem too.

We need to build simpler software that works.

[yxhuvud]

What? In my experience the true seniors are the ones pushing hard for simplicity while the mediors build overly complex messes that one needs to be a rocket scientist to understand.