I’m on Android, so some of these may only be applicable to there.
Specific tweaks
- Citymapper should have the options for “home” and “work” at the top, not the bottom
- You should be able to see the guest list on Luma and Partiful before you RSVP (see Katja Grace’s blog post)
- Microsoft Authenticator should let you search or reorder all the accounts you have OTPs set up for
- Yay, as of 2024-09-28 they have fixed this in the beta version!
- Typeform should let you toggle a view to see all questions, not just the current one
- They say it is to increase engagement, which might well be true, but it’s also annoying to have no sense of how long the form will be
- If it’s an application for something, I want to know what all the questions are before I start writing answers.
- A workaround is to put in fake answers and scroll down, but that’s just a waste of my time, particularly given that their smooth scroll is slow…
- You should be able to switch between accounts in Airtable, rather than sign out entirely.
Broken things
- Spotify only plays downloaded songs if in offline mode – if you just have no internet it complains about that and doesn’t realise that they’re downloaded
- Yay, this has been fixed for a couple of months now (December 2024)
General points
- When web forms have a dropdown single-select option, you should be able to type into the field to filter options. Something like React Select solves this problem perfectly and is easy to implement.
- Although on desktop you can usually type and get to where you want, this isn’t possible on mobile because there’s no physical keyboard (and the virtual keyboard disappears once you focus on the dropdown).
- So, you have to scroll all the way to reach your option (and “United Kingdom” is a long way down in alphabetised lists…)
- Even worse is when you get to the bottom, see it’s not there, and then have to go back up to look more carefully for “Great Britain”, or “England”, or something else
As seen on the Paris Musées website
- Two-page login screens are often annoying for password manager users – e.g. Airtable’s takes 1-2s to go from the email page to password one, and also they haven’t implemented a hidden field for my password to autofill into, which means I need to fill it twice.
- Various places online where people discuss the pros and cons
- I can see how the two-page pattern is helpful for people who use SSO or social sign-in and might get confused, but as a minimum the hidden field solution would make this accommodation less inconvenient to users like me
- Relatedly, it’s nice when websites have a combined sign up / login form, where if they don’t recognise your email address you get taken through to the registration page with your email and password choice prefilled
- I guess a security downside of this is that it leaks information about who’s already a user. But so too does giving feedback on failed login attempts more detailed than “email / password combination not recognised”, or telling users on the registration page “email address already taken”