HN Explorer

Ask HN: Dark UI Patterns in Gmail?

15 points by miki_tyler ↗ HN
I have noticed that when I get a new email, let's say in the promotions tab of my inbox, a fraction of a second before I click on it, the ad below it bubbles up, and I end up clicking on it most of the time. Am I the only one experiencing this?

16 comments

[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 49.3 ms ] thread
aodonnell2536
Haven’t experienced it myself, but Google has been doing it with YouTube for years so I wouldn’t put it beneath them
asdman123
I have experienced an deterioration in the mobile browser experience. When using Safari on iOS you always get a full page prompt that wants you to switch to the app. The problem is that it is slightly delayed from the rest of the page loading. If you started to scroll, your viewport is now offset vertically, making it impossible to get to the latest message. The JS always forces you down. So now you need to hard reload, wait for the prompt again, skip and only then you are able to access the search and latest message. It maddening.
bingemaker
In the settings, I have unchecked all the categories (Primary is checked by default). I haven't experiences any such issues.
legitster
"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence". I hate "Dark Patterns" because UX is hard and 90% of accusations are complete assumptions of intent.

Advertisements are almost universally served from a secondary/external source. So when you make a request to load your inbox, the ad may come in a half second or so slower than the native content. In a world where content is loaded in Async that means it may come in slower than your reaction time to read the page and click.

If you load up your console and look at the network requests, I would bet you a crisp $49 bill that you will not see all of the content loaded at the same time and the ad being delayed intentionally.

BugsJustFindMe
Never attribute to incompetence instead of malice after a reasonable amount of time has elapsed for someone to have noticed and decided whether the behavior was undesirable and should be urgently fixed (not malice) or not (malice). Never attribute to incompetence instead of malice when a trillion dollar company that should have trillion-dollar-company-appropriate internal QA processes misses or ignores something blatant and terrible, especially when that problem is as old and as well understood as content shifting.
legitster
Uh, I have worked cross team enough at huge companies to know that there is nothing magical about the size of a company when it comes to QA and bad UX choices.
mostlysimilar
Choosing "No" instead of "No thanks, I don't like free stuff" is not hard. Choosing to give the "No" button equal weight and placement as the "Yes" button is not hard.

It's malice to hide the opt-out option in tiny gray text at the bottom of the modal but make the opt-in button huge, orange, and unmissable. Dark pattern, not incompetence.

awinter-py
also never attribute to malice what can be explained by hyper-optimization -- if all ad clicks were misclicks of this type, an AB test on a speedup might say to keep the jank version, without saying why

normally I'd say in-house users would notice any gmail issue + it must be intentional, but most in-house users won't get shown ads

BugsJustFindMe
Hyper-optimizing for ad clicks instead of user experience is basically a synonym for malicious treatment of users.
legitster
> if all ad clicks were misclicks of this type, an AB test on a speedup might say to keep the jank version

The problem is that misclicks are not actually super valuable for the ad purchaser. So if Google changed their ad behavior and your bounce rate shot up, you (or enough reasonable customers) would reduce your ad spend to compensate.

Hyper-optimizing for clicks would eventually be noticed.

radley
> UX is hard

Odd. At one point, it was possible to specify the size of an image before it loads, thus reserving the space and avoiding content jumping around. I guess it could work if the UX designers were aware that there would be ads, so they could design space for them and then find a way to communicate that to the developers.

It might help if Google could communicate with the company producing the ads (DoubleClick?), so they might know in advance the exact sizes they will get. Even better, they could provide some sort of specifications that the ads be a specific size.

If only there was a way...

cameldrv
But everything is A/B tested. What starts out as a bug can end up organizationally unfixable if it has a positive impact on conversion.
blondin
this is bad UI design. not a dark pattern.

nowadays, i smile away whenever a lazy loading UI gets in my way. and i end up tapping or clicking on it. i never go back to do what i was doing when i was rudely interrupted.

i have seen it everywhere.

kibibu
Lazy loading UI is the worst thing to happen in UI design in the last decade.

Even Google's front page search does it. I have to wait 3 seconds before clicking anything because it might move from under me