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Ask HN: Why is OpenAI and ChatGPT design so bad?

11 points by hodder ↗ HN
From login ,UI, to ease of actually submitting a query, why is the OpenAI website so bad given it is the hottest startup on earth and ycombinator companies seem to prioritize quality design and UIs (such as ABNB). This company can hire the best designers on the planet and yet the page is horrid. Is this on purpoise bc demand is so extreme they are throttling with a horrid interface or what?

31 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 75.5 ms ] thread
keiferski
What do you find bad about it? It seems pretty straightforward to me...
apapapa
Maybe that the chat box is somewhat hidden
hodder
go to the OpenAI website.. where is the actual product? It reads more like a splash page with a bunch of news nonsense no user cares about.

Sure they have many products so then lets instead type chatGPT into google and go the link. Now I get to a page where it tells me to login on the side. Now I click login. Now im at an auth page. Next I get in. Now on the left I have about 60 tabs showing "new chat".

There is just a ton about the design that makes it inaccessible, difficult to navigate to the actual products and get to results. Im no expert in this matter, but it is much closer to Snapchat level UI intuitiveness than it is to Airbnb.

KRAKRISMOTT
They don't have to. When you are the hottest company on Earth, the customers break down your doors and come to you. Their UI for the landing page and docs has always been atrocious, since day 1. The login locations kept changing and it was difficult to find. But once you have logged in, the developer dashboard and ChatGPT UI are actually pretty standard and boring.
baryphonic
Here's one: I have some pretty long chats, but I can't use the "home" key to scroll to the top if I want to view previous messages. I always have to find the scrollbar and drag it all the way up (not so easy on macOS). It's quite annoying.
zippothrowaway
No ability to search previous chats.
nickthegreek
I'll add that I want a way to organize my chats. Give me folders!
sk11001
Is it? I much prefer the ChatGPT UI over the Gemini one which mangles any code you input.

OpenAI need to add text search over your chat history - your chat history becomes hard to manage very quickly.

tobinfekkes
Agree 100%. I think the design/layout is actually quite nice. How much better could it be for a simple prompt/response page? But the lack of search is the only obvious missing piece.
bobbob1921
Same here, I like the chatGPT web gui and use it on average once a day, I like how it keeps the chat history and auto names each chat session. (I’m on the paid 20$ a mo plan)
x0x0
There's lots of areas for improvement. eg you could create permanent messages re: your level of competence w/ programming. Say I ask for regex help. It will often start by explaining what ruby is or how to use gsub. Whereas I'm just using it to speedrun writing v1.

So some way to persist something ala, "I'm a competent dev familiar with languages X, Y, Z; please be terse; you're just writing v1 and do not have to warn me this is just a starting point; etc" would be quite welcome.

And search. And categories re: the project that I was working on if you're not going to provide search.

nosefurhairdo
This feature exists under "customize chatgpt" menu option in side nav. Can give information up to 1500 characters + instructions for how to respond up to 1500 characters.

Search is a good idea; I imagine that might already be on the roadmap.

muhiris
Yes you're right. In Gemini, scrolling back and forth within a chat discussion is so hard. It has more of a quick-question feel rather than extensive conversations feel.
aborsy
Indeed I find it bad, especially for such product.
rabbits_2002
I never thought this a single time. The UI is perfectly fine.
amerkhalid
One more vote for ChatGPT’s simple and intuitive UI. I personally find most of modern web design over the top, with bare minimum information, just fluff.

I guess it depends on your target market, average consumer probably is easier to influence with certain designs and average technical user probably prefers less clutter on their tools.

byyoung3
they are focused on models. If the model is the best, the UX wont matter. If the model is 2nd best, the best UX in the world won't make up for it.
sfmike
never asked this because the ui was good enough to hide it's presence in my subconcious
mgdev
They're focusing on what matters.
SeanAnderson
Can you give more concrete examples? What would you change from/to?
jwithington
"it's a chat app, michael. how much design does it take?"
nosefurhairdo
There's hardly any specific criticism here. I'll give my perspective for why I disagree.

They keep me logged in between sessions unless I clear cookies, so when I navigate to chatgpt I go straight to a new chat. There are zero steps for me to get where I want to go. The side nav is simple, shows me a history of chats which is all I care about. Copying code is easy. The layout works well on mobile as well as desktop.

mgkimsal
> ycombinator companies seem to prioritize quality design and UIs

Any sort of B2C org will need to focus on improving a UX experience. Many B2B orgs don't need to do this. openai certainly doesn't at this stage. What would be the point? Getting even more people signed up and using it? They've got nothing to prove at this point with respect to getting signups and revenue.

FranklinMaillot
What infuriates me is that it scrolls while generating an answer and the text keeps shifting while I'm trying to read at the same time.

Doesn't look like a hard problem to solve, it should just keep the viewport fixed. Am I the only one bothered by that?

TechRemarker
Interesting, I've greatly enjoyed it. And often note how for instance Microsoft's implementation is much poorer design as well as Google's implementation of their chat bot. While always room for improvement, haven't heard any previous significant discussions about ChatGPT being poor design. Might be helpful if you elaborated on what about the design you particular do not like?
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CharlesW
"Bad" and "horrid" are unactionable, and the Airbnb comparison makes no sense. Do you have any useful criticism?

It's rudimentary, yes. It sure seems like it'd be easy to enable users to easily copy and save chats, for example.

irvingprime
Horrid? It looks fine to me. More importantly, it does what I want (more or less). What do you think is so bad and how would you fix it?
0x008
Because they are spending all their money on data scientists.