Badreads

Bad design: Losing your place after logging in

Usually, for reasons of security, some websites will only allow you to automagically login for a limited time. After that, the sites will stop and force you to enter your credentials again. They will then work automagically again for whatever the specified time is.

This is an inconvenience, but a minor one, and I can see the justification for it.

However, a surprising number of websites–so many I won’t even attempt a list–completely mess this up by following this pattern:

  1. You have a link to an interesting article/feature in a newsletter to a site you have an account on. I’ll use Goodreads because their site is generally terrible and it’s the most recent one where this has happened.
  2. When you click the link in the newsletter, you are taken to the site–you can see the article, but over top of it is a pop-up demanding that you log in (or create an account).
  3. You enter your credentials.
  4. You are taken to the main page of the site.
  5. You must now find the article you came to read, or go back to the newsletter and click the link again, which will now take you, logged in, to the article in question.

This is bad design, because it adds multiple steps to what should be a simple click and worse, sends the user off to somewhere they never meant to go, forcing them to retrace their virtual steps to get back. It wouldn’t surprise me if this extra friction results in a lot of people just not bothering at all.

The correct way–and the way all properly managed sites handle this, is to let the user enter their credentials, then keep them on the same page, so they can see the content they had come for. It sounds astoundingly obvious and logical, yet even in 2021 many sites fail to offer this.

Bad design: Goodreads’ review editor

As terrible as 2020 has been, we still have modern conveniences, like toasters, washing machines and keyboard shortcuts for formatting when writing text on the web.

Unless you use Goodreads’ “What did you think?” text box to add a review of a book you’ve read. In this case what you get is a text box that could have existed in 1998, unchanged.

Here’s the set of formatting tips it includes, which could have been cribbed from Learning HTML for Dummies, 1999 edition:

They do have a few concessions to the 21st century, mostly related to allowing easier linking to content on its own site (a coincidence, to be sure), and if you use a proper link, it will automatically make it clickable, a true miracle of modern web magic.

But looking at the warning about improperly nesting tags really does take me back to when I was building websites in HTML by hand and yes, it really was in 1999.

Given how trivially simple it is to offer simple and easy formatting controls (keyboard shortcuts and a formatting bar, both of which are available to me as I write this post in WordPress), the only reason I can think for a massive site like Goodreads to not offer the same is sheer laziness. And that’s not a good reason. It’s bad design.