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.
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.
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?!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 ..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
It's interesting to see that the UX issues that are annoying me when using Azure DevOps are finding their way into GitHub.
In case they are truly chasing Azure DevOps level UX, I would recommend they implement an HTML editor for issues that, depending on whether the user has dark mode or light mode enabled, saves some CSS of the respective mode and makes it unreadable if read within the other mode.
It sounds like the root issue is that some people prefer opening new tabs while others prefer staying in the same browser window. I surfed the web when all links, even across websites always stayed in the same browser window, and I still prefer that. But I can understand that some people prefer opening new browser tabs instead.
I think web browsers should revisit how they handle links with target=_blank/_top, and show different cursers when hovering and let users customize the default behavior.
Alas, GitHub has been plagued by bugs and UX regressions year after year.
I reported a bug last year about being unable to quote code blocks. It's quite a basic yet fundamental feature, right? They acknowledged the bug and moved on. To this day, quoting a block of code is still broken [1].
They simply don't care. I suppose their attention is focused on other subjects...
Anyway, I kind of accepted the "enshitification" of things I used to like. Fortunately, in this case, we can still hack our way around using custom userscripts [2].
Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old
UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab,
as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub
here. This is epic.
There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon.
*the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked
Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.
This is why I kind of think that UI/UX should be handled by normal developers who do other things as well. People whose sole job is UI/UX must do things like this in order to stay employed, normal developers don’t. So teach normal developers how to think about UI and UX so that changes stop happening solely because a specialist needs to change something that does not need changing.
Sorry, UI/UX people, but if you were proceeding towards some finely crafted experience, you’d have honed in on it by now. You would have a set of rules that could be followed to present information in both a pleasing way and a useful way simultaneously and everyone would know how things work because everyone followed the same rules. None of that has happened. You are just changing things to change them.
Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.
Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users.
Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out.
Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.
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.
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.
Split tabs are now in:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/split-view-firefox
Chrome also has split tabs since Feb '26
right click a link, open in split view
You might like Zen Browser
Just in case you aren’t aware, Edge can split a tab and open links from the left side on the right.
What’s edge ?
It’s a de-googled spyware app in case you’re looking to diversify your personal information loss portfolio across multiple firms.
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?!
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.
The larger the company, the more it will be designed according to internal incentives, and less by people actually using their own product.
> 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.
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?
UX is really, really hard - and for some reason still not fully respected as a discipline.
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.
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.
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 ..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Part of UX is leveraging what users are already familiar with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
It's interesting to see that the UX issues that are annoying me when using Azure DevOps are finding their way into GitHub.
In case they are truly chasing Azure DevOps level UX, I would recommend they implement an HTML editor for issues that, depending on whether the user has dark mode or light mode enabled, saves some CSS of the respective mode and makes it unreadable if read within the other mode.
They should also order the comments in order of recency top to bottom so you have to read the page in reverse.
Great, the UX feature I probably hate the most in Jira, now on Github.
This was exactly my thought. It breaks every bit of intuition I have using a browser, and makes pages run even slower.
And GitLab, too!
It sounds like the root issue is that some people prefer opening new tabs while others prefer staying in the same browser window. I surfed the web when all links, even across websites always stayed in the same browser window, and I still prefer that. But I can understand that some people prefer opening new browser tabs instead.
I think web browsers should revisit how they handle links with target=_blank/_top, and show different cursers when hovering and let users customize the default behavior.
This is not about new tabs. It refers to an in-page panel that displays the content of the linked issue instead of navigating to it.
Idk, it almost seem a workaround for slow/broken go-back? If go-back is fast and state preserving, it's basically a fullscreen modal.
All(?) browser open links in a new tab when middle-clicked?
It will probably suffer the same fate as the most-upvoted discussion of all time in the GitHub Community repo: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/66188
no reaction
And they pushed this as every major browser introduced a "Split View" feature...
I get this issue preview on Projects, although I don't like it there either, but as a hook on any issue link is just terrible UX, zero benefits IMHO.
Just improve what you have GitHub. Stop the AI bloatware. You will lose that race anyway, obviously.
I still don't understand what's the point of any full screen popups are
Links should be links. Stop making them into something else.
Alas, GitHub has been plagued by bugs and UX regressions year after year.
I reported a bug last year about being unable to quote code blocks. It's quite a basic yet fundamental feature, right? They acknowledged the bug and moved on. To this day, quoting a block of code is still broken [1].
They simply don't care. I suppose their attention is focused on other subjects...
Anyway, I kind of accepted the "enshitification" of things I used to like. Fortunately, in this case, we can still hack our way around using custom userscripts [2].
[1] https://imgur.com/a/github-bug-cant-quote-blocks-of-code-Z9O...
[2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/192665#discuss...
Interesting to see that Microsoft is now also ruining the old UI. That was the only advantage GitHub would still have over Gitlab, as Gitlab's UI was always horrible. And now Microsoft nerfs GitHub here. This is epic.
There's browser extensions to bring back more user control on youtube, facebook, trello* and many others; looks like someone should make one for github soon.
*the markdown enabler needs updating last I checked
There's already something like this for GitHub: https://github.com/refined-github/refined-github
Thanks for sharing - loads of great ideas there for the GitHub team.
I wish they’d focus on making their platform reliable and more stable.
Why would they care to empower competitors?
It took me a while to realize it was not a bug. Utterly insane that this went through QA.
> Utterly insane that this went through QA.
Big assumption you're making there.
Last week there was a new Plex update to their already bad new redesign where they changed the main font. And I hated it, but it also reminded me, this font may not be objectively worse than the last one so much as the regular change is what has made me come to hate using the app. We don't give enough credit to maintaining the status quo. If software was getting better and discomfort with new designs was a tax we had to pay, then fine. That was still the world of ten years ago, perhaps. Now we're deeply into the era of software getting worse. The design changes from employees who have full time permanent jobs and need to make themselves busy aren't balancing actual progress.
This is why I kind of think that UI/UX should be handled by normal developers who do other things as well. People whose sole job is UI/UX must do things like this in order to stay employed, normal developers don’t. So teach normal developers how to think about UI and UX so that changes stop happening solely because a specialist needs to change something that does not need changing.
Sorry, UI/UX people, but if you were proceeding towards some finely crafted experience, you’d have honed in on it by now. You would have a set of rules that could be followed to present information in both a pleasing way and a useful way simultaneously and everyone would know how things work because everyone followed the same rules. None of that has happened. You are just changing things to change them.
If anyone knows someone at GitHub and can tap them on the shoulder, please ask them to revert this terrible change.
Tay.ai (Microsoft's infamous chatbot) and copilot are too busy vibe coding GitHub into the ground to look at the issue. There is no CEO of GitHub anymore to respond, which means no-one cares anymore.
Unfortunately GitHub, err Microsoft, stopped listening a long time ago. From the feed to text contrast to many more issues, their community feedback repo has become a place where complaints go to die.
This title is misleading: yes, a bunch of users didn't liked it. But of course there's UI research and likely A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable to the majority of users.
Personally, I don't like it much. It sounds like leakage from AzDO design. Maybe a option to turn it off would be the best way out.
Disclaimer: I work for msft, although I've no connection to github, ado or any other such tool.
> A/B testing showed github that this might be preferable
A/B testing can’t measure preference, only interaction.
I guarantee you it's not preferable to the majority of github users.
Can you actually show us this research and a/b testing?