> the absolute inability to override the order of items in the sharing panel
As an extra F.U., it also changes the list of contacts after a second. So I try to tap on my wife, only to have it substituted with the plumber who came once half a year ago... and this of course gets logged by the AI, ensuring the plumber continues to hold pride of place in my contacts.
This is quite literally my least favorite UI feature that Android has ever released.
It's slow. It encourages mis-taps. I have intentionally tapped it literally <10 times ever despite using the share dialog thousands of times, since it almost never shows me the desired contacts, and even then I've tapped the wrong contact half the time.
It's incomprehensibly awful, wantonly violates even the most basic user-interaction guidelines of the past few decades, and there's no way to turn it off. What in the world are they thinking / drinking.
I don't even understand what this feature is supposed to be. All I know is that the share screen _used to_ work really well! It used to show my most frequently contacted friends / family across applications (eg. Whatsapp vs Hangouts vs email) and it was a breeze to share content. Now... It shows the correct contacts for ~1 second, enough time for my brain to think oh maybe I should try and oh nevermind it's gone.
iOS actually isn’t much better here. Occasionally I’ll see something on Apple News that I want to share with friends who don’t use Apple News. I just want a web link. But despite Safari being literally the only icon I’ve ever tapped on to share something from Apple News, I have to hit the “...” and then scroll to find Safari buried in the list. I have to scroll past Strava despite (as far as I’m aware) Strava not even being able to open the link and me never having used it to open the link.
iPhone has the same issue in something simple as recent contacts / phone dialer screen. I end up clicking the last dialed number that gets replaced on top of last-but-one by the time my finger moves to tap what appears as last-number, which was really the last-but-one, but the history wasn’t updated then.
My least favorite android UI feature is the "clear all" option on the list of notifications. Every time I use it, they randomly show up again hours or even days later.
That's a bug/feature of the application(s) offering the event. They get an intent informing then that the notification was dismissed. Well-behaved apps should not repeat the same notification later on, but many seem to do when an additional notification comes in. :-(
Is there an agreed upon name for this, where a website or app loads elements piecemeal so we click the wrong thing by mistake?
I know it exists as an intentional dark pattern (so we just think that's what happened). But it also seems so common now across computing and it pisses me off every time.
Just yesterday I tried to type "Network and sharing center". Apparently it does not exist in the index which is quite annoying, I have to click through the control panel (after accidentally ending up on a web search). Windows 10 is an odd beast with multiple generations of UIs all nestled away.
If I type VS... Visual Studio Code! Cool. (wonder why it did not suggest Visual Studio itself which I also have installed, buy hey I got what I wanted)
If I type VSC... ??? config files and some random XMLs from the deep realms of AppData
If I type vscode... No results, try a web search!
If I type Visual Studio... THE Visual Studio shows, but no Code in sight
If I type Visual Studio Code... There it is again!
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The whole rigmarole is just... Huh?! How does one even reach that point? I can't think about any naive buggy way that could reasonably cause such discrepancy of results. Just search by Filename and Display Name! Or whatever criteria, but be consistent!
When I start typing "solidworks" it alternates (with lag) between the Solidworks core software and Solidworks Explorer. I only get the right one ~half the time, since it seems like it will open the one that would have loaded rather than the one that is at the top of the list when you hit enter.
Trying to get to the network devies page is equally infuriating- it's under network adapters and options in Control Panel, and may or may not actually be accessible from the new Settings app- I don't remember.
Even better, try setting the dead zones on an XInput game pad. Off the top of my head, it goes something like:
“Settings” > “Bluetooth and other devices” > “Printers and other devices“ > Right click your game pad > “Gamepad Settings” > select your gamepad > “Ok” > “Deadzones”
I want to know this too. Another example is Google search. If you search, click on a search result and then go back then a panel slowly appears below that link. So if you are going to click the next link, it interferes with that.
"reflow" or "layout jank" are ones I've seen a fair number of times (not sure if "jank" was intended as "stuttering" or "unreliable", but both work if you go for the feeling)
I've heard "jank" in speedrunning used to mean "badly-implemented interaction logic that makes the timing for a reflex action non-deterministic / non-learnable", which fits perfectly here.
A dark pattern is intentional, most of the stuff I'm talking about seems to be from ignorance or indifference.
Asynchronous element loading saves time overall but it costs time when key UI elements rearrange. It's probably difficult to pull off but linear/blocked/sequential loading for the current viewport and offscreen asynchronous loading is probably what we need to avoid this (or ugly placeholders).
Google prioritizes time to first draw. Do they prioritize time before the page is completely loaded? I don’t know the answer but if they’re going to stay in the business of ranking pages on speed, they should be putting that as a higher priority for their rankings. Too many times I’m reading the content and yet the browser is still loading... something. What? I have no idea.
I find this happens with computer game UIs a lot, too, especially for dynamic UI elements that float above static UI elements. Especially when there is a lag due to animations.
The Chrome reload gesture also gets in the way sometimes. It's especially infuriating when there's a link you want to click on the page (that's still loading), but additional content causes the content to scroll down as you're tapping the screen so Chrome misinterprets this as you wanting a page reload.
Google recently started doing this. I literally never click google ads, and today about four times I've click on ads because the thing I want is result #1 but just as I'm about to click three ads load in and I click the first ad.
I swear I've had images and videos switch places as I'm clicking on the search results tab.
Or maybe I have 15 years of expectation that images is going to be the second tab.
Edit: nope, just did a search, it started web images videos then right when the page finished loading it switched to web videos images
So only does search not work anymore, it's unnavigable
Edit 2: it's not just video, it rearranges the tabs based on relevance. "John wick" will move videos to the second spot. "San Francisco" will move news second and maps 3rd.
A product manager somewhere in Google is excited for their quarterly bonus.
I just clicked on google ads 3 times in 2 minutes because it keeps showing image search results. Then juuuuust as you're about to click the row of ads shows up and you click on an ad.
The AI then congratulates itself on serving such relevant ads.
Not only does it enable mistaps, the speed each time is inconsistent. The order each time is inconsistent. I never know what app or person will be high up on the list
@9nGQluzmnq3M don't mean to mock you. It more that it sparked a general observation that seems to be the case now dasy . It is how 'funny' it is that now days we tend to all a lot of stuff AI. Back in the days pre-internet days, this is just some kind of preferences we stored per user bases. I can see that the IT industry is a lot of what is in fashion.
I don't think the two are the same thing. I can't speak for everyone, but when I talk about AI in the context I'm talking about opaque systems with no obvious connection between my action and its response.
The sorts of things phones used to remember I'd never refer to as AI. A list of contacts sorted by the frequency with which I use them isn't AI. A list of contacts sorted in an order I don't understand, with a slight preference for frequent contacts, is.
The latter have proliferated recently, hence the shift.
Clearly, you want your list of "frequently searched terms" stored locally on your device in a very small and efficient history file.
However, if you store this file on the server, you can hide from the user what actually gets stored in it, it takes longer so it seems like it's doing harder work, and for some reason gets it wrong occasionally which means -- AI.
Google Maps is like this. It completely refuses to remember your recently searched addresses if you disable Location History (which includes remembering and storing, let's call it a little bit more info than just my recent search terms).
This would be such a prime candidate for storing securely, privately on your device, for any type of map service, that I can only conclude this is deliberate hostile anti-user programming.
Also I bet there's code out there that just returns most-recently-searched with a few deliberate mistakes to seem more opaque and thus more AIey.
No, the difference I'm drawing is between straightforward and opaque responses to input.
I'm sure there are companies which play the various games you're suggesting, but I think positing that it's the rule verges into the conspiracy theoretical.
> when I talk about AI in the context I'm talking about opaque systems with no obvious connection between my action and its response.
For sure, with all the type of Neural Structured Learning, seems like we are just trying things out by training models. Would be good to have a way to actually explain to us developers how decisions are actually made. I know it is based on some kind of statistics.
If anyone can point in the direction that would be greatly appreciated.
It's an "AI" in the sense that it's an uncontrollable, unknowable black box that's clearly trying to be "smart" (artificially intelligent).
It's definitely not sorted by contact frequency or anything close to it, because many of the people I share with all the time never show up. As I type, three of my "top" 4 (including that plumber) are SMS, which is doubly weird since I almost exclusively use WhatsApp.
It's doing something else than the most logical deterministic assumption, so clearly it must be trying to be "smart" ?
How often does a badly implemented algorithm that should in theory just work, get labeled AI because in practice it returns opaque results occasionally?
This has been bugging me as well for years. Only found an app called Sharedr recently which replaces the sharing dialog. It's not perfect and has a limitation with sharing files, but it's a million times better than the default option.
Not sure if the same issue, but Android 9 takes a second to load your contacts from apps. Want to send a link through SMS? Tap Share, and Messaging is at the top row. But if you hesitate for a second, your Whatsapp contacts will load in and suddenly you're sending a link to someone that shouldn't get it.
This is so weird. I don't use messaging, just Whatsapp. My experience is the polar opposite--it shows my Whatsapp contacts whom I actually want to share with for a second, and then replaces them with messaging contacts.
It's like they know what our intent is, and intentionally replace what we want with what we don't want.
As an extra F.U., it also changes the list of contacts after a second. So I try to tap on my wife, only to have it substituted with the plumber who came once half a year ago... and this of course gets logged by the AI, ensuring the plumber continues to hold pride of place in my contacts.