Serious webdesign flaw in Facebook, LinkedIn and more
By glazou on Wednesday 27 March 2013, 11:12 - Totalement Crétin - Permalink
Many web sites like Facebook and LinkedIn have implemented an « infinite scrolling » view: when you reach the bottom of the content area, more articles are dynamically loaded and the page's height changes. I won't go into the details or accessibility of such a design, but I want to list here one of its bad and painful side-effect on another area of the page, the page's footer...
Both Facebook's and LinkedIn's web sites show a page footer with several links:
Here, the dynamic data are loaded so fast I don't have the time to read the footer to find the link I want before it goes away, pushed outside of the viewport by the newly inserted content! Extremely painful.
And when a webdesign flaw makes vital (to the user) information unreachable, it's then a functional flaw.
Update: someone just asked me how I did the two screenshots above. Excellent question, indeed... I had to use the PageSaver add-on to Firefox... Using screencapture on my Mac was a no-go, the page update was too fast...
Comments
Ironic enough, I've spotted this bug once on Facebook, when I wanted to reach the help page to report some other bug. Had to go with firebug to retrieve the link.
So true! It happened to me quite a few times on some websites, impossible to reach the footer to access links. But that's not a bug, sadly it's a feature of those websites.
(sorry, french) J'y croyais pas, ça me paraissait trop gros, j'ai testé sur le facebook de ma compagne, en effet, c'est complètement absurde, c'est quasi-impossible d'avoir accès à ce bas de page. A croire qu'ils n'ont pas forcément envie qu'on puisse trouver le lien pour se désinscrire définitivement :)
Daniel,
les infos contenus dans ce bandeau très volatile sont répétées dans la colonne de droite en dessous des liens sponsorisés.