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.