A UX Pattern That Needs to DIAF

Why, Home Depot, why?

There are more than a few shopping sites out there with these “fancy” picture viewers like Home Depot and Newegg.com.

This has to be one of the worst UX patterns out there and every site that uses it never fails to piss me off with aggravation just trying to get an idea of what a product looks like.

You see, these web designers, programmers, and architects seem to not realize that most browsers nowadays (and even a few years back at this point) have supported automatic resizing of images to fit the browser window with full-size “zoom” capabilities and that the built-in browser scrollbar is a perfectly acceptable method of navigating an image.

Better, but still a poor UX

Even worse in the case of the Home Depot site, the cursor shape over the image leads one to believe that the image can be clicked and dragged.  Instead, you can only drag and move the little red box on the right to pan the picture.

Newegg actually does the same thing, but it’s a bit better because at the least, it doesn’t popup in a new window in Firefox and to some degree, I can understand why they do it because of the gallery navigation and the 360-degree view (there’s some “added value”), but I would appreciate the option of just being able to see the full image without it being cropped off within some silly window.

This pop-out, image viewer UX pattern is definitely one that needs to DIAF.