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Comment by Declanomous | Hacker News Reader

I totally believe "the UI sucks argument" as well. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally liked something on Instagram because of the stupid double tap a photo = like, not zoom feature.

Instagram is a piece of software millions of people use every day. I've designed software that 5 - 100 people use a day, and I can tell you the UI is going to suck if you have a data architect design the UI for your CRUD application. I'm sure the UI sucked on Mariott's app, I'd bet my life savings on it.

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I've actually had this exact problem with Instagram.

  1. My teenage daughter shows me picture of a girl she knows but doesn't like.
  2. I don't have my glasses so I double-tap to try to zoom in a bit.
  3. My daughter screams that the girl now knows that she was looking at her picture.
  4. I quickly double-tap again to un-like the photo.
  5. My daughter glares at me because she knows that the damage is already done.

In fact, I can relate to the guy in the original story. Fortunately, I only earned my daughters short lived wrath and didn't lose my job.

This happens a lot on the reddit mobile app. Sometimes I'm just browsing and out of nowhere I see an orange upvote or a purple downvote that I likely trigger just by scrolling to the comments.

It also happened to me once or twice that I was looking at the Facebook profile of someone and then 2 hours later I got a notification saying that that person accepted my friendship request. Somehow I mistakenly sent those requests.

At least for the latter, I've always thought there should be some impedance to avoid this. Like slide to send request or some other small friction interaction.

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