I think it's really interesting and instructional to think about why the UX feels so bad. My ideas are:
- The page has one main job: presenting latency numbers to the viewer.
- This job is easy enough. There are many ways to get this done. So people expect the main job to be done at least as good as with these other ways.
- I hypothesize that the page prioritizes other jobs before the main job. It tries to make finding the relationship between those numbers fun to detect. * Users are foremost interested in the main job, but this main job is done poorly because you don't see all latency numbers in one view (maybe after clicking a few times at the right places, but for such an easy task this is way too much work)
- It's very difficult to grasp the mental model of the UI just aby using it. You click somewhere and things happen. Even now that I have used it for a few minutes, I have no idea what it does or is supposed to do. I found it very interesting how much it frustrated my that repeated clicks are not idempotent and made the UI "diverge". It makes you somehow feel lost and worry about breaking things.
- The user must read the help text. But users don't do this. At least I didn't until I was very frustrated. Then this help text changes. And changes again. I don't want to learn a new application only to read a simple list of numbers.
These are my main points, I think. To me, it was very interesting. Thanks for that, samwho. and kudos for sharing this publically :-)