What people keep getting stuck on.

What the home page shows

The biggest specific usability problems on Hacker News, such as “rejecting cookies takes more clicks than accepting”, ranked by how many different people raised each one this year, in the last 5 years, or since 2007. Every issue is ranked by the same rules, whether or not anyone has reviewed it. Search any product to see its own biggest problems.

What “Reviewed” means

A pipeline can find and count complaints. It can't judge them. Justusability reviews every issue that reaches the home page lists by hand: checks that it's a real usability problem, names the principle behind it, and suggests a fix a design team could act on. Claude helped draft those; every published one has been reviewed. Everything else is grouped and counted by machine and marked Unreviewed: you get the counts and links to the comments, but no quotes, principle or fix.

The first version started with five hand-picked themes: self-checkouts, cookie banners, Jira, Microsoft Teams and car touchscreens. They were chosen before we had data on all of Hacker News, and they aren't its biggest problems, so now they're ranked like everything else. Their reviews carried over to the matching issues.

Something wrong?

Machine grouping makes mistakes. Each issue has a “Something wrong here?” link that opens a public correction request. HackerFriction is the first edition of the Justusability Friction Index, starting with Hacker News. How it's made explains the steps, the numbers and the limits, starting with the biggest: Hacker News skews towards developers, so these are problems people report, not a measure of all users.

Who made it

Reviewed by Adnan Khan, founder of Justusability, which helps teams see where their customers get stuck. Inspired by Andrej Karpathy's HackerTube.