There's an odd design quirk on the New York Times web site that's been bugging me for a while now. When you open a slide show on the site (this gift guide, for example) you immediately see a count of images in the slideshow: 1 of 9. When you get to slide 8 of 9, you can reasonably expect to see 1 more slide. But you don't. When you advance, all you get is a semitransparent panel that pops up with a link back to the beginning, and links to email, save and share. I find this very disappointing when I'm enjoying the slideshow and expecting more content.
I can sort of see the motivation for this. The slideshow does not advance automatically, but they want you to click forward after the last slide so they can show you the information mentioned above. If you knew you were on the last slide, you'd have no reason to click again. But this is pretty clearly a solution that creates a much worse problem for the user experience. Why does the link back to the beginning have to go on top of the slide? Why can't it be off to the right with the "More Slide Shows" gallery, and show up when you get to the last slide?
To make matters worse, there is no link back to the article (at least in this case--I feel like maybe sometimes there is one). I almost always want to go back to the article, and almost never back to the beginning of the slide show. This forces me to use the 'deep' back button on my browser to go back 9 pages to the article.
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Bonus rant: Flickr slideshows embedded in web pages. They advance automatically, and every time they do so, it's considered a new page load by the browser. So I'm reading Gothamist or whatever, and after 5 minutes I get to the part of the page with a slideshow on it. Then I finish reading, and click Back to go back to my home page. Nothing happens. I click on the deep Back button and OH DEAR GOD NO. Apparently I've loaded the page 100 times without realizing it. Maybe this is some kind of scam to get advertising dollars, maybe I'm more paranoid about my browser's movements than most, but in my opinion it's got to stop.
