I just accidentally clicked the “clear all” on the browser URL and wished that it was a bit harder to click but was still there. If it took three clicks to make happen, its still useful in most circumstances but would drastically drop the mistaken clicks
Anyway, what are your unpopular UI opinions?
I like chunkier scrollbars. Fuck the tiny disappearing scrollbars where you need to mouse over… somewhere… to maybe be graced with its presence, only for it to be 1px wide for some reason.
Also fuck the endless scroll, especially when you already know what you’re looking for is on page 4 because you had to reload the page for some reason but the infinite scroll didn’t save your position and you have to go down (without an actual scrollbar) only to “load more” 3 times until you’re (maybe) on page 4.A related peeve of mine is stateless URLs. When backend engineers built UIs they were terrible in a lot of ways but the URL would often reflect the state of the UI so you could refresh and get back to the same view. I think web frameworks and people specialising as frontend engineers helped kill this being something that was added as you developed
I am 100% with you on both of those!
One that gets me is the number of menus below infinite scrolls. I think this is a reflection on people doing responsive design for variable screen sizes but only as a checkbox / meeting some UX redlines / implementing once without basic testing. An example of this is Google Flights for some screen sizes where the currency selection is below the infinite scroll on some screen sizes (but its not an ideal example because on other screen sizes the currency select just disappears or at least it used to)
Ah yea that too!
Sometimes you can kinda get there by hitting the End key, sometimes you need to open the DevTools to get to their About page or change the language or whatever option they put below the endless scroll.
I just stopped using Libre Writer and switched to OnlyOffice because it was impossible to get a normal goddamn scroll bar in an application literally designed around scrolling text. Holding the scroll Arrow button to scan for something is impossible because there are no scroll Arrow buttons.
But OnlyOffice has a Header navigation tool, too, so fuck Libre Writer right in the face.
Auto hide bullshit scroll bars should be illegal on desktop. Who the fuck needs that 7 extra pixels on desktop?
I now have very strong opinions about scroll bars.
Scroll bars don’t just let you scroll, they tell you where you are. If I’m reading and wonder how much I have left to go, I want to be able to just glance at the scroll bar, I don’t want to have to wave the pointer around to make to scroll bar appear. Fuck people’s anal-retentive fetish for “cleanness”.
Why would you ever need that in a 10 chapter story? Sounds a little indulgent. Next you’re gonna ask for fonts.
I JUST updated Raspberry Pi imager and the new UI is a huge step back… and it has the TINIEST scroll bars that don’t even exist until you try to mouse over everything! I hate it so much.
agreed but not really that unpopular
Maybe popular among users but somehow not popular among devs?
ha the way things usually go, its probably popular among devs, but somehow not among the bosses and managers.
I absolutely hate those scrolling number pickers, like on alarm apps. Just pop up the numpad and I can enter a time in 2-4 taps, not 2-3 coarse scrolls of minutes, a fine scroll to the minute I actually want, then repeat that process on the hours.
I like when they have both, like the roller thing you can click to input a number, best of both worlds.
Samaung at least in their apps I canbtap on the number to type it instead of scrolling.
On the same vein, date pickers. Just let me type the damn date instead of having to choose on your virtual calendar.
especially when you’re uber old like me and need to go back 4 decades to choose DOB
I’m from 1967 😭
My condolences, ancient one
Thanks. Now get off my lawn.
Ihhate it when the numbers affect each other too, so if you roll back on the minutes, the hour changes too. It’s awful.
I don’t mind one way or the other, I just wish people would settle on one convention!
As an old guy with a Birthday in Late December, fuck scrolling for dates.
Even if iPhone did everything else better than android, you could still never convince me to switch over to their hell of every date and time being entered via scroll.
Give me the little clock or a numpad.
Bro why is it any other way, ever.
I despise setting alarms. Why do I have to scroll? Fucking let me type in the time on a numpad.
I have like 50 alarms that are 15 minutes apart and I toggle them on and off as needed.
It’s a fucking mess, bro. Fuck.
I take a moment to mildly rant about this, sometimes out loud, every time I have to set a timer on my phone.
Unpopular because most people don’t notice at all, not because they disagree:
Bring back ellipsis to signal a new dialog instead of a complete action. E.g., a button “Save…” opens a dialog where you want to save, whereas a button “Save” saves it immediately
I didn’t know that was a standard until I started working in UIs. It’s great when you know, but it’s a clear sign that the standard isn’t clear enough when everyday users don’t realize.
Colorblind people exist and should be able to use the site. At least, based on my real experience, this must be an unpopular opinion amongst UI folks glares
That’s something I appreciate about the WordPress “block editor”; it tells you when you’ve changed colors in a way that is hard to read for some people. I wish more design software did that automatically.
Modern browsers have tools for this built in. Lack of accessibility is a choice.
It’s usually an oversight.
The designers are literally colorblind-blind.Apologies beforehand for the soap-boxing, but this is something I’m rather passionate about.
So I work as a full-stack developer, with a penchant for UI/UX and front-end, and I have a particular passion for accessibility. The web is a fantastic place for connecting and empowering people, but I believe it can’t be truly open and democratised without everyone having equal access to it.
The way I see it, it’s your job as a designer to make your design accessible. There’s obviously more to it, someone working purely with design can’t do all the heavy lifting when optimising for screen readers and such, but I view it rather like an architect ignoring accessibility in their buildings, or a chef ignoring allergies. Can you do it? Absolutely. Are there good excuses for it? I don’t think so.
Personally I only have an auditory processing disorder, and the only accessibility tool I really use is subtitles. The thing is being able-bodied is not necessarily a permanent state, and anyone could go from able to disabled in the blink of an eye. Thus we all benefit from having accessible design in our day to day lives.
Sadly, there’s not enough focus on accessible design in schools today, thus learning about it becomes more of a personal responsibility. If you work with web, then the browser accessibility tools are literally just two keystrokes away. They’re not that hard to learn to use. Setting up a screen reader and working with that is a bit more work, but I’d encourage everyone who work with this kind of thing to do so because even if our education properly covered these things, nothing beats first-hand experience.
This is UI design basics but I guess there are a lot of bad designers / rushed projects etc
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Quick question and I’m very happy with a RTFM type response: Any chance you’re red-green colour blind and can share some with what that’s like because the good-bad representation seems pretty pervasive in society?
I’ve actually got some level of all three types. My wife was trying to get me to play Puyopuyo tetris and it was driving me crazy that no combination in their colorblind menu worked for me.
The biggest downsides are graphs and stuff like that. Things just look like the same color to me. In my case, blue and purple, yellow and green, and red and green, just depending upon the hues involved. Most modern traffic signals, especially here in Japan, use a combination that is fine for me and not confusing at all.
I can’t really describe much better since I don’t know what it’s like not to be like this.
Edit to add: MMOs (and websites about them) often sucked because I could not tell the difference between gold and copper. The whole loot system color thing was also bad since blue/purple and other difficulties. There were some games I probably trashed epic gear thinking it was common.
That reminds me that the traffic lights in Japan are blue for green / go. So that’s better for you? Do you know if that’s historic, or because of colourblindness?
I have no idea the history/reasoning behind it, honestly. A “green light” is “ao shingo” in Japanese which would mean “blue signal”. Historically (I’m not sure until which year), Japanese just lumped everything under blue with words to describe the shade as necessary.
Scroll bars are way too fucking thin now. When I have an app on one monitor, and try to scroll it, I’m battling the move to the next monitor with the teensy tiny scrollbar.
I’m even someone that knows how to use the mouse wheel and page down keys. It still has its place and so many refuse to acknowledge that. Sometimes I can’t even tell where on the page I am because the scrollbar activated its Octocamo.
Even worse are the scrollbars that are hidden until your mouse is over to of it.
Mouse over for anything needs to die.
What’s even worse is when everytime you happen to move the mouse you get popups you didn’t want blocking what you are trying to see.
Especially when you want to click something but those pop-ups are clickable too.
I posted just now about this to someone else but I just updated my Raspberry Pi imager and the new UI is horrible, convoluted, and had scroll bars hidden by default with no way to show their MINUSCULE TINY ASSES without hovering over their one-pixel-wide bullshit bars ughhh
- Stop removing the underline styling for links. It’s not cool or sleek that you made things unintuitive to navigate by having the only indication be a slightly different text color, or a hover effect.
- I don’t like emoji in text interface output. I don’t need cute little sparkle graphics and yellow smiley faces and lightning bolts and rocket ships to tell me the operation was successful, to say nothing of environments where emoji aren’t supported and it’s just broken.
- Please stop trying to be cute or hip with your basic interface messaging. “We got you, we’ll find those results you need. Just hang tight, OK?” “Oops, our bad, there was a little hiccup in the process…” It’s unnecessary padding just like all the rounded corners everywhere. Exception if the entire app/site/whatever is specifically designed around being cute and friendly, but I see this all the time where it just feels out of place, disingenuous, and obnoxious.
- Custom fonts and nonstandard characters in usernames are an abomination. Show your personality and creativity in your graphical avatar and your profile, I’m happy to see it there!
Back when I was a kid on MSN Messenger, a bunch of my friends had names like this:
☆꧁✬◦°˚°◦. ǟɮɮɨɛ .◦°˚°◦✬꧂☆
I disliked it even then, because it’s not really about personal expression or style, it’s more about wanting to stand out in other people’s contact lists and look the most special and get the most attention.
It’s an arms race that leads to a user list that’s impossible to find anyone in, and when everyone is special then nobody is.
I ca̴n’̸t rea̵d wha̴͌t ̸̈́y̶o̵u̷͆’r̴̚e̸ ̷s̴à̴y̵i̵͛n̴̓g̴͑ ̵f̶ró̵m̸̜̎ ̴̊ơ̴v̵e̴͂r ̵͎̽h̷̛̺̀͑̃er̵̆e̴…̴. But not sure what thé solutïon would be. Forbiddíng non-english text would be even worse UI.
For me back in the day, the solution was a third-party add-on which patched the Messenger client with a bunch of improvements - one of which was the ability to set a custom alias for a contact. So you could set any name you like and for you, they’d show up as that.
Discord actually has it too, but ONLY for friends, which in my opinion is a massive oversight, but I guess they were worried about the possibility of abuse or something, so there we go.
Stop removing the underline styling for links. It’s not cool or sleek that you made things unintuitive to navigate by having the only indication be a slightly different text color, or a hover effect.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about sites that keep a colored underline on links, but have the text color be the same as the body text?
Less problematic, but still potentially confusing. Why break the standard and add another variable people need to consider in order to find the form and function they’ve already learned? Links are there as a functional element, not an aesthetic design.
I get people wanting to add their own touch or sense of style, but doing so at the cost of intuitive functionality, especially a kind that is long established and standardized, can be a slippery slope.
All that said: At the end of the day, it’s up to the creator, of course. If someone really wants to indicate their links with upside down text and no underline, or a glowing CSS effect, or whatever, I’m not going to demand that they stop. Especially if it’s a personal website. Your satisfaction with your work and self expression is more important than a guy yelling at a cloud about front end web design standards and whatever. I’ll just reserve my right to gripe over some minor personal annoyances, and everyone will be just fine in the end!
If it doesn’t need JavaScript, it shouldn’t have JavaScript.
If it doesn’t need dynamic styling, it shouldn’t have dynamic styling (especially if it makes other elements move around or become occluded).
If it doesn’t need images, it shouldn’t have images. When it does need images, they should be in an appropriate format and minimum useful filesize.
It shouldn’t have audio. It doesn’t need audio, and should not have it.
This is the most boring movie I ever watched.
It was a very faithful adaptation of the book, though.
I develop JS for a living, but for my personal site I faced the burden of PHP to load it directly, and kept minimal JS. I’ve had people note to me how quickly it loads.
Mobile phones have caused a dark age of UI design
The hamburger button is an abomination, we need the proper menus back
Unpopular opinion: I like the hamburger button. Easy to find at a glance, and I don’t have to guess which sub-menu the settings are in. Now, if you have a hamburger AND 3 dots… 🤬🤬🤬
Gmail is the best (worst) example of this. They literally have EVERY possible icon for “settings” on the page at once.
There’s a hamburger button. There’s a three dots button. There’s a NINE DOTS BUTTON. There’s a cog. There’s a slider icon. And you click your profile picture for “manage your account.”
Hamburger menus are fine if the developer has the restraint to truly limit the number of items, but it can quickly become an unsorted “junk drawer.” And you sometimes still end up with submenus anyway!
Here I was going to join this thread to share the controversial opinion of “The hamburger menu is fine,” because I thought the general trend was shifting away from using them.
Admittedly the hamburger menu is often misused. It’s like the junk drawer for developers who don’t know how to logically streamline the navigation modes within their app, so they just throw everything in there. But when it’s used well, to me at least, it’s a better option than some of the alternatives. I prefer to have views that I almost never use just kept out of the way in a menu I can manifest at will instead of occupying permanent space on a navigation bar.
Unfun fact: I taught computer literacy for about a year. The students struggled to see or find the hamburger menu on many pages. Understandably so, because it literally does not look like anything.
The modern trend for “flat” UIs absolutely sucks. There is no separation between element layers, so you can’t tell where one windows starts and another begins when they are overlapping.
Respectfully I’m on the other side of that, but I see what you’re saying. I hate skeumorphism and (IMO) flat is a much more professional looking design motif. BUT…that flat has to come with just enough drop-shadow to be able to delineate the layers, otherwise yes, its too flat and indistinguishable.
GIVE ME HIGH CONTRAST COLOURED BORDERS
Modal dialogs. Making it impossible to move the window or reference something else in the same interface.
Toasts on android. No idea where the toasts came from and no way to look up what the toast said after it disappears.
Ah yeah, don’t you love f-droid’s impossible to read 5-line toasts that randomly appear when something in the background fails?
Internal to Google what you’re calling toasts were made to need user input to dismiss as part of accessibility pushes to win government contracts. That really just highlighted their issues for me though, most of them should be behind a small element I think, like the notification bell. And I think a bunch should be more localised to the action / app
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Any button that’s grayed out should say why it’s grayed out when you hover the cursor over it, or attempt to tap it.
- If it can be done without a touch screen DO NOT use a touch screen. And if you use physical buttons, they should have tactile feedback
- Toggles are just more ambiguous over-designed checkboxes
I do wonder whether the text next to the toggles changes depending on the state of the toggle. It seems to be arbitrary whether they do or not, leaving me unsure as to what the toggle actually does.
The colors too. It’s pretty clear where ON is when it’s between blue and grey but when it’s between red and pink who knows which is which. The best would be a label that doesn’t change and the words ON and OFF on either side of the toggle but that looks terrible so nobody does it.
I encountered a weird thing in my BIOS. I’ve got a graphics card and a CPU with integrated graphics, I could save power and free up some system RAM by turning the iGPU off. The option in the BIOS says “dGPU Only Mode” and you Enable it to turn the iGPU off.
dGPU Only Mode, turns the iGPU off. It makes more sense the less you think about it.
A further complaint: There’s a setting in the BIOS called “Game Mode” and what that does is turn SMT and some other TLA off. SMT is AMD’s name for hyperthreading. Learned this when I noticed KDE system monitor reporting 8 processor threads instead of 16. Apparently that is to increase single core performance on high end chips to wring a few more FPS out of single-threaded games, but meh.
I also thought toggles were unnecessary, but then I read something that changed my mind.
Toggles have an immediate effect, whereas checkboxes don’t.
For example, a light/dark mode setting. You could use a checkbox, but users have become used to the above behaviour, and so a toggle may be more appropriate.
Checkboxes, therefore, are more of a form element.
Personally, I’d still be fine with just checkboxes, but that design intention is something I hadn’t known but makes sense after I heard it
Interesting idea, I’d never thought of that. It would almost change my mind if only different software respected that distinction. There are many forms using toggles and many option pages with checkboxes without a save button.
Toggles are strange, now that I think about them. They’re one of the few things that have skewed more skeuomorphic over time. Or, In the Win95 era were we thinking about paper, with documents in folders on the desktop, and a check box you’d check with a pen makes sense there, where now we think of the computer as a device with switches to flip?
Either way, this is the aviator in me speaking but an on/off toggle switch should be longitudinal or vertical, with forward or up ALWAYS being ON. Toggles in UIs are pretty much always horizontal with right being ON.
I don’t know if it’s unpopular but I think the cookies should have a white list policy instead of a black list.
And in general I think that a UI has to take into account people with visual problems. “Everything is gray” is a shitty idea.
The right answer would be to mandate an architecture for cookies to properly label their purpose and origin. This would allow you to set policy on the browser level and never have to think of it again.
Instead they just prop 65’d the whole Internet.
I prefer light mode.
Just be in a properly lit room. Open your window curtains. Don’t blast your display on max brightness. It’s actually easier on the eyes.
Now there’s an unpopular opinion!
I also prefer light mode, but I recently had an eye condition for a while and I needed dark mode to use any UI. Those few sites or apps that don’t have dark mode suddenly stuck out like a sore thumb. And don’t get me started on apps with a dark mode, that outright flashbanged me on startup while loading the UI!
Depends one’s eyes condition, just worth keeping in mind.
and housing conditions: just open the curtains on your big well lit windows!
Not sure to understand the link, so just in case: I meant to say that anyone being suffering from any form of photophobia or light sensitivity, should appreciate having access to a dark theme even more so when they can’t work in brightly lit room (because of their condition).
i was agreeing with you and listing another category of person for which their advice didn’t fit
Oh, obviously, I did not get it. Thx for the clarification :)
Look how angry it makes people! I use light mode exclusively, dark mode hurts my eyes. Other geeks have an aneurysm when they look at my screen. I honestly think they lose respect for me (among other reasons).
I honestly think they lose respect for me
We do.
I know it’s incorrect, and an unfair assumption, but whenever I see someone using light mode for anything, I assume it’s because they don’t know how to change it.
Even my terminal windows are light mode. You would think that would show that I know how to do things, but nope.
Hilariously, I’m the one who implemented dark mode for my company’s product, and am well known for that since it made so many people happy. When they see my UI they’re horrified, like learning about Santa Claus or Jesus.
That’s like Hank Hill finding out that Bob Strickland uses an electric oven.
That’s fair. I live under the assumption that dark mode users don’t know how to change the brightness level.
We don’t.
Why change perfection?
I’m the opposite, light mode hurts my eyes so I change to dark mode everywhere. I also love bright lights and open windows, I still have to use dark mode because the bright light backgrounds give me headaches.
My preference for dark modes is more about design choices than the actual dark/light divide.
Light modes tend to have way less separation between UI elements, with borders and differences in background colors barely visible. It results in them blending together and making it harder to identify different parts of the website than on dark mode. They’re also much more likely to use actual white backgrounds, when dark modes usually use anything other than actual black. I really hate both white and black used as backgrounds, they’re both bad imo.
I do use light modes on websites where it actually looks better than the dark mode design. But sadly those are too rare.
My window curtains stay CLOSED and my lamp stays on LOW because my partner and I are gremlins and night mode is made for us.
