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?
Infinite scroll pages are inherently worse than a set number of pages you can jump between at will. The fact almost everything has swapped to that is a nightmare and makes looking for old things on a blog or hell even a YouTube Playlist a nightmare.
Elements should not even be clickable for at least 0.5 seconds after first appearing.
Oh, to avoid things like when there is a list that updates just before you click? Or something else?
Yeah that’s exactly it. It drives me nuts when I try to click on something just as a dialog with a button shows up, and I maybe don’t even get to know what I did. Or clicking on something that moves because of some sloppy infinite scrolling or slow loading images or something.
Every action should be accessible from the keyboard. Stretch goal: The OS should be able to describe all UI events in prose.
Windows 11’s UI is fine.
I have so many issues with Windows: the privacy invasion, the ads, the upselling of MS’s services, the need for an online Microsoft account, that I haven’t used Windows in over 2 years. But I see so many people saying it has an ugly UI - it’s UI is literally fine, I would have no problems using it if a Linux DE happened to come up with that design before Microsoft did.
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.
Overriding browser functionality because of designer preferences or shitty implementation of tracking or whatever.
Don’t fuck with my scrolling.
Don’t fuck with my ctrl clicking to open links in a new tab.
Don’t capture window keyboard events unless you have a really excellent reason to and even then think about it really hard and decide not to.
And learn how to support basic keyboard navigation, damn it. It’s just about marking up your html properly, no scripting required.
I think all of these opinions are popular on the user side.
Flat Minimalism is fine, but the buttons should still look like and animate like buttons. How the fuck is one supposed to know that text is clickable if it isn’t blue or raised like a button?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I take a moment to mildly rant about this, sometimes out loud, every time I have to set a timer on my phone.
Some apps will have the search icon at the bottom of the screen. Then the search bar pops up at the top. Then you tap that for the keyboard to come up at the bottom. I think a search button should automatically pop up a keyboard.
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
Chrome peaked when it was all angular. Why does everything have to be all rounded now?
Windows 98SE was peak design
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.
- 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!
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
This is not only about colorblinds. Accessible technology on general is horrible.
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.
