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Modern UI designers don’t have a fucking clue.
You’d think the first principle would be “don’t break the existing fucking UI”, but no.
Infinite scroll. Windows without toolbars. Replacing context menu with useless site-specific one. Forcing links to open in new or same tab, depriving the user of choice. Blocking text select. Blocking copy, as if that’s somehow going to stop people from stealing your shitty content. Fucking with the browser history.
And then there’s the constant reinventing of the wheel. How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
No lie, I’ve actually had designers come to me with a concept for “a visual indicator that shows the user how they are progressing through the page”.
What the actual fuck, do these people actually use computers.
My biggest gripe is websites that take control of the browser
C-f.I mean, over the years the scroll bar has got less and less visible. Maybe these people don’t even realise it exists.
I hate how tiny it often is now. What the fuck. Not to mention the ever decreasing contrast.
MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.
Some people are just like that.
I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.
Text that doesn’t wrap and goes off screen. Scrollbars that shrink to a single pixel. Universal undo (open multiple Excel Windows and do stuff in all of them. When you undo it will follow your activity instead of being local to the window). Excels crappy copy.
One of the many extremely basic issues with Excel. Absolutely disgusting.
Excel does all those things it does because it’s always done those things it does, and if Microsoft changes it everyone will pitch a fit and probably sue because now they have to retrain their entire accounting department.
The undo and copy behavior for Excel started with office 365. Also the repeat after hitting the end of the redo stack.
I disagree. There are louts of things that would not change old behavior but add so much convenience. Like cell reference for diagram ranges. But nope, we are stuck in 199…4?
I love some of the newer things like LET and LAMBDA. But I’d kill for structured references to be properly implemented everywhere. I’m a bit over using INDIRECT to get around it (when I can).
Yes. I have build dynamic diagrams with indirect, I feel ashamed.
Let us use Python instead of cancerous VBA. You can not even add comments to your variable definitions. Or named vars in functions. Why do I even need macros at all to simply define a function?
You don’t, any more. At least not for relatively simple functions.
LAMBDA combined with the name manager lets you do custom functions even in a regular .xlsx workbook.
You don’t get the full control flow and extended functionality you do in VBA, and Python would be amazing of course, but I find LAMBDA covers about 90% of use cases.
What’s wrong with infinite scroll?
As it’s most often seen on news sites - where scrolling too far gives you another article - a handful of reasons.
One: there are frequently still links (think “about us” / “contact us” kind of pages) in the footer that you might need to access, which you can invariably now never reach, because as soon as they’re in view they’re replaced by more content.
Two: as the parent poster so accurately put it, “fucking with the browser history”. It becomes entirely indeterminate whether the back button now returns to the previous site, or just goes back by one piece of content.
Three: the new content is almost certainly unrelated to the page I started on, and not of any interest to me.
This was just happening to me with Amazon. I wanted to get to the support link in the footer but they always loaded new stuff before I could click on it
Breaks the scroll bar, for starters.
- You want to navigate somewhere then navigate back? Haha, no.
- If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
- Some fuckwit wannabe designers actually put the footer UNDER infinite scrolling pages.
If it’s not implemented properly, resources (images, videos, ads) don’t get unloaded when they’re no longer visible.
Doing this causes it’s own problems. Try searching on a page that unloads everything out of view. Or saving it
When you’re dragging the scrollbar down, the page suddenly loads new content and you’re lost.
When you’re going through a long page and you want to come back to it later, you can’t come back to where you left.
Plus if you want to find older content, you can’t just skip to a page, you need to scroll through every goddamn item until you find what you’re looking for.
Y’know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she’d talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, “skins”).
Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it’s about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
How many times do we need to implement a fucking checkbox?
The vibe coding “paradigm” says: once or twice for every checkbox that appears on the page 😂
This is a complete misnomer. Modern UI designers that are forced to do what corporate wants are competent. It is large scale marketing that doesn’t have a clue as to what people want in a UX.
forcing new tabs drives me crazy. like how dare you. i even tried to disable it in firefox, but when i do it makes all ‘open in browser’ things overwrite the current tab :(
I hate the opposite even more - sites that block you from opening new tabs when you need to, as if you somehow don’t ever need to be able to access multiple pieces of information concurrently, or return directly to your current context.
“Oh, we’re following the single-page app paradigm.” No, you’re a fucking website. Follow the fucking website paradigm.
You can just tell these idiots have never actually done any real work.
I have a deep hatred for modern designs. Especially Material and Adwaita. There’s SO. FUCKING. MUCH. WASTED. SPACE. Early 2000s Winamp on my 1024x768 monitor had more concise and legible information than Tidal and Spotify do on 1440p fullscreen. It legitimately pisses me off.
fucking YES! just give me information dense uis please!!! The new intellij ui sucks and windows 11 too, for this reason
Win 11 is so bad. Right click sucks so bad now.
Win 10 start menu is the same. No I don’t want to search the Internet for apps I would open a browser for that, I would like to use the apps on my PC.Just FYI if it every gets to be too much: Linux has gotten extremely easy to install, and KDE has gotten astonishingly polished.
I have a 4k monitor, and some sites I still have to zoom out. I’ve gone through and set all my settings to small text, no UI scaling. But shit is fucking huge.
I think part of it is tablets and phones. Big areas for people’s fingers to touch.
I think most people, including me, appreciate how it looks cleaner though. On Android I get you, they should allow custom themes, but for Linux you can easily swap to a more information dense one.
The problem with “cleanness” is that individual elements of a data structure more complex than a tiered list blend together without visual separation. It very quickly becomes illegible.
Well, you can switch to non-GTK applications but beyond that you can’t really get more information density into apps that follow the Adwaita design language. You can’t even really theme them.
You can absolutely use custom GTK themes. I used WhiteSur theme for a while before switching back to default
Doesn’t that require extensions, which are only semi-supported?
No, just the GNOME Tweaks app. And extensions are fully supported in my experience, by the way
You’re not wrong, as it’s your personal subjective experience, which can’t be wrong.
But the fact that it pisses you off implies that you don’t understand the reason behind it.
We used to have information-dense UIs before because:- devices used to have only large screens with lower resolution.
- devices were used primarily be specialists for productivity.
Which means programs had to fit a lot of stuff in very few pixels. Nowadays, vast majority of users are casual, the people of the land, fatfingering their tiny displays. They don’t need a ton of buttons and sliders. In fact, a common user would get overwhelmed by all that, even on the desktop. And while a small amount of people would benefit from a denser UI for the same casual apps, it’s usually not with the effort designing and implementing them.
[…] the people of the land
👌
If that is the stated goal, then they have failed. Completely.
My father, who is a “man of the land”, has issues navigating most apps that don’t implement a bespoke, application-oriented UI. Most of them use Material UI, and all of them have big controls, huge margins and padding, unnecessary rounded corners, actions hidden in unlabelled menus, stuff that you have to swipe at to navigate (without showing any hint of it), and so much wasted space that the entire screen is occupied by two or three rows of controls. I use some of the same apps and even I feel that the design is hostile.
Is he also into discipline, with a Bible in his hand and a beard on his chin?
Tbh I love material design and adwaita, it looks great
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally. Period. I won’t purchase shit off of your shitty site if I can’t see it. And you obviously have no clue how shitty my vision has gotten over the years. And for the love of anything good in the world, don’t wait till I’m zoomed in to pop a fucking model asking me if I want to join your list for 10% off. If I buy something, you’re gonna put me on your list, whether I like it or not. And I can’t stop you if I actually want a receipt. So just give me the discount. Or don’t. I don’t even fucking care anymore. Just fuck off. Fuck.
a fucking model
I wouldn’t be so mad about that, unless it was a modal.
Touché
Every time I get a newsletter pop-up I enter something like “fuckyou@dontfuckingannoyme.withyourfucking.popup.fuckingstep.on.a.lego.fuck” in the hopes that whoever manages the list sees it when cleaning out the bounces
Firefox for Android. Settings -> Accessibility -> Enable zoom on all websites
Extensions -> uBlock Origin -> check “Annoyances”. Handles almost all of the random bullshit modals
When I am on a phone, let me zoom on whatever the fuck I want. Unconditionally.
The worst is when the zoom affects the surrounding UI elements, but the part you want gets unzoomed by the same amount.
I get unreasonably (okay, reasonably) upset when the simplest way to share an image is to take a screenshot of the image.
Not at all unreasonable imho!
My other favourite is screenshot > Google lens > select text …
I have to do this all of the time whenever anybody sends me a screenshot of their error message, rather than copying and pasting the error message into the ticket. Or worse still a photo of their screen that shows the error message.
I use a system at work that is 100% web based. I have 2 4k monitors in my desk. Why are the apps formatted for viewing on a phone? I’ve gotten to the point of hacking the CSS on every page just to make things usable.
At the last version upgrade, the developers made some changes to the interface. They couldn’t be bothered to change the existing CSS, so they just put !important on all the new stuff.
Mobile first rule.
And then lazy port to desktop.
“it’s mobile first!”
“And desktop second, right?”
“What’s desktop?”
“What’s a desktop?”
At the start of Covid, we had to start working from home. Our Chief Security Idiot thought that was a good time to impose measures that made it impossible to reboot a computer without physical access. When I questioned how that would work with my desktop, which stayed in the office building that I couldn’t legally access, he kept saying I had to take the “laptop” with me. I told him several times that it was a desktop, but he just couldn’t understand until my boss got involved.
That was my first run-in with our idiot-in-charge-of-security, and it only got worse after that.
It’s kind of screwed to say. But a lot of people entering the work force grew up with phones and tablets as their main computer. It’s the mind set they have that everything uses touch interfaces.
I’m not saying everyone or even most, but for a good portion it’s their default computer experience.
The first generation was just that bad ignoring that some people wanted to browse the web through their mobile.
80% population have access to mobile phones.
Multiple windows. Most people dislike 2 meter wide text blocks.
Most people dislike
[citation needed]
Most people
Most people people dislike 10x10 cm text windows when programming/editing HTML/reading SQL dumps.
The irony of this post being an image which I can’t select as I read 😢
Don’t worry, I got you. Here’s the alt-text:
@jk@mastodon.social on Mastodon: “note to ui designers. when i’m reading a long piece of text. i select text while i read it. I select text while i read it!. i select the text using my mouse. while i read the text i often select the text. when i select the text i just want to select the text. i don’t want to perform actions on the text. i don’t want a popup menu to appear when i select the text. i don’t want to accidentally click on a Share link. i want to select text while i read it”.
Ironically, my mobile Lemmy client will still not let me select text until I reply.
There are tools for that.
As someone who doesn’t do this, I can only guess it’s like holding your book mark parallel under the lines in a book as you read it, which I thought was fairly uncommon. Apparently a bunch of people read this way?
It makes more sense on monitors with large blocks of text or large paragraphs. With a monitor so big relative to a book, and scrolling making it easy to lose where you were, it can sometimes be tough for folks to read through huge chunks. Some people select chunks of text to help break up those monoliths into manageable bites along with putting a clear marker for where they are if they scroll or otherwise lose their place…
As someone who does occasionally do this, I don’t think it’s about readability. After all I also read books, which are not known for short bits of text in narrow columns. And I don’t use a bookmark, pen, or finger to keep track of where I’m at.
I think it’s more about keeping your hand busy, subconsciously even. Although to be honest I also don’t do that while reading books.
Maybe it’s a remnant of when every computer had a screensaver, and constantly moving the mouse meant keeping the screen alive.
From a usability, accessibility, and comfort perspective a book is incredibly different from a device that’s blasting your eyeballs with highly contrasting light.
The fact that I couldn’t select text on this post because it’s a completely unnecessary graphic kind of makes me hate you.
This is what you sound like: Xkcd Workflow
I do not want the program to react when I left click ordinary text. The program should not anticipate my needs. It should wait until I’ve told it I need something (with a right click) before doing anything.
I’m gonna break your heart then. Until about 15 years ago it used to be that literally all interactable/clickable text was both blue AND UNDERLINED to indicate it was a clickable link. Then some self-important designers with no user experience testing decided that was just too ugly and stopped underlining links to give it a “clean” minimalist look. It was then a trend, so everyone copied it. Now we still live with those consequences :(
Number one thing I hate is html/css/js used for anything that is not a website. Fucking stop it.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue. Assuming you’re on a computer. If you’re not, good luck. Selecting text on phones and tables can be impossible in too many circumstances.
It’s very rare that holding alt while selecting text doesn’t resolve this issue.
But I’m not actually looking to select the text when I do this, I’m just stimming and the extra visual noise is annoying.
I don’t think I understand the issue then.
I’m complaining about pop-up widgets appearing when you select text, like the email icon here:
Edge is the absolute worst for this. Infuriating
TL;DR: OP could try using your finger on your phone to keep your place?
Oh boy. I design UI (games, not software) and OP’s very specific need would stomp on a very common need for why people select text… which is to copy/paste.
While on a computer, text selection doesn’t typically summon a pop up, it’s needed in mobile because how else would you easily get to copy and paste? Everyone else would rage at the loss of the tooltip and any other interaction would be painfully hidden if it was delegated to a combo of pressing your lock buttons or volume buttons while highlighting text.
Quick edit: didn’t see the screenshot of the widget, might be the site you’re using, or browser? Also any adblocker add on should be able to hide those elements.
To anyone who does this, I’ve found browser extensions for both Chrome and Firefox called reading ruler or something like that, that will basically create a highlighted horizontal column wherever your mouse cursor is at, making it much easier to read text without having to manually select it
The point is not to make it easier to read, the point is to click on and select the text.
finally someone who gets it
skill issue
I love this comment, I see it everywhere and it fills me with fuzzies
So today I learned there is an internet equivalent of reading with your finger while mouthing the words.
Nonsense. AI adds rich features like these that no one wanted so VCs can become rich. The only thing missing on modern computers is blindingly-bright nuclear explosion white LEDs that shine directly into your optic nerve, all the time.
So true. Please hear us.
