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?
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?
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.
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?
Using window managers that have shortcuts for tiles improves both the UX and general productivity. I’m not quite so elitist as to say the point and click GUIs are objectively worse but power users are missing out if they don’t invest some time in learning keyboard based window management.
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.
single page apps. I fucking HATE all these apps that straight refuse to allow you to open multiple tabs.
the links are JS action hooked to redirect you instead of just linking you to the page.
it’s fucking bullshit.
also, fuck webp.
Chrome peaked when it was all angular. Why does everything have to all rounded now?
Windows 98SE was peak design
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.
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 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.
Since this thread is really about complaining about UI, I’ll add that when the developer arbitrarily limits input ranges because “Why would anyone what that?”
I’ve come across this several times, but the one instance that pops to mind is a desktop background changer being limited to no less than one minute between changes. I wanted to use it to show a stop-motion animation slide show and set it to one second, not the intended use, but still viable IF I could set the rate to one second. I wrote the developer, and they admitted it could be allowed, but “Why would anyone want it to be that fast?” I get that there are technical reasons why this might not be ideal, and maybe it would somehow tax the system for “just a background changer”, etc. But, assuming a value wouldn’t crash the application, or somehow physically destroy the computer, I think the input should be allowed. If prudent, put some warning about the less-than-catastrophic consequences, and let the user confirm before continuing.
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
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.
I hate 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!
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.
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.
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.
- 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!
